Posted by David Sifry on February 18, 2002 at 12:04 pm
Boy, just when you think that Real may be coming round, yet again they remind you that they suck.
Hey look, I’m all for companies making money – ya gotta do that – but the
thumb-our-nose-at-our-customer attitude that just seeps out of the Real website
sucks the big one. Case in point – go and try to get the RealPlayer player
for Linux without using external resources (like Google). Go ahead. Try
to get it. What, no search bar? Windows-only client downloads? No options?
Yup. For those of you who just want it, here’s the form.
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Posted by David Sifry on February 14, 2002 at 9:36 am
Hurray NPR! I’m finally able to listen to the daily NPR programs that I often don’t get to hear, like Morning Edition and All Things Considered – and the folks at NPR have made available via realaudio stream the shows right after they’ve finished their US broadcast. In other words, I can listen to today’s Morning Edition at 9:00AM PST, right after it finishes playing on KQED, my local radio station.
And through the magic of a linux box connected to my stereo and a great little program called trplayer,
I can listen to realaudio streams without having to put up with those annoying
take-over of your computer pop-ups that the current Real
client imposes on people. And, since it is playing over my stereo, it sounds
just like the real thing – I can’t notice a difference. Now all I have to
do is create a little cron script to auto play my favorite NPR programs on
demand, and attach it to my MP3 web server. Thankfully, the NPR folks have
created a logical URL system that I can put into a script. One more step
towards having a RiVo – a TiVo-like device for Radio.
I was wondering how I would do this with such a limited number of radio
stations out there, but now I know – I can do it by recording streaming media
onto a hard disk so that you can take it with you wherever you go and listen,
just like an MP3 player. Imagine…
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