What is RA Format And How To Open It Online?

Screen Shot 2015-01-23 at 1.06.22 pm

What is RA?

RealAudio is a proprietary audio file format created by RealNetworks for saving audio files and for streaming live audio. Files in RealAudio format have the RA extension though sometimes, they may also appear with the RM or RAX formats. The format was very popular at one time and was used for streaming audio content due to the wide range of low and high bitrate formats that it can support. The large number of bit rate formats makes it convenient to broadcast over slow and fast connections.

For a long time, RA was a closed format and in order to play an RA file, a user would need to official player to open them but the company behind it eventually opened up so that other developers could develop players that would support it. The format is a compressed lossy format though RealAudio Lossless has been developed should users wish to save files in RealAudio format without losing any data.

Although the format was popular at one time, particularly for online broadcasting and streaming purpose, it eventually faded away into obscurity when other more suitable formats were developed and became popular.

There are close to three dozen codecs available for use with this format. The data chunks saved in an RA file can contain the title of the file, the name of the author, a header, file properties, and streaming properties.

How can I open  RA file online?

Upload the RA file to Jumpshare and click to play it. Although RA format players are rare to come by and the common solution for playing an RA file is to convert it to a more common format such as MP3, Jumpshare will be able to play it without needing to install so much as a plugin.

Jumpshare button_RA