Has anyone done any work towards implementing a real audio codec in the player software? Can codecs simply be plugged into the player, or does it require hacking into the player software?

The reason I would like to play real audio files is because there are radio programs that archive their broadcasts in real audio format, and it would be nice to be able to copy those to the empeg directly. I know that the other option is first to convert them to mp3, but of course that would be time consuming.

Is there anyone else doing this kind of thing?

It would be nice, but RealAudio requires paying a license to the Real people in order to use it. And since it's not a file format usually associated with high-quality music playback, there is not much demand to put it on our high-quality music player.

You can use a product like TotalRecorder to change RealAudio into some other file format.

So if I'm not a Real person does that mean I'm not a real person.

RealAudio requires paying a license to the Real people in order to use it.

I would suggest that you might get best results by obtaining your license from either Sarah Purcell or Skip Stephenson.

Oh, my goodness, Bitt, if that's the reference I think it is, I'm ashamed to admit that I even know what you're talking about.

(Was one of my favorite shows as a kid.)

Yup, right here.

Wow, that's a trip down memory lane. God, how could I have liked something that was so awful? Wait, I know. First of all, I was a kid. Second of all, pretty much all television sucked in the 70's and we had to get our entertainment where we could get it.

I watched that show every week. It really was the best thing on, until the A-Team came around.

-Zeke

Real People was always followed by That's Incredible, I watched both every time they were on I think. I had the hots for Sarah Purcell I think, hard to remember that age much.

Somewhat related to the original topic, is there another less bloated and ad-laden program out there (preferably free) that can play Real files (not fake ones). I despise Real Player/Jukebox/everything. Heck, if I could play them in WMP6 I would be ecstatic. I tried downloading a plugin for Winamp, but it didn't work at all.

Damn all those people who encode in RM. Argh!

I found this:
http://www.onestopsoft.com/audio-converter.html

looks like the right critter, except for the $29 part (there is a d/l link but I didn't look too hard to see if it's nag/share/whatever-ware).

-Zeke

I had a Real plugin for winamp once,
it worled great.

2 step process to conver to mp3 though.
.rm to .wav to .mp3,
but still, painless. keep looking, it's out there.

I think we would rather have a video codec than real codec. Real sucks and costs money.

I have nightmares about That's Incredible for some reason.

There is a clone RealAudio decoder for Risc OS, which I believe is writen in assembler, but I don't think it supports recent file formats. Porting it might be a nice project for someone into that kind of thing.

BTW, Real has announced today that they are releasing their source code for RealOne to the public...

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=1211&e=2&cid=1093&u=/pcworld/20021029/tc_pcworld/106457

- Jon

Real aren't releasing the source code for their codecs however. It's pretty much only the RealOne GUI that is being open sourced. So unless they've got some freely usable codec implementation for ARM processors, we're out of luck

- Trevor

Real use ATRAC3 for their high bandwidth codec, and I doubt Sony will open source their format. This may not be a big problem, however, as Real are said to be releasing precompiled codecs for popular systems. ARM is certain to feature in that.

Rob