At SXSW I met Alex of Hand Coding. We shared a few Shiner Bocks and chatted for a while. I've been following his weblog for a while and it's always interesting.

A few days ago I read about his post on Jet Audio and the fact that it can play Real streams. IMHO, the Real player is a piece of bloated, invasive, spyware that attempts to squelch my attempts to get all my media players to coexist peaceably.

I downloaded the client from Jet Audio and it rocks. I really like the features and the clean design. From the single client you can rip CDs, convert files from one type to another, record audio (even from steams being played back), burns files to CDs, and it will even crossfade one song into another on playback.

You won't regret the download if you give it a try.