Real Jukebox Plus

Rating:
Summary: MP3 Work Horse
Review: I've been a user of Real Jukebox Plus since the 1.0 release. The 1.0 release was a decent piece of software, still a bit rough, but useful. With this new release, the Real Jukebox 2 Plus, Real has gotten things right and it is one useful piece of software. It might not be as fancy as some software out there, but it does everything I need it to do and it does it well. If you're using the free version of Real Jukebox there is one real reasons to upgrade to the Plus version and that is the VBR encoding. With the free version you can go to the Real site and get an upgrade to let you do encoding of MP3s to 320k, but the upgrade does not let you do VBR (Variable Bit Rate). The Plus version does and it does it well. If you haven't used either version here's what's good about the package: If you have a CD-RW drive you can select songs from out of your library and burn an audio CD for use in the car or what not (though you're limited to 2x burning with the free included Roxio plug-in, if you want to burn faster you have to pay Roxio $19.99 for the upgraded plug-in). Real Jukebox rips and encodes extremely fast (on my machine it does it as fast as my CD-RW drive can read the audio disk). There is a radio function that's nice. And the cross-referencing and sorting of your music library is great. I would recommend that you try the free version of Real Jukebox first, then if you like it and want to encoding your music with VBR (which does sound better at a lower cost of disk space) then upgrade and get the Plus version.

Rating:
Summary: Great player but too expensive
Review: I've had the free version of Real Jukebox for over a year now. It is the best player I have ever used in my life. OpenMG jukebox has way too many flaws, musicmatch is cool looking, but complicated and it doesn't work too well either. Windows player is my 2nd favorite player, but now it is 80% corrupted on my PC. It freezes every time I load it now, and before it got destroyed, it still had a problem with playing tracks burned on my hard drive. If I clicked on two quickly, it pops up with a "cannot play multiple tracks" message and won't let me play anything until I restart the program. Winamp is a sad little silver player that is nothing but a bare-bones music player. Now Real Jukebox has none of those problems. I've burned over 700 tracks onto my hard drive with it, and not a single file is corrupted, doesn't play properly, or skip. I mess around with it a lot when I'm bored, dragging things around, clicking on 100's of songs, and download extra 3rd party skins and visualizations. Not once has it froze or not worked properly. I even copy songs from Kazaa and put it on my Real Jukebox, and it plays it perfectly. The only problem is that the full screen player looks boring. But who cares, if you want it to look cool, put it on skin mode. I've read some other reviews on the Plus player, and I recommend you don't get it. Especially for [$$]...

Rating:
Summary: Nice interface but too many problems
Review: Real Jukebox has a good look and some good functionality, but it has more than it's share of problems. As the other reviewer mentioned, it takes up a HUGE amount of memory. That means it is VERY unstable and crashes ALL THE TIME. It has a cool feature where it will get the album title and track info from the CD online database. But this feature is flawed and does not refresh properly. The visualization feature is very bad compared to the incredibly cool visualizations you can get with Winamp. The free version of Real Jukebox is SUPERIOR to the full version. It runs faster and has fewer problems. And I must disagree with the other reviewer. The tech support is terrible. As a matter of fact, Real, Inc. does not even provide it's own support, choosing rather to farm it out to a company called Talisma Corporation. Their idea of support is to email pages from the website. They don't read your emails or try to solve your problems. And, really, how could they. THEY didn't make the product. Long story short, DON'T BUY REALJUKEBOX. If you want to try it, download the free version. If you want a better player, download WINAMP.

Rating:
Summary: Nice interface but too many problems
Review: Real Jukebox has a good look and some good functionality, but it has more than it's share of problems. As the other reviewer mentioned, it takes up a HUGE amount of memory. That means it is VERY unstable and crashes ALL THE TIME. It has a cool feature where it will get the album title and track info from the CD online database. But this feature is flawed and does not refresh properly. The visualization feature is very bad compared to the incredibly cool visualizations you can get with Winamp. The free version of Real Jukebox is SUPERIOR to the full version. It runs faster and has fewer problems. And I must disagree with the other reviewer. The tech support is terrible. As a matter of fact, Real, Inc. does not even provide it's own support, choosing rather to farm it out to a company called Talisma Corporation. Their idea of support is to email pages from the website. They don't read your emails or try to solve your problems. And, really, how could they. THEY didn't make the product. Long story short, DON'T BUY REALJUKEBOX. If you want to try it, download the free version. If you want a better player, download WINAMP.

Rating:
Summary: MP3 Work Horse
Review: This is a cool jukebox as is musicmatch.Both are buggy in the plus versions although the free versions are much better.I love the free skins,visuals,and added freebies they give you.I've tried Winamp and it sucks!It doesn't record,have smoothe looking skins,or have a mp3 to cd feature built-in.Also it does distort the sound when you use the "fake amp" that's supposed to amplify the sound on pooer speakers.Realjukebox comes in a virtual entertainment center pakage,bundled with Realplayer 8.These can come in handy when you stream music and video!

Rating:
Summary: It's a cool mp3 player
Review: This is a cool jukebox as is musicmatch.Both are buggy in the plus versions although the free versions are much better.I love the free skins,visuals,and added freebies they give you.I've tried Winamp and it sucks!It doesn't record,have smoothe looking skins,or have a mp3 to cd feature built-in.Also it does distort the sound when you use the "fake amp" that's supposed to amplify the sound on pooer speakers.Realjukebox comes in a virtual entertainment center pakage,bundled with Realplayer 8.These can come in handy when you stream music and video!

Rating:
Summary: a great player, but with a few kinks
Review: this program is great. it has large, stereo-style button that are easy to recognize and use. The only problem with it is that it uses up a lot of memory - making it very hard to listen to music, and do other stuff at the same time. But there are always updates coming out, and if you own this product, you can get them for free. One of those updates probably will address this problem soon. There is also a lot of customer support, which is always a plus. Real Jukebox is a great, easy to use player.

Rating:
Summary: a great player, but with a few kinks
Review: this program is great. it has large, stereo-style button that are easy to recognize and use. The only problem with it is that it uses up a lot of memory - making it very hard to listen to music, and do other stuff at the same time. But there are always updates coming out, and if you own this product, you can get them for free. One of those updates probably will address this problem soon. There is also a lot of customer support, which is always a plus. Real Jukebox is a great, easy to use player.

Rating:
Summary: Eh, not much difference between the free version
Review: Yes you too can go out and pay thirty dollars for a piece of software that is dwarfed by competing software, and is available for free on the website of the company. So what does it do? You can record media from off of CDs, and organize MP3s and Real Audio files on your computer. So nothing really special. However, the software also comes with lots of sample songs to add to your music collection. Eh, thats all I can say, get the free version, if you like it pay thirty bucks for it then.