[MPlayer-users] listen while dumping?

[Bertie Coopersmith]

I am a newbie with mplayer but after some help from this
mailing list I can now successfully download RealAudio speech streams
and save them as speex (.spx) files. Up to now all the URLs I have been
getting have ended in .ra but today I have one that ends in .rm . I dont
know what all that implies but I found this .rm stream was very soft by 
comparison with all the .ra streams (All taken from the BBC website by 
the way).

Is this to be expected?

My speex file is narrow-band (8KHz) mono. I get around the above problem
by means of the option  -af extrastereo=0,volume=$GAIN 
where GAIN is set to 12 in the case of .rm  and  1.6  for the more common 
.ra  stream. 

A related question:
mostly I run the mplayer command at night via an 'at' command but sometimes
I run it directly.  When I do that it would be nice to be able to listen
while streaming and creating the audiodump.wav intermediate file.
Is this possible? - On another channel perhaps?

Bertie.