converting between proprietary sound formats q.
 

hello, i have recently got a handful of files in the proprietary audio formats of ".ra" and ".wma". Now i would prefer to convert these either to the (also proprietary) mp3 format, or to ogg format. I am not even sure these files will play on my system yet. i have got mplayer with all the win32plugins and so forth, but i have not tried the files on it (due to not being at home right now) and anyway, mplayer is for movies. my xmms only has plugins for mp3 and ogg i think (and probably au and wav and so on also). i do have a copy of realplayer 8 i could install, but i don't want to to be honest, as it is closed source spyware and generally it sucks.

Anyway, what utilities or programs should i use to convert these files? and will i need to download and install extra codecs to do so? anybody else done this with success? i hear that it becomes a little tricky since the ra and wmv formats may actually be encoded with any of several different codecs, so i am prepared for a bit of aggro...

thanks in advance.

you could use
mplayer infile.wma -ao pcm -aofile outfile.wav
for .wma then use lame to encode to mp3
it may work for .ra i'm not sure

thanks, i will try that.