A couple weeks ago with great trepidation I installed a RealAudio player. I remember 10 or 15 yeas ago that I and everyone I knew avoided Real Audio because the installation program would without asking set RealAudio as the default for everything it could possibly play and possibly a few things it couldn't. There were a lot of unhappy people about that. They seem to have cleaned up their act, and now RealAudio just hides until I specifically call it up. Much better.

It also has a nice little feature that any time I play just about any sort of video it puts a small clickable icon in the upper right corner of the video that says "Download this video", and it works.

That said, about the only time I actually do anything with MP3 playback on my computer is to play a few seconds of the beginning of a file to check audio quality, or if the tag information on an audio book doesn't have the narrator's name, I'll play a bit of track one to get the information. All I ever do is double-click a filename and give a quick listen. The fact that the first time each day I do that entails a half minute delay is annoying, but hardly on the scale of, say, a Republican controlled Congress.

I may just change the default association for MP3 to be RealAudio instead of WMP and see how that works out. I had thought this little problem would be simple, just a "You dummy -- change this parameter to be that and it'll work right" sort of thing.

Funny how that never seems to work out.

tanstaafl.

Edit: Yeah, that works [RealAudio]
db