"Trevor" wrote:

I have a .ra file that lasts over an hour. When I play it in audacity it
plays the whole thing in 2 seconds. I would really like to convert it to
mp3, which it does but still only a high speed two second sound clip.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help...ma-proprietary

"Audacity cannot import or export files in WMA, AAC, RealAudio, Shorten (SHN), or
most other proprietary formats. Because of licensing and patent restrictions, we are
not allowed to add these formats to Audacity."

Perhaps someone wrote a rogue filter that allows Audacity to handle RealAudio
natively.

Best practice seems to be using the Tara plugins for winAMP and play the RA file int
othe DiskWriter pluging which will leave you with a large file on the harddrive which
you can open in Audacity. If you do not force the written to be 44.1KHz 16bits stereo
or any other common format which Audacity understands then you're stuck with playing
the file to the soundcard WAVE OUT and have Audacity record from WhatYouHear - do set
up Windows to have no system sounds while you are doing this. If your sound card
driver doesn't support WhatYouHear, which is an input composed of all the outputs
that are active, then you have to use a second computer to record the sound off the
first computer.

I once resorted to doing that, but a digital PCM recorder without compression will
sufice, such as a DAT deck or CD-RW recorder.

-Mikkel