RealAudio

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computing: data formats: media formats: audio formats: RealAudio

Overview
RealAudio is a proprietary format for storing compressed lossy audio. Due to its proprietary nature, the exact format is not publicly documented, and conversion from RealAudio to other formats is generally difficult to accomplish due to a lack of tools. The format is owned by RealNetworks.

The non-decodability of RealAudio is one of its selling points to content providers, in that a reasonable guarantee can be provided that any content encoded with RealAudio will not be easily copyable into other formats. When RealAudio is streamed using RealNetworks's proprietary rtsp format, it cannot even be saved to hard disk for replaying unless a "recordable" flag is set.

Reference

 * Wikipedia: RealAudio | RealNetworks

Practical

 * dbPowerAMP, a Windows program with codecs for converting to/from many audio formats including RealAudio
 * How to download Real Audio streams and convert Real Audio to MP3: blog entry with some how-to tips