mp3rm - ganks realaudio files into itunes as an mp3

There's lots of streaming realmedia files around, I think they suck, and prefer to have an mp3. There's a bunch of information online about downloading and converting them, but I haven't found a simple how-to (for my platform of choice) in one place. I figured out a method, and made a script to automate a lot of it, and I'm gonna share what I learned here.

Setup requires three things:

• ffmpegx from mplayerosx project - this is compiled to link to realplayers codecs, the fink version will not work. You want the latest ffmpegX binaries from mplayerosx.sourceforge.net, ffmpegXbinaries20050814.zip when I last checked. Recommend placing them in /usr/local/bin/.

• realplayer.app or the helios codecs - i just used realplayer, if you just get the codecs you'll have to alter the instructions a bit.

• LAME mp3 encoder - the fink version works fine.

Once you have these installed you have to make a link to the real media codecs in the place that ffmpegx will look for it. Use this command in a terminal window:

ln -s /Applications/RealPlayer.app/Contents/Frameworks/HXClientKit.framework/HelixPlugins/Codecs /Library/Application\ Support/ffmpegX/reallib

That's it for setup.

Then you'll need the mp3rm script. There's also a more detailed README file. Put it somewhere in your path and chmod it executable.

Most of the time you will see .ram files online - which are for streaming, and not what you usually want to download. They act as pointers to the actual content, which is in a .rm file.

The nice thing is, if you open the .ram file in a text editor usually you will find the url to the .rm file you are looking for in plain text. If you call mp3rm with a .ram file as its argument, it will parse and printout the file's content, and prompt you to try again with the .rm file as the argument.

Given a good .rm url the script will download the .rm to the current folder, convert it to .wav, then to .mp3, import the .mp3 to itunes, and then (since this assumes you have Itunes set to make copies of everything imported in its Library) moves all the created files to the Trash.

With only a url as argument, defaults to setting the id3 TITLE tag to the filename. After the url, additional arguments will set ARTIST and ALBUM.