I've recently started converting the Best Show archives into MP3s so I could listen to them easily on my iPod. I started at the oldest and am working my way forward so I can have all the historical perspective. What I've found, however, is that many of the archives in Real Audio format seem to have "gaps" in them. That is, when played with Real Player (or with "mplayer" in Linux, which is how I'm kicking off my actual conversion process), at a set point in some of the archives, it consistently hangs and never recovers on its own. In each case, if I skip ahead manually about ~20 seconds within Real Player it'll pick up, but I can't find a way to get mplayer to do this from the command-line. Some samples of this you can reproduce for yourself:
January 16, 2001: Tom apologizes to David Clayton Thomas - 00:00:16 into the archive
February 6, 2001: Interview with Rick Benson, "George Benson's White Son." - 00:00:16 into the archive
March 27, 2001: 2001 Marathon Week Two - 01:19:52 into the archive
These are just the first three out of a couple dozen I've found in the first couple years worth of archive. Many more of the archives are just fine without any gaps. Up to now I'd just been skipping over the ones with gaps hoping they'd "fix themselves" or I'd figure out a technical solution for converting despite the gaps, but thus far I've come up empty. I see that multiple people here on the list have spoken proudly of making their own MP3 collections and listening to them end-to-end multiple times, so I'm curious of other folks can say if/how they got around this problem, or if it somehow didn't exist at some point in the past.
Thanks!
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punchme
