RM to MP3 Conversion

Sun 28 January 2007 by Thejaswi Puthraya

RM to MP3 Conversion

Very often I come across friends downloading songs in RM (Real Media) Format because they are very small in size. But after downloading them they realize that their favourite (MP3 sucks...OGG rocks) MP3 (portable) player cannot play them and get frustrated. Here is a small Vorbis vs MP3 vs Real vs Microsoft Media Now I write a small how-to convert RM Format to MP3 Format using Mplayer and Lame (standard applications in any GNU-Linux Box).

Installing Mplayer

Since I use Fedora I'll be dealing with installing Mplayer using Yum

$ yum install mplayer

(The corresponding utilities for Debian is apt-get, for Ubuntu is dpkg and for Gentoo is emerge).

Installing Lame

Lame can also be installed through Fedora Repositories.

$ yum install lame

Once done with the installation, it is time for the conversion.

Converting RM to MP3

$ mplayer thefiletobeconverted.rm -ao pcm

What the above command does is that it dumps the RM Format Song to raw unencoded PCM (ie Wave Format).

$ lame -h -b 128 audiodump.wav myconvertedfile.mp3

The "h" argument specifies higher quality of encoding and "b" arguments set the bitrate, default 128 kbps

Hopefully you find this mini how-to useful.

NOTE: RM to MP3 Conversion is illegal and lossy and I am not responsible for any negative consequences.