Jun 26, 2001 11:39 PM
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Probably the only competitor of Microsoft’s Windows Media Player, Real Jukebox is “Really” a very good and complete jukebox.
About Real Jukebox:
Good Looks: The thing, which appeals most about Real Jukebox (RJ), is its presentation. I have used other jukeboxes such as Musicmatch, Windows Media Player and Jet Audio. However I feel that Real Jukebox is the best among them.
Highly Customizable: The second thing I like very much about RJ is that it is highly customizable. We can adjust the various options that are present in the RJ window. There are various options in the Jukebox window such as ‘home’, ‘CD’, ‘playlists’, ‘make CD’ etc. Among these choices there is this “make CD” option, which is of no use to those user who don’t have a CD writer. All such options that are of no use to the user can be removed. So when you open the window you have only those options that are of some use to you.
Library Facilities: All jukeboxes have in-built libraries. I personally don’t like these libraries because if you change the location of some song on the hard-disc or rename some particular song, the jukeboxes cannot detect it. In Windows Media Player such songs (songs that are renamed or moved) are just skipped whereas in Musicmatch you get a message “song not found.” Only in RJ you get this message –“if you have moved this file please locate it” and there is space provided for changing the previous location of the song. Below this there is an option “delete from library”. This might look a very trivial affair but for it is very helpful. If the same problem occurs in any of the other two jukeboxes (WMP and MM), you have to do lengthy procedures to get these things right.
Besides if you delete some song from the hard-disc you don’t have to search for that particular song in the RJ library and then delete it. There is an option-“remove missing tracks from library” in the “edit” menu.
Visualizations: The visualizations of RJ are the best you can come across. More visualization can be downloaded from the official site. There is a visualization called “Surreal FX player” which I think should be downloaded by every RJ user. It creates the best visualizations. “Surreal” can also be used as a windows screensaver. “Surreal FX player” is indeed surreal (i.e. too good to be true).
Line-in and Mic-in:You can record songs from line-in and mic-in also using RJ. I have tried using other jukeboxes for this purpose. The quality of sound recording is best in RJ.
Other Features: There are other options such as searching information about a particular artist or song on the net, downloading songs (…downloading the songs which you buy!!!) etc. Other standard include making and saving playlists, backup of music data, radio etc.
About the drawbacks: Real jukebox takes hell lot of your RAM; you computer cannot perform other tasks while RJ is being used. I generally like to listen to music while using Flash or Paint Brush or any other package. However if I am using RJ to listen to music and doing some other work the overall working of my system becomes very slow.
Secondly if RJ hangs many times you have to restart the computer…control-alt-delete won’t do any good.
Fussy Player: In the cons I have mentioned that RJ is a very fussy player. By fussy I mean many things.
First of all while downloading the setup of RJ you have problems while resuming your download. The setup program is about 8 to 9 MB. I generally use DAP (Download Accelerator Plus) so that I can resume my downloads. However at the time of resuming RJ setup download, I got the message –“requested link does not exist” twice. The third time I decided to sit on the net till the complete program was downloaded.
Besides along with RJ you also have to download Real Player necessarily. You have to install both player and jukebox. You cannot install RJ alone!!??
RJ can be used for ripping CD’s. Songs ripped from the Cd’s can be saved in mp3, rmx or wave format. You can of course choose the bit-rate of the songs. However songs ripped using RJ can be player by RJ only. No other player can play the songs. This is the most annoying aspect of RJ. I have mentioned above that the quality of songs recorded from line-in and mic-in is best when RJ is used but the same problem occurs…these songs can be played by RJ only.
However RJ is Really a good Jukebox and worth downloading.
