Today I just wanted to play a music CD. Put it in the CD drive and next thing I know RealPlayer pops up (I had expected my computer’s media player to bootup). Right off the bat I get an alert from my firewall saying that RealPlayer was trying to access the Internet (I told it not to allow). Then RealPlayer complains with a nag screen that it “can’t get a network connection” and asking me if I’m online (none of its business). Closed that window too. Then had to close another nag window asking about some “library” or whatnot thing.
Finally it lists a menu of the CD’s tracks but when I click on one it again tries to access the internet (and again I forbid it). Then the top menu screen of RealPlayer says “burning CD…” and I see a slow blue progess bar start in the row containing the info for the first track. “Burning CD”??? I don’t even have a CD burner on this machine. Anyway I halt that too, then finally, after all this and contining to click on the tracks, it finally starts playing the music.
RealPlayer is nothing but evil. If for no other reason, it changes all your file associations, put’s icons and links all over the place (on the desktop, quickstart, usually two in the start menu, two on the IE favorites) I cannot stand that program. My firewall is set to block it from connecting to the internet and I have it installed on my computer for ONE reason and ONE reason only…So when I install another program that has RP bundled and installs it without asking me it doesn’t change all of my settings. It (usually, not always) see that I have it installed and doesn’t re install, although sometimes it still changes file associations etc…
I’m in the same position as sailor… dumped the thing a long time ago.
But there are any number of programs that want realplayer, and any number of things I’d to listen to, read, etc, but can’t because I refuse to install that program.
Has anyone found a way to trick those formats into using mediaplayer, quicktime, or some other media program?
I know it’s probably a pipe dream, but I’d love to be able to access realplayer audio, video, etc.
There was a really klunky program that converted real movies to uncompressed avi’s. Not useful at all. The video quality remained uniformly awful and it ran across the dreaded win9x 2gb file size limitation so you’d only get about 5 minutes of video…
The sound was much easier to convert, IIRC. I think there are a number of utilities out there that can convert it to straight .wav’s.
If you find that you have to install it in order to play a clip, install the stripped-down free, basic version. At some point it’ll prompt you to describe your internet connection (56k, dsl, etc.). Pick the “none” choice and it won’t bother dialing out. Also at some point during the installation it asks you to configure it to provide you with “better support” which means “allow me to dial out.” Don’t opt for that either.
So, when installing, don’t install anything but the basic player, don’t opt for any additional “services”, don’t allow it to “preserve file associations” (which means "use RealPlayer to play all my media), don’t allow it to put an icon in your start-up menu, hell… don’t allow it to put an icon anywhere.
After you’ve installed, hit the start, run and then type “msconfig” and remove RealPlayer from your start-up menu. Otherwise, RealPlayer in it’s quest to be “oh-so-helpfull” will launch in the background everytime you boot up.
It’s been a while, but I think that everytime you subsequently use RealPlayer it goes ahead and “unticks” the box allows itself to run upon bootup again. You have to go into msconfig each time after you run RealPlayer in order to remove it from the boot-up process.
Royal pain in the ass and that’s why I don’t use it.
Oh, and make sure that your firewall software never grants Real Player rights. Unless you need it to grab CDDB info. In which case I’d ask you WTF are you using RealPlayer to play CD’s for?
An interesting (if a little outdated) discussion by Steve Gibson, Gibson Research Corporation about the insidious, invasive practices of Real Networks and other similar companies.
I think it’s a shame the way Real Player started off being a cool upstart, battling the evil mega-corporations for dominance in the streaming media world. (Didn’t they even help to create the market?) Then they sold out, and their product has become just one more piece of bloated, annoying, sleazy spyware.
cddb is a database of track information for most commercial audio cds. Many music players will attempt to query it for the info on whatever album you put in, so it can say something like:
Band Name - Album Name - 0x - Song Title
for each song. Otherwise, you get the Oh so helpful display:
“Unknown Artist - Track 01”
“Unknown Artist - Track 02”
“Unknown Artist - Track 03”
…
The CDDB is a great resource, since it lets you see information about the track and artist. I’d suggest you get notifycd, which has the look up and displays the title in your program window.
Huh? Why isn’t this info just included on the CD? I am totally baffled why there is a need to visit some website’s database in order to for my PC’s cd player to know what track it is playing…
I’ve tried doing this on my networked computer at work and it’s not giving me access to msconfig. It really annoys me how RealOne keeps popping up every time I reboot. I want to be able to stop it without having to call my IT department (who will slap me on the wrist for installing software without their permission). I want to keep it for when I need it, but I want to be able to stop it from turning itself on automatically.
My system doesn’t have msconfig, either (Win2K). What does it do?
Remember, the audio CD format was designed in what, the late 1970s?
I’ve wondered how the CDDB works - my guess is that it does some kind of a CRC on the first x bytes of the music, which gives it a signature to look up against. I have at least one CD that CDDB gave me a choice of the correct title, or some other one, so it’s not something that is unique.
The CDDB is a database that identifies CD’s based on length and order of tracks. As it happens, almost all CD’s are unique in terms of their track lengths and orders. Some CD’s aren’t in it: IIRC, when I try to look up U-2’s “Achtung Baby”, the CDDB comes up blank…(huh?)
I think if you download the free player and do a “custom install” it allows you to check off the file type associations. All I allowed it was Real file types, and it hasn’t changed any itself since. It has not re-enabled itself on startup either.
Sony started including the CD track labels on select CD’s in the late 90’s throught a format called CD-Text that some car audio CD-Players supported. CDA, or Compact Disk Audio, the standard format for CD’s doesn’t allow for this type of ASCII data to be encoded into it. Many vendors haven’t even adopted the format.
Some CD-R’s will allow you to burn CD Text. If you are backing up a CD with Nero, it will connect to the CDDB and download the track names and burn it to the new CD if your burner supports CD-Text like mine does. I made backups of all my CD’s that I could, after having over 300 stolen out of my car and finding out my insurance company won’t replace them.
acsenray -
There is a registry key you can delete that will take care of this problem. It’s under:
Current User > Software > Microsoft > Windows > Current Version > Run
Just look for the key there. If it’s not there, try running SERVICES.MSC and you might find the Real Tray running in there as a “service”.
Also, since Realnetworks is notorious for bundling their software with spyware like aureate, grab yourself a (free) copy of AdAware from Lavasoft. It will remove the components that are spyin’ on ya, and leave your Realplayer functional.
Do this even if you decide to uninstall realplayer altogether… Typically, the spyware components that get bundled are not removed and continue to relay information about you back to spammers. And apart from stuff bundled with arealplayer, if you use the internet at all, you’re likely to have picked up some crap you don’t want. AdAware is the best free app since the original ARC compression utility.
Ooooh. Evil Real software. I remember the last time I installed one of their products. It took me three hours to get rid of it and get everything back the way I wanted.
One other nasty thing it does (at least the version I have): its volume control overrides the system volume control, even when it’s not running. And, of course, it always starts with the volume at half. So if you forget to crank the RP volume up before you close it, everything you do will run at half volume until you remember to reopen it and fix the volume again. Bastards.
