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NPR's Car Talk Switches Back To RealAudio
taped2thedesk writes "Today, NPR's Car Talk, a 'call in talk [radio] show about car mechanics', announced they were switching back to RealAudio, after dumping it for Windows Media a few months ago. When the show switched to Windows Media, Real took notice and convinced the show to switch back, by addressing various listener complaints about their player (many of which were fixed in RealPlayer 10). The hosts say: 'We believe [Real have] made a serious and successful attempt to address those things that our listeners complained about most... They even offered to serve the audio for free online, which defrays an expense we'd otherwise have to cover.'"
From Real: We think our new RealPlayer 10 is, beyond a doubt, our friendliest and best player yet.
Nice to know that I can listen to Click and Clack on my computer without being constantly bombarded with pop-ups from a piece of annoyware.
Oh wait, I've been doing that for weeks thanks to Real Alternative. All the joy of streaming audio without Real's player.
It sounds like Car Talk's Complaint Line Operator, Xavier Breath, earned his paycheck this week.
Wow. First Microsoft adds a project to Sourceforge and now Real has admitted that not everyone likes being bombarded by pushy bookmarks and shortcuts of unusual size. What next? SCO admiting that maybe they didn't invent sliced bread?
Seriously though, I'm glad to see that Tom and Ray gave Real a second chance. If it's true that they is dedicated to responding to customer's complaints then this is a good thing for everyone.
He took a duck to the face at 250 knots.
What a choice. DRM Whore or Spyware/Adware hijackery. That's like having to choose whether to be shot in the face or stabbed in the back.
I liked Real Audio streams back when the Real Audio plugin was an embedded object in the webpage. Same holds true for windows media. I consider this to be a step in the WRONG direction... I dont want a whole app suite firing up, spamming me, just to listen to some audio. My Rant is done.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
About offering multiple streams? It's not like it will cause bandwidth problems (You're only going to be listening to one stream at a time no matter what anyway...). I dunno about liscencing fees, but I do know there are free [beer] alternatives.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
The current week's show is available here.
I know the site used to have archived "favorites" of many, many shows when it was hosted by cars.com. However, I don't see the favorite clips listed anymore...
I subscribe to Liverpool Football Club's liverpoolfc.tv service that provides live streaming audio of all of Liverpool's football (soccer) matches. Based on "user complaints", they switched to Windows Media streaming audio feeds from Real Audio for the first time this weekend. If user comments are any indication, this was a complete failure. Admittedly this was the first major test, but the performance was extremely poor, the audio cut out frequently and the quality of the feed was much poorer than I'm used to.i ng-I-do software packaging as much as the next person, but I think its well worth it for the superior experience you now get with it. And the improvements since Real 6.0 with its leak-buckets-of-memory-and-crash-Windows issues is significant.
I hate the Real bundle-of-everything-I-don't-want-with-the-one-th
On the other hand, Real's reason to exist is streaming media....and admittedly, they had a headstart over the others. But is it really feasible for them to survive based solely on RealServer software sales? I don't think any reasonably sane/not abnoxiously rich person would subscibe to their "Real Gold Superpass" etc.
I think that's why they were pushing on advertising, popups and spyware with such fervor - that's about the only means of income and existence they have left - without a reliable business plan.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I hate to say this, but after staying far, far away from Realplayer for years (I don't think I've used it since 1999), I finally found something I really, really wanted to listen to online that was RealPlayer only. All the alternatives to RealPlayer seemed like too much of a pain to set up (I'm extraordinarily lazy), so I decided, against my better judgment, to give the new player a download and see how it worked.
It's actually really not bad at all. The install is fairly short and lets you pick your media types, what shortcuts to install, etc. and unlike old versions of RealPlayer doesn't just DO IT ANYWAY. ("Would you like your homepage changed to real.com?" "No." "Homepage changed!") It doesn't ask for some obnoxious registration, load itself into my start bar, or do any of that other "helpful" BS that made the old RealPlayer such a dog.
So far it seems to be a small little player that does what it does, and nothing you don't want. Since I still don't really trust Real, I'm waiting for some popup to come up, or wake up one day and find "RealConsole RAM-Fucker Pro" installed on my desktop or something, but so far, nothing.
But for now, it just plays Realaudio files. What a novel concept for an application. It's actually been pleasant to use. (RealVideo still sucks, though.)
Between Real cleaning up their program and M$ putting out opensource, Im going to stock up on blankets- hell should be freezing over shortly.
Does the current version still do this? It is not listed in the user complaints they responded to. Maybe this is the core way they make money. If so I can understand why this might be a complaint they don't want to make changes to please their users.
But some open-ness about it would be a good thing.
Or maybe they made this change a long time ago? Well, a lot of us don't hang on their every announcement...
https://player.helixcommunity.org/
Downloads are available here:
MS2.1 had problems playing back non-realaudio/realvideo datatypes -- if you need these, M2 is a better bet.
Nightly builds are also available -- see the player webpage for details.
Check out Helix Player
I'm still suprised mp3 streaming audio hasn't become more popular then Real or WindowsMedia. I have no trouble finding quality open source server software to broadcast live mp3 streams and the bandwidth usage(for me at least) is very acceptable.
:)
It annoys me that sites like NPR and Air America Radio use Real, not to mention other news sites.
Thank goodness for RealAlternative
Yeah, they're only using the de facto standard in digitized audio: they must really be out to fuck you over.
Mp3 has been a standard -- not an agreed-upon standard, but a "well, everyone can listen to it and it works well enough" standard for years; the "decision to standardize on MP3" as you put it, was made ages ago, and just about the only thing that has even come close to putting a dent in mp3 is wma's ubiquitousness and windows not including an mp3 encoder by default (ie, you have to BUY one, because windows media player won't just use LAME -- and 99% of users wouldn't know LAME's use if you explained it to them in 78-point font.)
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Pros
The worst ad's are sponsorship recognition
You learn something new every day
You become more liberal every day
No spyware
Supported by most AM/FM radios
Better news coverage than Fox News
Less Hollywood gossip induced brain atrophy
None of that [BUFFERING....] [97%][BUFFERING...] crap!
Cons
You still have to listen to the registration notice [Fund Drive] twice a year, even after you've paid the annual support fee! :)
Friends look at you funny when every other sentance starts with "I heard on NPR that..."
Screw you ClearChannel, we don't need that poppy Britney, Timberlake, OMG WTF Celeb shit, or the 57 Minute Non-stop Commercial MegaMixes!! Get your spam off of my radio
Sorry for the rant, Car Talk rulez, keep it real Click & Clack!
-- In Soviet Russia, radio listens to YOU!
I suspect it may have been their Chief Legal Counsel, Hugh Louis Dewey of Dewey, Cheetham & Howe.
This is an excellent site for problems like realplayer
Let me get this straight.
1. They start working heavily with the open source community through Helix, including making a free Linux player that handles real (which, btw, is probably where the people who made the Real Alternative got the material to make the codecs).
2. They remove the bloat and ads from their software as a direct result of people's complaints. Not only that, they let you turn off all their popups. Name 3 other free closed source softwares that allow you to do that.
3. They're working with the Doom9 community, which is probably the biggest internet community about audio/video matters.
And none of this is good enough? Christ, that's as pig-headed as idiots who keep chanting that Linux is just a hobbiest server OS and will never be useful on the desktop.
For the record, I hated Real too, but since they seem to be genuinely giving it a real effort, I figured I'd give them another try. So I downloaded and installed Real 10 just now. Fiding the free download off their website was trivial -- it was in big bold blue letters on the side of their downloads page. Who would have trouble finding *that*? Yah, it's not as big as the big graphic showing their pay version, but hey, they have employees to pay. Get over it.
Install was easy -- It did ask to take over all my media files, but I just turned them off, then went into advanced, and turned on DVD playback for Real -- Real does a much better job on DVDs than WMP, for sure. Only other annoyance during install was they asked me to register. This is not unlike other media players that I use regularly, so I did. A quick click to turn off the popups from their quick-launch app, and I'm done. Not exactly the nightmare of previous Real installations.
So yeah. I can see people complaining about Real because of what they did in the past, but jesus, they're giving it an honest effort here, and remember, any time Real wins, Microsoft LOSES. =)
RealPlayer is a commercial virus. No matter how much they have changed it, no matter if they crawl across broken glass to kiss my feet and beg me, I won't ever install it again!
If my only option for a site serving streaming media is RealPlayer, I will just skip on by and not watch / listen. There are too many alternatives on the web; I can always find somethign as good or better that won't force me to install RealPlayer.
RealPlayer lost my trust a long time ago and there are too many options that are far more consumer-friendly for me to bother to give them a second chance.
Fuhgettaboutit.
Some other examples of the same principle:
'gcc reliably crashes when building this code' => there is a bug in gcc, not your code;
'my web browser crashes when viewing this page' => the fault is with the web browser, not the page;
'my computer crashes when I scroll the mouse wheel in a particular way' => the computer or operating system is faulty, not the mouse.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Egon: It would be bad.
Venkman: I'm fuzzy on the whole good-bad thing. Whattya mean "bad?"
Egon: Try to imagine all media players as you set them up stopping instantaneously and every file association on your computer exploding at the speed of light.
Ray: Total protonic reversal....
Venkman: Right, that's bad...OK.. important safety tip. Thanks, Slashdot.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
The Car Talk guys own a garage in Cambridge, MA, and that is where I had my car serviced when I was a grad student at (I shall not speak the name of the evil institution).
The guys in the shop were not what you usually expect a mechanic to be. What I saw in those guys was the same thing I see in my propeller-headed software engineer colleagues. They were car hackers.
The most interesting visual in my memory was the heavy bearded guy welding a muffler with safety glasses on his face (i.e. no face mask) and a cigar hanging out of his mouth, talking about the physics of engine compression and how it is related to the exhaust system.