So the BBC have been making a ton of their radio programming available on the web via their Listen Again service. This is great if you happen to be near a broadband connection, but not so good if you're out and about with your iPod. I've seen a number of solutions to this, I even paid for a copy of Audio Hijack, but nothing so far has made the conversion from Real Audio stream to iPod as seamless as I'd like. So I rolled my own script based on bedouin's script found at www.macosxhints.com.
Pre-requisites :
- Lame
- Mplayer for OSX
- Curl (which I think is installed on OSX by default?)
The mplayer binary must be in the path (create a symlink to /usr/local/bin for instance).
Also, you need to make the cook codecs available for mplayer. I did this by copying the ones that come with RealPlayer thus:
$ sudo mkdir /usr/local/lib/mplayer
$ sudo cp -R /Applications/RealPlayer.app/Contents/Frameworks/HXClientKit.framework/HelixPlugins/Codecs/cook.bundle /usr/local/lib/mplayer
You could do this with a symbolic link also.
Then excecute, eg :
$ ./real_to_mp3.sh http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/ram/inourtime.ram "BBC IOT The Physics of Reality"
Still to do - Pipe each stage into the next so things happen more smoothly, and automatic uploading to iPod would be neat.