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A rose by any other name.....
OK, here's the scoop on those pesky .ram files. I've been clamouring all this time that .ram files are meta-files (i.e. text files giving a link to an audio file), not actual audio files. And this is true unless .... just read on. :confused:
BTW, all this stuff would probably apply to other real media extensions, like .rax or .rmj or whatever else RealNetworks have cooked up. Trial and error is indicated for these types. Since dMC doesn't know all these extensions, try to rename the file to .ra or .rm and see how it goes. Rename it back if it didn't work while looking for the proper method.
OK, here's the scoop on those pesky .ram files. I've been clamouring all this time that .ram files are meta-files (i.e. text files giving a link to an audio file), not actual audio files. And this is true unless .... just read on. :confused:
I have just realized why so many people have problems with .ram files. This is because when you have a link on the internet to a .rm or .ra file and you right-click on it and save target as the proposed file name is suffixed with .ram! It is however the .rm or .ra file that gets saved with the wrong extension. Since we don't know in advance that this is wrong, the easiest thing is to check the file size. If it's large (like considerably more than 1-2K) then it is most certainly the .rm or .ra file, which can be converted to other formats (unless protected, but that's a different story). In this case, and only in this case, rename the file with the .ra (for audio) or .rm (for video) extension.
So now the thing to keep in mind is that dMC can convert real media files which have extension .ra or .rm (the .ram given in the documentation is actually wrong). If you have downloaded a real media file off the net the way I explained above and you ended up being misled into saving it as a .ram, after making sure it is not a true .ram (check the size, an actual media file would be at least 100k and can go to a few megs in size, always depending on duration and compression settings - if in doubt try to open it in Notepad, if there's no human-readable text, it is an audio file), then rename it to .ra and be done! You can now convert it normally using dMC.
If the file is protected ,the conversion procedure is not so straight forward, and I won't deal with it here since there's no consensus on the best approach. I personally advocate dMC Auxiliary Input recording in such cases.
So now the thing to keep in mind is that dMC can convert real media files which have extension .ra or .rm (the .ram given in the documentation is actually wrong). If you have downloaded a real media file off the net the way I explained above and you ended up being misled into saving it as a .ram, after making sure it is not a true .ram (check the size, an actual media file would be at least 100k and can go to a few megs in size, always depending on duration and compression settings - if in doubt try to open it in Notepad, if there's no human-readable text, it is an audio file), then rename it to .ra and be done! You can now convert it normally using dMC.
If the file is protected ,the conversion procedure is not so straight forward, and I won't deal with it here since there's no consensus on the best approach. I personally advocate dMC Auxiliary Input recording in such cases.