RealPlayer is one of the world’s best known and most used music and media players. The company has created a player with a huge range of options which you can access free or at a charge depending on what you want to do with your entertainment time.
The basic player you can download free here will allow you to listen to music and watch videos and organize your music and burn CDs.
Most importantly, the player is set up to work across all of the latest and major media formats so you can do most anything here. This site gets really interesting when you move on to the range of premium services.
The premium features on offer here really open up how you use your computer to keep yourself entertained. You can, for example, sign up to play games, listen to and watch news, movies, sports, TV and music, listen to online radio stations and even arrange to get a certain number of free music downloads every month. You can even access the partner Rhapsody music service if you like.
Most users here are most interested in the RealPlayer Music Store. This online store has over 1,000,000 songs in its catalog and it’s a great place to buy music. You’ll be able to find all kinds of music here – from the latest releases to classic tracks and site exclusives.
The best news here is probably the cost issue – selected tracks in this online store are priced from $0.49 which is a lot cheaper than many other online stores. Plus the system has been set up to support as many portable audio players as possible. At the moment it supports over 100 devices – including most of the iPod range! For this reason many iPod users are using this service as an iTunes alternative.
Another plus here is the quality of the music on offer to users. The site claims that their track quality (192kbps AAC) is higher than any other music store which will please all music enthusiasts. You can store the tracks you buy on up to five different computers, transfer to portable players and you can burn to audio/data CD (but not as MP3 CDs). You get unlimited burning here but you can only burn a playlist up to five times. You can get round that issue by simply tweaking your playlist.
One thing to note, however, is that there is no guarantee that your existing MP3 player or portable device will work with the store. It probably will but some older models may not – so it’s worth your while to check first before you decide to go ahead and try to buy. You may also find that RealPlayer doesn’t support music that you may have bought digitally from all other online stores – again check to see first before you go ahead.
And, as with many online music download stores you may find that you can’t always download what you want when you want it. Digital rights issues can sometimes mean that you can only download an album as a whole rather than as individual tracks or you may not be able to download all the tracks on an album, for example.
Some users have also reported that the system is not the easiest to use, can be slow with downloads and often has glitches with certain computers. One way to get round this and to see if you like the service in the first place is to sign up for a free trial – that way you can suck it and see how it suits you before you commit to a longer term.
Find more info on legal music downloads at this page.