MP3 players are great, but they don’t play .ram or .ra files and it can be tricky to convert them to MP3 format. Here’s a simple and crude script to do so using linux:

1) Put the following in a file named ‘ram2mp3.sh’
2) From the command line, make the file executable
chmod +x ram2mp3.sh
3) Run the file as follows:
./ram2mp3.sh http://example.com/thesource.ram newfile.mp3
4) The file will download itself, convert itself to .wav, encode the .wav as an MP3, and then write it to your current directory as ‘newfile.mp3′.

Requires:
mplayer, ffmpeg, lame, libwww-perl

file=`GET $1 | sed 's/\r//'`
date=`date +%s`
feed=`wget $file --output-document=/tmp/cnv_$date`
`mplayer /tmp/cnv_$date -ao pcm:file=/tmp/cnv_$date.wav`
`ffmpeg -i /tmp/cnv_$date.wav ./$2`
`rm /tmp/cnv_$date* -f`