plays not for sure
If you’ve got a moment you’d like to spend marveling at corporate lies and doublespeak, I’d like to direct your attention to this page over at Real.com which purports to allow iPod users to transfer their RealAudio files to their iPod. Notice I said “transfer”, not “play” — “play” is what you would want to do with your music files; “transfer” is what happens instead. “Transfer” as in “you can transfer your files onto this thing and lug them around but you cannot open or listen to them whatsoever”.
Yeah, Real, that’s what music fans want to do. They want to haul their music files around and not listen to them; it’s like, zen or something. What is the sound of one music file not playing? In any case, this poor guy fell for Real.com’s total and blatant lies on that aforementioned page and spent a day fruitlessly trying to get it to work. Maybe he should’ve just given it up and became a John Cage fan.
As a corollary: why is Real.com still around? Didn’t the widespread adoption of the mp3 format make them completely unnecessary overnight? I remember when we were all kickin’ it Netscape 4.7.1 style and it was pretty amazing to hear hissy ultra-compressed audio unexpectedly pop out of your Mac LC II. And after about 30 seconds of trying to find the stop button, Real’s browser plug-in would buffer overflow and crash your machine, because that’s life in the Real world. But these days, we have better audio codecs, better video codecs, better free media server software, better free media client software — these days, Real offers exactly zero products that aren’t available elsewhere, better, and for free.
~jeff