I am looking for a way to download and convert realplayer files

April 24, 2018 4:11 PM

I am a fan and subscriber of the site Reelradio.com. It's a site of old airchecks. Presently I must listen to the airchecks while on the internet which they link to realplayer. Is there a way to download these files directly onto my Mac computer? They probably do not want their subscribers to do this so I'm throwing this out to the hive. When I click the links a .rm file opens and allows me to play it using realplayer
posted by citybuddha to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

You can download the file (Option-click or right click on link) on Mac.

VLC will play .rm audio files.
posted by sudogeek at 4:15 PM on April 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

Real Media is a streaming format, so there is no single file to download, the .RM file is just a link to the stream.
You can use a sound capture application such as Audio Hijack to convert the stream into an audio file. This does mean you have to play through the whole thing.
posted by Lanark at 4:26 PM on April 24, 2018 [2 favorites]

Perhaps my answer was a bit too telegraphic. Once you load a stream, VLC can capture it to a file for later playback.

See here.
posted by sudogeek at 4:35 PM on April 24, 2018 [3 favorites]

I tested the .ram file posted at the top of the ReelRadio Tenth Birthday demo page, and VLC played it. The .ram file is a streaming link (which basically means it's not the audio file, it's an instruction to VLC about what file to get from which server on the Internet). There were some gaps and pauses when the stream could not keep up with playback (iirc the RealPlayer app shares streaming data with the server in real time to avoid these problems), but aside from that it worked fine.
posted by ardgedee at 4:36 PM on April 24, 2018

If my hazy twenty-year-old memory of obsolete Web tech is correct, the .RM file is the actual data. Often sites would link to a .RAM file which was basically a playlist.

Poking through the site, it looks like they are indeed serving .RAM files (as a non-member I can see the link although it won't work). If you look inside it's probably just a list of URLs that you can grab directly.

As always, youtube-dl is worth a shot too -- it supports a ton of sites and might know what to do with a .RAM file.
posted by neckro23 at 5:22 PM on April 24, 2018

Okay, nevermind. I hadn't seen the link to a working stream above.

The .RAM file redirects to an .RM file, which itself redirects to an RSTP URL. And there's where I'm stuck because the usual tools I use for this stuff only speak HTTP.

It looks like you can use VLC to download RSTP (you can probably just enter the RAM url) so that might be your best option.

BTW the site is rather paranoid about downloaders, it will refuse to work if the HTTP referrer isn't from their site.
posted by neckro23 at 5:27 PM on April 24, 2018

The same people that make Audio Hijack make a super easy (and much cheaper) program called Piezo that can record anything on your Mac. It's basically like taping something off the radio when you were a kid.
posted by AgentRocket at 7:57 PM on April 24, 2018 [1 favorite]