There was a program called StreamBox VCR that would save streaming media to your hard drive. Real Networks got very angry and put a stop to it (probably sued them out of business). It basically would just dump the stream to your hard drive in the same format it's broadcast in.

From then on, you could use something like Cool Edit to convert the Real file to WAV and so on. The program is not that easy to get a hold of, but it is very good.