Rants for the day:
1) I’m having a serious hate-affair with RealPlayer. Wants to sneak in an auto-start every time I launch it (WinPatrol to the rescue.) If NPR/college stations were cocktail waitresses, RealPlayer must be Tiger Woods :) EDIT: and now my desktop if covered with little .RAM love children.
2) Some of these new StreamTheWorld players are really flaky.
I’m okay now. No straitjacket required.
I absolutely refuse to load RealPlayer!
I’m tempted to try the new SongBird. Anyone using it yet?
Tried it about a year ago. Maybe the quirks have been worked out by now. I didn’t care for the way it cataloged my music library, but may try it again. It’s Mozilla based, so just like Firefox, it will create a profile. If it gets wacky, it’s best to delete the profile and/or create a new one.
Also keep in mind that this program does a good job of cataloging your music *only* if you’ve done a good job of tagging all your music files. Of course, a good (free) program like Media Monkey or MP3Tag will take care of that.
I guess I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to serious PC or Streaming music or radio station listening,
I never have any player Auto-Start except Windows Media Player when I select the link button,on a station .
No other player even comes up untill I want it too , but then again I only have the WMP and RealPlayer and iTunes, and have never heard of the one’s you mentioned
3tooz: unless you’re having problems with streaming, I’d leave well-enough alone. MediaMonkey made a mess of my machine two years ago (perhaps they’ve improved it now) and because of Robrrt’s comments I don’t think I’ll try Songbird.
Unlike you, I will not load RealPlayer, but do have WinAmp, which seems to play nice with all the other kids.
Heh, odd how players work differently on different machines. I love WinAmp, but it doesn’t play nice with some of the stations. I associated .asx with WMP and everything worked great until I did an upgrade to WMP. Pre-upgrade, when testing a Cumulus station (WCOA, KCMO, etc.), I would get the neat little Cumulus popup player. After the upgrade, I now get the full page player (not a popup or new tab.) I’ve been through the settings, installed the WMP power toys plugin, etc., but can’t change that behavior or I’m just too stupid to look in the right place. Note: I still get the popup player at the stations’ own web sites.
The mention of Songbird piqued my interest, so I installed it again (discovered that a non-install portable version is available too.) Like Firefox, it also has an extension system. I got an extension that will display lyrics from whatever song is playing. Pretty neat. I had previously used a pre-1.0 beta version. It’s at 1.2 now and is looking a lot better.