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Real Player Gripes Real Player plays audio files in Real Audio and other formats

Other Gripers

Real bad software Spywareinfo.com newsletter of April 2004. by Mike Healan. Quoting: "After reading about how Real responded to being dumped by CarTalk, I decided to check it out to see if they had indeed cleaned up their software. While they have made a few changes, I'm afraid that it is still an obnoxious piece of software ... by default, there are 4 different "contact me about stuff" options checked. Immediately after it finished installation, my firewall popped up four different times to tell me it was accessing the internet. I decided to log every firewall access to see what would happen. After an hour of playing music, the firewall logged an astounding 2,500 distinct internet accesses, and this was after I had gone through the options and disabled all of the "phone home" options."  

Find the Download in a Haystack By Katie Dean of Wired News. April 6, 2004. Quoting: "For the past few years, Minnesota Public Radio's customer service department has fielded e-mails and phone calls from angry listeners who can't get their Real media player to play the radio station's programs through the Internet ... MPR has had enough. The station is testing the Windows Media Player to present its programs on the Web, after years of relying exclusively on RealNetworks' product."

Real Obnoxious weblog by Tomas Jogin, February 29, 2004. "The one application that I try to stay away from more than any other is Real Player. Or Real One ..."

Alternative to RealPlayer by Fred Langa in his newsletter, the Langa List April 28, 2003. About a free program called JetAudio.

Car Talk and Real Audio 

• Car Talk Now Available via the Windows Media Player by Tom and Ray Magliozzi. No date. About January 2004 or so. Quoting: "Car Talk will now be available via the Windows Media Player, rather than RealMedia. That's right, we're unceremoniously dumping RealMedia. Why? Because, for a long time, we've had tons of complaints about RealNetworks. And the one that ticks us off the most is the perceived trickery they use to sell their premium products." 
   
• The gripes of the Car Talk listeners were 
• Real puts icons all over the place
• It is hard to find the free RealPlayer.
• The player associates with every media file there is
• Real was trying to sell me stuff
• RealPlayer was filled with pop-ups
• Real was installing other programs and unwanted junk 
    
• Welcome back to a kinder, gentler Real Audio by Tom and Ray Magliozzi. No date. Early April 2004. A follow-up to the above story. Quoting: "We've now had about a month's worth of serious conversations with a number of folks over at Real. The bottom line is that we believe they've made a serious and successful attempt to address those things that our listeners complained about most."
   
• For all that, it didn't work when I tried it. Car Talk has the current show available for online listening at any time. I clicked on a few of the links (April 10, 2004) and they all failed to play because the requested file was not found. One of the errors is shown below. Maybe it doesn't work with my recent, but not the latest, version of Real Player? Don't know, as the Car Talk web site doesn't say which versions they support.  

My Gripes

March 20, 2006. Windows 2000 SP4. After hearing of a security bug in Real Player, I updated my copy a few weeks ago. I am now using version 10.5 Helix Powered, build 6.0.12.1483 Distribution RN30BB. This version no longer plays audio CDs, which the older version did just fine. The CDs themselves are fine, they play in a stereo system and in Windows Media Player. 

I have been using Real Audio on and off since the beginning. In the old days, it was easy to keep track of the new releases of the Real Player software as they were numbered in sequence. I think version 8 is where this simplicity ended. Since then, I've been confused. There were the G2 releases and the One releases. I think the One generation came after the G2 generation. The One product lasted long enough to get a version 2. You couldn't make things more confusing if you tried. As of March 2004 or so, they are back to plain, ordinary, simple, vanilla numbers again. The current version is 10. 

October 12, 2004. I installed Real Player version 10 under Windows 2000 SP4. As soon as it was installed, it suffered a runtime error as shown here at the right. The error was R6025 - pure virtual function call. The program seems to work anyway. I got it from the BBC.   October 14, 2004. Real Player version 10 hardly ever loads the Radio page. The older version I used to use did not have this problem. Even when the Radio page does load it can take over a minute. The problem is just with the web page from Real. The couple radio stations that I stored as Favorites play just fine when initiated with Favorites -> Radio. The web pages are from radio.real.com and they load in a web browser but won't load in Real Player.

Here is an example with a version of the Real player software that dates from late 2003 or so. Rather than being Real Audio or Real Player, it is the RealONE Player. This is version 2.0 as you can see from the "v.2" in blue on blue on the left. Who is Helix, by the way?  When is One greater than 8? When your talking about releases of Real Player. :-)  How long until they release Real Player 2004 or 2005 and discard version 10? Probably when the head of the marketing department leaves the company.

FYI: Thanks to Car Talk, here is a great link directly to the free version of RealPlayer.