How To Steal Music From BBC Radio

Or any other source using RealAudio.

• First, choose your target. Somewhere, there will be a URL which is being fed to RealPlayer, and this is the door and the key to the abduction. If you can see a RealPlayer window or widget, it might help you - the widget embedded in the BBC Listen Again page has a 'Copy Clip URL' option in its context menu, which does the job (if you don't get this, make sure you're clicking in the right place).
• Download the object pointed to by the URL, for example with CURL. You will find you have a file called something.ram or something.rpm, whose entire content is another URL. Do not get upset! This URL is a better, more magic URL: it is the URL to the music itself. The URL can use any of a number of schemes; that number is two. The first is 'http'; if this is what you have, rejoice! All you have to do is download the object at the end of that URL, and you have your music. In RealMedia format. Good luck listening to that. The other is 'rtsp', which means you've got the Real-Time Streaming Protocol to deal with. Oh yeah. Read on.
• If you do not already have one, get a Mac, running OS X 10.3 or better. Older versions might do it too, i don't know.
• Get thee to the MPlayer OS X website, and get yourself to the files. Brave the hideously poorly arranged list of files, dig into the ffmpegX_recommended_bins section, and get reallib.zip and one of the ffmpegXbinaries zips (i have absolutely no fucking idea which one - i think those numbers are dates, but they're all formatted differently, and the dates are inconsistent with the release date on the package, fucking retards; i got 20051201, since it looks like the most recent). I have no idea if these are really the files you want, but they'll do the job.
• Unzip reallib.zip, create a directory /Library/Application Support/ffmpegX, and move the unzipped reallib directory in there. You now have the awesome power of ffmpegX in the house (the codecs, anyway). Give it up!
• Unzip the ffmpegXbinaries zip, find the mplayer and mencoder binaries inside (CAREFUL - there are hardlinks here!), and put them somewhere you won't lose them; the traditional choice is /usr/local/bin or something, but i like something like /Applications/MPlayer.
• You can now run the wonderful mplayer (and mencoder), which will download and play ANYTHING. From the command line.
• Remind yourself of the RTSP URL you dug out above.
• Lustily invoke (this is the key bit so i'm going to switch to typewriter) /Your/memorable/path/to/mplayer rtsp://some.poor.victim/with/a/stealable.tune -ao pcm:waveheader:file=arrr_booty.wav
• You will soon have the plunder in a convenient WAV file. You can now transcode it or whatever you want to do with it.
• I think maybe VLC has a way to save the RM-coded data straight to a file, but i couldn't get that to work.
• There are nice Aqua front-ends to mplayer, but i couldn't get those to work either, and they didn't have diagnostics worth shit.
• Do you get an error message like:
  
  Opening audio decoder: [realaud] RealAudio decoder
  opening shared obj '/Library/Application
  Support/ffmpegX/reallib/cook.so'
  Error: dlcompat: file "/Library/Application
  Support/ffmpegX/reallib/cook.so" not found
  ERROR: Could not open required DirectShow codec cook.so.
  Read the RealAudio section of the DOCS!
  ADecoder preinit failed :(
  ADecoder init failed :(
  Opening audio decoder: [realaud] RealAudio decoder
  opening shared obj '/Library/Application
  Support/ffmpegX/reallib/cook.so.6.0'
  Error: dlcompat: file "/Library/Application
  Support/ffmpegX/reallib/cook.so.6.0" not found
  ERROR: Could not open required DirectShow codec cook.so.6.0.
  Read the RealAudio section of the DOCS!
  ADecoder preinit failed :(
  ADecoder init failed :(
  Opening audio decoder: [realaud] RealAudio decoder
  ERROR: Could not open required DirectShow codec cook3260.dll.
  Read the RealAudio section of the DOCS!
  ADecoder preinit failed :(
  ADecoder init failed :(
  Opening audio decoder: [realaud] RealAudio decoder
  opening shared obj '/Library/Application
  Support/ffmpegX/reallib/cook.bundle/Contents/MacOS/cook'
  Error: dlcompat: file "/Library/Application
  Support/ffmpegX/reallib/cook.bundle/Contents/MacOS/cook" not found
  ERROR: Could not open required DirectShow codec
  cook.bundle/Contents/MacOS/cook.
  Read the RealAudio section of the DOCS!
  ADecoder preinit failed :(
  ADecoder init failed :(
  Cannot find codec for audio format 0x6B6F6F63.
  Read DOCS/HTML/en/codecs.html!
  
  ? Well, one of your options here would be to read the RealAudio section of the DOCS! Did you get docs with your install? I didn't get docs (or DOCS). So, fuck that, read this: you haven't installed ffmpegX right. The solution is to install ffmpegX right.
• If you could get VLC to do this, my feeling is that that would be better. VLC had these cool options about how you wanted the data encapsulated and stuff.