This weekend I had a go at de-streaming RealAudio feeds, so I could listen to BBC Radio 7 comedy at times more convenient to me. It's been a minor triumph, and it has more than made up for breaking the nvidia driver on a Sarge box.

• Use vsound on x86 systems with OSS sound, and "listen" with RealPlayer, vsound generating a wave file.
• Use mplayer or xine to dump the stream to a RealPlayer .ra file. At the moment mplayer dumps a core at the end, but it seems to work otherwise. I've yet to try xine.
• Use mplayer to stream the live feed or .ra file to a wave file. This works very well, though the wave files are a little large.
• The feeds are often quite sloppy with a lot of overrun at each end, so audacity is pretty good at trimming wave files.
• Finally I've been using oggenc to compress the wave file to a more compact and still useful ogg vorbis file.

I'm running Etch on AMD64, so it's a pain to use RealPlayer (it does work in the chroot). Using mplayer is a big plus as it's all AMD64 native, and very-very fast when doing stuff, it converts ra to wave in seconds. I've got www.debian-multimedia.org in my apt.sources so I can get all the multimedia stuff.

Google and my LUG are useful resources to have!