9 ms·

What joy it is to finally uninstall Flash. The last time I was this happy to uninstall crappy software was when I realized that I no longer needed RealPlayer.

What joy it is to finally uninstall Flash. The last time I was this happy to uninstall crappy software was when I realized that I no longer needed RealPlayer. For those that don't know it, RealPlayer was a very popular proprietary media player (with its own proprietary formats) circa 2000. The company's stock was worth $380 a share in 2000; it's now worth $6. The only explanation for RealPlayer's popularity was its DRM I think; lots of commercial users wanted the DRM. But it got more bloated with every release, and I had to go through its countless option settings every time I updated it to disable all the sneaky ways they came up with to violate user privacy. I'm relieved that we no longer need either Flash or RealPlayer.

koyote 12y ago
Oh my god I completely forgot about RealPlayer. Luckily there was an alternative, Real Alternative, that enabled you to play the content without having to install that ghastly RealPlayer. It seems like the community always finds a way around crappy software.
- mhb 12y ago
  What's the community using instead of iTunes?
  - debaserab2 12y ago
    Spotify?
  - maaku 12y ago
    What's crappy about iTunes?
    - username 12y ago
      It's extremely bloated.
      - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
        Not that I've ever noticed (my work computer runs linux, and I've found the music players there are, at best, barely useable in terms of what I want) (banshee's the best, but it's RNG is total garbage)
    - psychometry 12y ago
      I don't think iTunes is bloated, per se. I'm actually on an older version because they're removed useful features in 11 and 12 and there's no way to extend the program. The bloat is probably integration with the store. That should be split into a separate program and iTunes should just be a music library manager. Of course, that won't happen since not many people care about having a persistent music library any more.
      - gurkendoktor 12y ago
        You could also move iOS device sync out of iTunes. It doesn't even make sense that we use iTunes to sync content that comes from iPhoto.app, it might just as well be a core OS feature. After all, we have Handoff etc. built into OS X now...
    - JohnTHaller 12y ago
      On Windows it's incredibly bloated and has really bad UI design. Apple always used to trick people into installing Safari and Quicktime bundleware-style during updates as well. (Source: Every computer I've maintained over the years and asked the owner 'why did you install Safari' and the answer is always 'I guess iTunes did it')
      - yuhong 12y ago
        I believe iTunes formerly required QuickTime.
        JohnTHaller 12y ago
        It did years ago, but hasn't in a while. Since then, Apple Update would pre-select to install Quicktime and Safari when you updated iTunes unless you purposely unchecked them each time.
    - lukifer 12y ago
      Speaking from personal experience on Yosemite: slow UI, constant beachballs and stutters (despite lots of RAM and no platter drives), paint/refresh bugs while scrolling, 100% CPU usage to play tracks (without FX/EQ), years of mission-creep, and a general conceptual mess since version 12, with its multiplicity of modes and sub-modes. As an iTunes apologist and power-user since 1.0 (my huge library admittedly is not helping), 12 has become the last straw on using iTunes as anything but a sync tool and database. As a media player, it's a disaster.
      - username223 12y ago
        > paint/refresh bugs while scrolling, Good to know I'm not the only one. I've become used to scrubbing the pointer up and down over the list of podcasts until the part I'm looking at is legible, and plugging my iPod in twice to get it to show up. But IMO iTunes is actually one of the less-bad recent Apple software screw-ups. At least it doesn't have enormous memory leaks, like Safari and Keynote, which regularly beachball my poor laptop with "only" 4GB of RAM long enough to go make a cup of coffee.
        gurkendoktor 12y ago
        > But IMO iTunes is actually one of the less-bad recent Apple software screw-ups I would argue the peak in bug severity was 11.0, which randomly deleted podcasts: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5324634?tstart=0 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5324634?tstart=0 For me that meant 30 GB of podcasts gone, most of which I can't download again (publisher went broke, original download required payments etc.) Sigh. I used to be a big fan of iTunes as well.
        username223 12y ago
        Podcasts used to be simple: follow an RSS feed, download the audio files, listen to them, delete them when you're done. Now they're "cloud," so your computer is just a cache, and God only knows when you have those files, or when some program lets you use them.
    - TaylorAlexander 12y ago
      For me, no linux support is an issue. But then, I have plenty of options for open source media players so I don't particularly need iTunes.
    - deathanatos 12y ago
      > What's crappy about iTunes? In addition to what other have said: * no support for FLAC, OGG, WMA(?) * I don't _think_ there's support for ReplayGain. * Frankly, I just find the UI hard to manage. * _any_ marginally advanced feature.[1] [1]: (I "DJ" for dancers) fade outs, volume changes in actual decibels (the volume bar is completely unlabeled), simple one time gain even if it results in clipping (quality matters none if you can't hear it), stop after current song, don't trust duration metadata or guesswork (I have MP3s that completely break the seek bar), start song from an index that isn't 0:00…
    - rttlesnke 12y ago
      Mostly, no Linux support. I really want an open iTunes alternative which runs on Linux or any Unix, and can re-encode my entire music library with the codec/bitrate I want, while retaining music metadata. iTunes is good at that. Opus/Ogg support would be great. Anyone know of something like this?
      - lozf 12y ago
        You might like Clementine[1] it seems quite popular as an all-in-one music manager... though I usually use either `opusenc` or `fdkaac` via `ffmpeg` for transcoding with intact metadata. [1] https://www.clementine-player.org/about https://www.clementine-player.org/about
    - 72deluxe 12y ago
      The UI ignores all the guidelines Apple sets and they redesign it every release from what I can tell? All the other applications on OSX have sensible close/minimise/zoom buttons on a titlebar but iTunes has long ignored that, with no obvious titlebar to move the window. Now that everything is bundled into the space where the titlebar should be, how do you move it without risk of clicking on something else? Additionally, it is a LARGE application just for playing audio. I know that it does other things too but it seems to have outgrown its original purpose? There is now a crossover between iTunes and the App Store on Mac, from what I can tell? I wonder why they don't merge. Having said that, I like the glaring red icon they now use (not sure why they changed from blue though!)
  - hengheng 12y ago
    foobar2000 and GoneMad Music Player? Dunno, I'm that propeller hat guy who carries his music around in Opus Format on his Android ...
    - voltagex_ 12y ago
      What's Opus like for day-to-day use? Do you notice any battery hit on Android from it being decoded in software? (assuming AAC is done in hardware - could be wrong) What kind of quality/filesize do you use? If I'm used to ~170kbit VBR AAC/MP3 for headphone use, what settings would I need for Opus?
      - voltagex_ 12y ago
        Just tried a few encodes: to my poor ears, 64kbit Opus is fine on headphones!
      - hengheng 12y ago
        No significant battery hit, I really don't care. There is an ARM-optimized version of libopus that seems to use vector operations, I don't think it gets much better than that. I'm using 72-96 kbit/s as bitrates, I've been playing around with that actually. 72 kbit is too little sometimes, 80 is fine, 96 is safe. Encoding is done in foobar2000, copy everything into a playlist, right click -> encode. My archive structure is this: At the top, there is one folder "Lossless", one folder "Lossy", each with subfolders for artist and album. foobar2000 and any other players syndicate their library from both folders. I have separate versions of my music archive on my laptop and on my phone, each of which are complete. For the laptop, Lossless gets converted to Opus, Lossy remains the same, folders get merged. On the phone and tablet with tighter space constraints, I just re-encode everything to opus and merge. I won't notice the artefacts of re-encoding MP3 to Opus when there's a train humming in the background and people talking. My best headphones for use with my phone are the 50€ Shure earphones. I also have some large open headphones from Thomann. Both are kinda good, but not studio quality good, so some details will escape me. I could maybe find some differences between Flac and Opus in some recordings if I tried very hard, but frankly I hate paying attention to audio quality. It's a very draining task that I restrict to comparing amplifiers/DACs and speaker setups, and I'll always use Flac for that anyways.
  - dandroid1 12y ago
    Google Play Music
  - krschultz 12y ago
    Android?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - munificent 12y ago
    YouTube, Spotify, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Pandora, et. al.
    - click170 12y ago
      Those just aren't sufficient IMO. I like being able to listen to music when I have no internet connection. I like being able to listen to something when the original was taken down. I like being able to listen to something that the vendor no longer offers. I like having smart playlists in my library and on my devices that automatically update themselves based on meta data such as what I've played recently. Unfortunately I like being able to use my music program on an operating system of my choosing as well, and am looking for an iTunes replacement. But then replacement can't be worse than the original. That's a deal breaker.
      - tschuy 12y ago
        Spotify premium, uploading anything they don't have, and using Offline Mode?
      - derekp7 12y ago
        Isn't most of the music purchases on Amazon DRM-free? And downloadable in regular MP3's with a standard web browser? It's been a while since the last time I acquired any music.
        javert 12y ago
        Yes. I purchase Amazon MP3s and play them on Linux. I like actually owning my music as good old-fashioned files. Highly recommended. Amazon doesn't just provide a link to the files once you purchase them, there is a downloader client. I have never tried the official one, there is an open-source command line alternative called "clamz" that works perfectly.
      - AndyKelley 12y ago
        Have you tried groove basin? It satisfies your requirements except for smart playlists. But that feature is planned :-)
  - jlarocco 12y ago
    I use Clementine on Linux, and sometimes on my Mac. It handles more formats than iTunes (FLAC and OGG, maybe others), and the interface is okay, but not as polished as iTunes. I haven't used it to add or remove music from my iPhone on either platform, but the Linux version can play music from the phone, so maybe it works.
    - zaroth 12y ago
      > the interface is ok, but not as polished as iTunes Is 'polished' some kind of euphemism in this context that I'm just missing? The last time I tried to simply copy an MP3 from my laptop to my wife's iPhone I wasted almost an hour wading through nonsense errors, online tutorials, and absurd UI before I decided it's actually impossible to copy/paste an MP3 through iTunes and downloaded a standalone free player so I could load the file to the phone through the browser. I don't own a lot of music, I don't have a library of albums, just a folder of files I wanted to copy/paste.
      - leo_santagada 12y ago
        I think you were doing something wrong, it is supposed to take less than a minute.
  - Max_Mustermann 12y ago
    I use winamp, ample customization and plenty of plug-ins with good performance on my largish (~8k items) library.
  - aswanson 12y ago
    VLC media player.
  - logn 12y ago
    Tomahawk on linux is the best I've found.
  - yitchelle 12y ago
    Go old school and use the FM radio. I mean the physical item.
  - r0s 12y ago
    Private media collection.
  - stefantalpalaru 12y ago
    http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/ http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/
  - normloman 12y ago
    Torrents
  - iloveyouocean 12y ago
    Enqueue (available on Apple App Store) - simple, powerful interface, automatically finds/adds music to your library, support for many formats including FLAC
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  What was the RealPlayer they introduced for Linux called again? Gold something or other? I have a vague memory about that, as I installed it (RedHat 7.0??) and then realised I didn't actually need it as I didn't watch any RM content.
  - ccozan 12y ago
    I think it was Helix Player? My memory is also not clear.
    - 72deluxe 12y ago
      Ahh that's the one! Thanks! I really don't miss that, although it did feature curved edges to the window. Shaped windows were all the rage at one point but thankfully we've all gone back to Rectangle Land.
hrasyid 12y ago
Wow http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=RNWK+Interactive#symbol=RNWK;range=my http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=RNWK+Interactive#symbol=R...
- smacktoward 12y ago
  Yes, Virginia, as hard as it may be to believe today, once upon a time RealNetworks was a very big deal. For a real spit-take, though, put one of the companies that we think of today as Very Big Deals next to it for comparison. Like, say, comparing Apple's performance to RealNetworks' over the decade from 1997 to 2007: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&chvs=Linear&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1195851600000&chddm=993922&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:AAPL&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:RNWK&ntsp=0&ei=yQ3IVOmbI4K08gbe94GICg https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&... (I omit the last few years because AAPL has gone up so much over that period that if you include it you can't see the line for RealNetworks anymore. But check out how long it took Apple just to reach the heights Real was at in the late '90s.) Or Adobe, all the way up to now: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&chvs=Linear&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1422397092625&chddm=1698504&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:ADBE&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:RNWK&ntsp=0&ei=yQ3IVOmbI4K08gbe94GICg https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&...
  - amenghra 12y ago
    Comparing two companies over a period of time without taking into account splits, reverse splits, dividends, etc. isn't very meaningful.
    - rsanek 12y ago
      Both Google and Yahoo Finance already adjust for splits. Yahoo has an 'adjusted close' value that reports the price adjusted for dividends, but these adjustments don't change the stock price so much that it would make comparing unadjusted values 'not meaningful'.
      - WhitneyLand 12y ago
schoen 12y ago
Unfortunately (though it's considerably more compartmentalized and constrained than prior iterations), Google is trying to replace Flash with a DRM mechanism that also requires proprietary software. So while you might think that the advent of HTML5 video means you no longer need proprietary software to interoperate with the services that use it, Google and its partners are working to ensure that that's not true.
- jsprogrammer 12y ago
  Why would users switch to this as yet non-existent proprietary DRM mechanism when free and open source solutions already exist and are widely used?
  - mark-r 12y ago
    Because there will come a day when something they want to watch desperately will require it.
    - jsprogrammer 12y ago
      That day will never come[1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
      - TaylorAlexander 12y ago
        I remember the days where they talked about making video cameras that would actually stop recording if they were pointed at a piece of media with special markers in it. Nowadays people would use some kind of HDCP-breaking digital capture device, and regulating all video cameras is basically impossible with their ubiquity, but it's crazy to think about video cameras being modified against our will to suit the needs of one industry. Those in power will always try to take control away from us. Don't let them.
        gatehouse 12y ago
guelo 12y ago
RealPlayer was the coolest thing I'd ever seen when it came out in the mid 90s. It was the first streaming music player, as far as I know. Of course they later became corrupted by the advertising dark side, like every other internet company. But they were cool for a time. This was also before everyone decided that the browser would be the only internet platform.
- kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
  There was an early streaming video application for Windows 3.1 that predated RealPlayer. It had some radio stations playing music as well as CNBC. Can't remember the name now. Even earlier was MBone for X11 although that was never more than experimental at the time.
- barclay 12y ago
  Yup. I remember in 97(?) when I was able to be an early adopter of @home (before the excite merger), listening to "music on the internet" with realplayer on my PowerMac 7100. It was positively mind blowing. Almost equivalent to seeing 240x180 video playing on a CD-ROM.
- vel0city 12y ago
  Not only was it an awesome streaming client, I found it to be pretty sweet client for ripping/burning CDs at that time. It was sad to see it fall, but once Winamp got a bit more polished I never looked back.
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    I remember at one point Real Player had a redesign, it was sleek, well integrated and could stream all kinds of content very appropriately.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      It also supported SMIL with real-time buffering of content from independent sources. You could create a small XML file that dynamically and seamlessly streamed video excerpts from multiple servers, appearing as one stream.
whoopdedo 12y ago
RealPlayer's popularity was being first. At a time when most of the internet was accessed with dial-up modems and they offered a high compression media format. What killed them was the iPod. Or rather, computers and bandwidth improved so better quality compression could be used. Then RealPlayer limped along on name recognition alone. Although during the early days of h.264 it was the easiest way to play an MP4 on Windows.
- tosseraccount 12y ago
  Actually, it was Windows Media Player that killed them. Real lost it about 2000, years before the ipod.
  - X-Istence 12y ago
    "years" is a tad much, considering the iPod was first released in October 2001!
    - tosseraccount 12y ago
      Ok. I didn't know it was that old. Chart at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#Sales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#Sales says ipod really took off in 2005, though. Before then it was not a very big seller at all.
TylerE 12y ago
RealPlayer was capable - just barely - of streaming sort-of watchable video over 56k. That really was revolutionary at the time.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  Such blockiness, but very true!
jonalmeida 12y ago
Fun fact: Github uses Flash to copy link data or raw code to your clipboard.
- teej 12y ago
  Only because it is literally the only way to support the feature. Nothing sneaky about it.
  - zaroth 12y ago
    Clipboard API and events. W3C Working Draft 09 December 2014 http://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/ http://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/
    - alexcasalboni 12y ago
      That's awesome, I didn't know about this draft at all! Still wondering how such a native feature hasn't been drafted within the first 25 years of web browsers. Any (un)official ETA?
    - alexcasalboni 12y ago
      11% global support, so far. http://caniuse.com/#feat=clipboard http://caniuse.com/#feat=clipboard
72deluxe 12y ago
Having read your comment, I have just uninstalled Flash on my machines in delight. I had been using ClickToPlugin under Safari to force HTML5 videos on sites (and mainly for a way to send YouTube videos to the AppleTV via AirPlay, as there was no other way to do it) but now all machines are Flash-free. I think I'll have a coffee to celebrate.
xedarius 12y ago
God I hated RealPlayer so much, truly awful piece of malware.

koyote 12y ago

Oh my god I completely forgot about RealPlayer. Luckily there was an alternative, Real Alternative, that enabled you to play the content without having to install that ghastly RealPlayer. It seems like the community always finds a way around crappy software.

mhb 12y ago
What's the community using instead of iTunes?
- debaserab2 12y ago
  Spotify?
- maaku 12y ago
  What's crappy about iTunes?
  - username 12y ago
    It's extremely bloated.
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
      Not that I've ever noticed (my work computer runs linux, and I've found the music players there are, at best, barely useable in terms of what I want) (banshee's the best, but it's RNG is total garbage)
  - psychometry 12y ago
    I don't think iTunes is bloated, per se. I'm actually on an older version because they're removed useful features in 11 and 12 and there's no way to extend the program. The bloat is probably integration with the store. That should be split into a separate program and iTunes should just be a music library manager. Of course, that won't happen since not many people care about having a persistent music library any more.
    - gurkendoktor 12y ago
      You could also move iOS device sync out of iTunes. It doesn't even make sense that we use iTunes to sync content that comes from iPhoto.app, it might just as well be a core OS feature. After all, we have Handoff etc. built into OS X now...
  - JohnTHaller 12y ago
    On Windows it's incredibly bloated and has really bad UI design. Apple always used to trick people into installing Safari and Quicktime bundleware-style during updates as well. (Source: Every computer I've maintained over the years and asked the owner 'why did you install Safari' and the answer is always 'I guess iTunes did it')
    - yuhong 12y ago
      I believe iTunes formerly required QuickTime.
      - JohnTHaller 12y ago
        It did years ago, but hasn't in a while. Since then, Apple Update would pre-select to install Quicktime and Safari when you updated iTunes unless you purposely unchecked them each time.
  - lukifer 12y ago
    Speaking from personal experience on Yosemite: slow UI, constant beachballs and stutters (despite lots of RAM and no platter drives), paint/refresh bugs while scrolling, 100% CPU usage to play tracks (without FX/EQ), years of mission-creep, and a general conceptual mess since version 12, with its multiplicity of modes and sub-modes. As an iTunes apologist and power-user since 1.0 (my huge library admittedly is not helping), 12 has become the last straw on using iTunes as anything but a sync tool and database. As a media player, it's a disaster.
    - username223 12y ago
      > paint/refresh bugs while scrolling, Good to know I'm not the only one. I've become used to scrubbing the pointer up and down over the list of podcasts until the part I'm looking at is legible, and plugging my iPod in twice to get it to show up. But IMO iTunes is actually one of the less-bad recent Apple software screw-ups. At least it doesn't have enormous memory leaks, like Safari and Keynote, which regularly beachball my poor laptop with "only" 4GB of RAM long enough to go make a cup of coffee.
      - gurkendoktor 12y ago
        > But IMO iTunes is actually one of the less-bad recent Apple software screw-ups I would argue the peak in bug severity was 11.0, which randomly deleted podcasts: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5324634?tstart=0 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5324634?tstart=0 For me that meant 30 GB of podcasts gone, most of which I can't download again (publisher went broke, original download required payments etc.) Sigh. I used to be a big fan of iTunes as well.
        username223 12y ago
        Podcasts used to be simple: follow an RSS feed, download the audio files, listen to them, delete them when you're done. Now they're "cloud," so your computer is just a cache, and God only knows when you have those files, or when some program lets you use them.
  - TaylorAlexander 12y ago
    For me, no linux support is an issue. But then, I have plenty of options for open source media players so I don't particularly need iTunes.
  - deathanatos 12y ago
    > What's crappy about iTunes? In addition to what other have said: * no support for FLAC, OGG, WMA(?) * I don't _think_ there's support for ReplayGain. * Frankly, I just find the UI hard to manage. * _any_ marginally advanced feature.[1] [1]: (I "DJ" for dancers) fade outs, volume changes in actual decibels (the volume bar is completely unlabeled), simple one time gain even if it results in clipping (quality matters none if you can't hear it), stop after current song, don't trust duration metadata or guesswork (I have MP3s that completely break the seek bar), start song from an index that isn't 0:00…
  - rttlesnke 12y ago
    Mostly, no Linux support. I really want an open iTunes alternative which runs on Linux or any Unix, and can re-encode my entire music library with the codec/bitrate I want, while retaining music metadata. iTunes is good at that. Opus/Ogg support would be great. Anyone know of something like this?
    - lozf 12y ago
      You might like Clementine[1] it seems quite popular as an all-in-one music manager... though I usually use either `opusenc` or `fdkaac` via `ffmpeg` for transcoding with intact metadata. [1] https://www.clementine-player.org/about https://www.clementine-player.org/about
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    The UI ignores all the guidelines Apple sets and they redesign it every release from what I can tell? All the other applications on OSX have sensible close/minimise/zoom buttons on a titlebar but iTunes has long ignored that, with no obvious titlebar to move the window. Now that everything is bundled into the space where the titlebar should be, how do you move it without risk of clicking on something else? Additionally, it is a LARGE application just for playing audio. I know that it does other things too but it seems to have outgrown its original purpose? There is now a crossover between iTunes and the App Store on Mac, from what I can tell? I wonder why they don't merge. Having said that, I like the glaring red icon they now use (not sure why they changed from blue though!)
- hengheng 12y ago
  foobar2000 and GoneMad Music Player? Dunno, I'm that propeller hat guy who carries his music around in Opus Format on his Android ...
  - voltagex_ 12y ago
    What's Opus like for day-to-day use? Do you notice any battery hit on Android from it being decoded in software? (assuming AAC is done in hardware - could be wrong) What kind of quality/filesize do you use? If I'm used to ~170kbit VBR AAC/MP3 for headphone use, what settings would I need for Opus?
    - voltagex_ 12y ago
      Just tried a few encodes: to my poor ears, 64kbit Opus is fine on headphones!
    - hengheng 12y ago
      No significant battery hit, I really don't care. There is an ARM-optimized version of libopus that seems to use vector operations, I don't think it gets much better than that. I'm using 72-96 kbit/s as bitrates, I've been playing around with that actually. 72 kbit is too little sometimes, 80 is fine, 96 is safe. Encoding is done in foobar2000, copy everything into a playlist, right click -> encode. My archive structure is this: At the top, there is one folder "Lossless", one folder "Lossy", each with subfolders for artist and album. foobar2000 and any other players syndicate their library from both folders. I have separate versions of my music archive on my laptop and on my phone, each of which are complete. For the laptop, Lossless gets converted to Opus, Lossy remains the same, folders get merged. On the phone and tablet with tighter space constraints, I just re-encode everything to opus and merge. I won't notice the artefacts of re-encoding MP3 to Opus when there's a train humming in the background and people talking. My best headphones for use with my phone are the 50€ Shure earphones. I also have some large open headphones from Thomann. Both are kinda good, but not studio quality good, so some details will escape me. I could maybe find some differences between Flac and Opus in some recordings if I tried very hard, but frankly I hate paying attention to audio quality. It's a very draining task that I restrict to comparing amplifiers/DACs and speaker setups, and I'll always use Flac for that anyways.
- dandroid1 12y ago
  Google Play Music
- krschultz 12y ago
  Android?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- munificent 12y ago
  YouTube, Spotify, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Pandora, et. al.
  - click170 12y ago
    Those just aren't sufficient IMO. I like being able to listen to music when I have no internet connection. I like being able to listen to something when the original was taken down. I like being able to listen to something that the vendor no longer offers. I like having smart playlists in my library and on my devices that automatically update themselves based on meta data such as what I've played recently. Unfortunately I like being able to use my music program on an operating system of my choosing as well, and am looking for an iTunes replacement. But then replacement can't be worse than the original. That's a deal breaker.
    - tschuy 12y ago
      Spotify premium, uploading anything they don't have, and using Offline Mode?
    - derekp7 12y ago
      Isn't most of the music purchases on Amazon DRM-free? And downloadable in regular MP3's with a standard web browser? It's been a while since the last time I acquired any music.
      - javert 12y ago
        Yes. I purchase Amazon MP3s and play them on Linux. I like actually owning my music as good old-fashioned files. Highly recommended. Amazon doesn't just provide a link to the files once you purchase them, there is a downloader client. I have never tried the official one, there is an open-source command line alternative called "clamz" that works perfectly.
    - AndyKelley 12y ago
      Have you tried groove basin? It satisfies your requirements except for smart playlists. But that feature is planned :-)
- jlarocco 12y ago
  I use Clementine on Linux, and sometimes on my Mac. It handles more formats than iTunes (FLAC and OGG, maybe others), and the interface is okay, but not as polished as iTunes. I haven't used it to add or remove music from my iPhone on either platform, but the Linux version can play music from the phone, so maybe it works.
  - zaroth 12y ago
    > the interface is ok, but not as polished as iTunes Is 'polished' some kind of euphemism in this context that I'm just missing? The last time I tried to simply copy an MP3 from my laptop to my wife's iPhone I wasted almost an hour wading through nonsense errors, online tutorials, and absurd UI before I decided it's actually impossible to copy/paste an MP3 through iTunes and downloaded a standalone free player so I could load the file to the phone through the browser. I don't own a lot of music, I don't have a library of albums, just a folder of files I wanted to copy/paste.
    - leo_santagada 12y ago
      I think you were doing something wrong, it is supposed to take less than a minute.
- Max_Mustermann 12y ago
  I use winamp, ample customization and plenty of plug-ins with good performance on my largish (~8k items) library.
- aswanson 12y ago
  VLC media player.
- logn 12y ago
  Tomahawk on linux is the best I've found.
- yitchelle 12y ago
  Go old school and use the FM radio. I mean the physical item.
- r0s 12y ago
  Private media collection.
- stefantalpalaru 12y ago
  http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/ http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/
- normloman 12y ago
  Torrents
- iloveyouocean 12y ago
  Enqueue (available on Apple App Store) - simple, powerful interface, automatically finds/adds music to your library, support for many formats including FLAC
72deluxe 12y ago
What was the RealPlayer they introduced for Linux called again? Gold something or other? I have a vague memory about that, as I installed it (RedHat 7.0??) and then realised I didn't actually need it as I didn't watch any RM content.
- ccozan 12y ago
  I think it was Helix Player? My memory is also not clear.
  - 72deluxe 12y ago
    Ahh that's the one! Thanks! I really don't miss that, although it did feature curved edges to the window. Shaped windows were all the rage at one point but thankfully we've all gone back to Rectangle Land.

hrasyid 12y ago

Wow http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=RNWK+Interactive#symbol=RNWK;range=my http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=RNWK+Interactive#symbol=R...

smacktoward 12y ago
Yes, Virginia, as hard as it may be to believe today, once upon a time RealNetworks was a very big deal. For a real spit-take, though, put one of the companies that we think of today as Very Big Deals next to it for comparison. Like, say, comparing Apple's performance to RealNetworks' over the decade from 1997 to 2007: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&chvs=Linear&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1195851600000&chddm=993922&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:AAPL&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:RNWK&ntsp=0&ei=yQ3IVOmbI4K08gbe94GICg https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&... (I omit the last few years because AAPL has gone up so much over that period that if you include it you can't see the line for RealNetworks anymore. But check out how long it took Apple just to reach the heights Real was at in the late '90s.) Or Adobe, all the way up to now: https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&chvs=Linear&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1422397092625&chddm=1698504&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=NASDAQ:ADBE&cmptdms=0&q=NASDAQ:RNWK&ntsp=0&ei=yQ3IVOmbI4K08gbe94GICg https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=0&chds=0&chdv=0&...
- amenghra 12y ago
  Comparing two companies over a period of time without taking into account splits, reverse splits, dividends, etc. isn't very meaningful.
  - rsanek 12y ago
    Both Google and Yahoo Finance already adjust for splits. Yahoo has an 'adjusted close' value that reports the price adjusted for dividends, but these adjustments don't change the stock price so much that it would make comparing unadjusted values 'not meaningful'.
    - WhitneyLand 12y ago

schoen 12y ago

Unfortunately (though it's considerably more compartmentalized and constrained than prior iterations), Google is trying to replace Flash with a DRM mechanism that also requires proprietary software. So while you might think that the advent of HTML5 video means you no longer need proprietary software to interoperate with the services that use it, Google and its partners are working to ensure that that's not true.

jsprogrammer 12y ago
Why would users switch to this as yet non-existent proprietary DRM mechanism when free and open source solutions already exist and are widely used?
- mark-r 12y ago
  Because there will come a day when something they want to watch desperately will require it.
  - jsprogrammer 12y ago
    That day will never come[1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
    - TaylorAlexander 12y ago
      I remember the days where they talked about making video cameras that would actually stop recording if they were pointed at a piece of media with special markers in it. Nowadays people would use some kind of HDCP-breaking digital capture device, and regulating all video cameras is basically impossible with their ubiquity, but it's crazy to think about video cameras being modified against our will to suit the needs of one industry. Those in power will always try to take control away from us. Don't let them.
      - gatehouse 12y ago

guelo 12y ago

RealPlayer was the coolest thing I'd ever seen when it came out in the mid 90s. It was the first streaming music player, as far as I know. Of course they later became corrupted by the advertising dark side, like every other internet company. But they were cool for a time. This was also before everyone decided that the browser would be the only internet platform.

kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
There was an early streaming video application for Windows 3.1 that predated RealPlayer. It had some radio stations playing music as well as CNBC. Can't remember the name now. Even earlier was MBone for X11 although that was never more than experimental at the time.
barclay 12y ago
Yup. I remember in 97(?) when I was able to be an early adopter of @home (before the excite merger), listening to "music on the internet" with realplayer on my PowerMac 7100. It was positively mind blowing. Almost equivalent to seeing 240x180 video playing on a CD-ROM.
vel0city 12y ago
Not only was it an awesome streaming client, I found it to be pretty sweet client for ripping/burning CDs at that time. It was sad to see it fall, but once Winamp got a bit more polished I never looked back.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  I remember at one point Real Player had a redesign, it was sleek, well integrated and could stream all kinds of content very appropriately.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    It also supported SMIL with real-time buffering of content from independent sources. You could create a small XML file that dynamically and seamlessly streamed video excerpts from multiple servers, appearing as one stream.

whoopdedo 12y ago

RealPlayer's popularity was being first. At a time when most of the internet was accessed with dial-up modems and they offered a high compression media format. What killed them was the iPod. Or rather, computers and bandwidth improved so better quality compression could be used. Then RealPlayer limped along on name recognition alone. Although during the early days of h.264 it was the easiest way to play an MP4 on Windows.

tosseraccount 12y ago
Actually, it was Windows Media Player that killed them. Real lost it about 2000, years before the ipod.
- X-Istence 12y ago
  "years" is a tad much, considering the iPod was first released in October 2001!
  - tosseraccount 12y ago
    Ok. I didn't know it was that old. Chart at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#Sales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#Sales says ipod really took off in 2005, though. Before then it was not a very big seller at all.

TylerE 12y ago

RealPlayer was capable - just barely - of streaming sort-of watchable video over 56k. That really was revolutionary at the time.

72deluxe 12y ago
Such blockiness, but very true!

jonalmeida 12y ago

Fun fact: Github uses Flash to copy link data or raw code to your clipboard.

teej 12y ago
Only because it is literally the only way to support the feature. Nothing sneaky about it.
- zaroth 12y ago
  Clipboard API and events. W3C Working Draft 09 December 2014 http://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/ http://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/
  - alexcasalboni 12y ago
    That's awesome, I didn't know about this draft at all! Still wondering how such a native feature hasn't been drafted within the first 25 years of web browsers. Any (un)official ETA?
  - alexcasalboni 12y ago
    11% global support, so far. http://caniuse.com/#feat=clipboard http://caniuse.com/#feat=clipboard

72deluxe 12y ago

Having read your comment, I have just uninstalled Flash on my machines in delight. I had been using ClickToPlugin under Safari to force HTML5 videos on sites (and mainly for a way to send YouTube videos to the AppleTV via AirPlay, as there was no other way to do it) but now all machines are Flash-free. I think I'll have a coffee to celebrate.

xedarius 12y ago

God I hated RealPlayer so much, truly awful piece of malware.