I found an interesting thread relating to this in the spyware newsgroup of news.grc.com (also accessible via grc.com website). "Something to replace Realplayer" is the name of the thread started May 2. They refer to another tip at bottom of page http://www.lockergnome.com/issues/daily/20011228.html I wonder if the clever H-Audioers have experimented with this. My detestation of sneakware makes me suppress my aversion to Registry mods... (Apologies if this is old news -- I just cannot ever make your search engine do anything for me!)

i don't know what's the deal with realplayer. realnetworks were caught spying with realdownload. i haven't read anything about realplayer being spyware. u can disable the GUIDs from preferences (ever since the grc.com article, realplayer GUIDs are disabled by default), so what's the problem with using realplayer?

Simple...

The people of Real Networks are evil minions of Satan. :diabolic:

Seriously though - I just hate the stupid player, because it's so bloated and full of ads. The download is 8,64 MB.

An in_ram.dll plugin for Winamp would be a nicer solution.

Here's a workaround that I found while perusing the Winamp forums. I'm afraid I don't know who came up with it but to them all credit is due. Eventhough it was written with Win 98/ME in mind, it works like a charm with Win2K assuming you do the necessary modifications like changing all references of C:Windows to C:WINNT etc. Enjoy.
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Real Player Workaround

Winamp Realaudio plugins require Realplayer to be installed, I know that, there has been a lot of discussion about this here. Well, I think Realplayer is a bloated software which puts way too much entries in the registry and I hate those types of softwares.

I found a way to keep the minimal components required in order to hear Realaudio content in winamp. (tested innover's and Tara's plugins, on Winamp 2.76, Win98SE, Realplayer 7 & 8). Tara's plugin even allows playback of realvideo.

Here is what you must do :

1- Install Realplayer (I suggest a registry backup before, if you want to avoid the hundreds of registry entries it puts in your registry when only 3 are needed)

2- Backup those 3 folders :

c:program filescommon filesrealcommon
c:program filescommon filesrealplugins
and
c:program filescommon filesrealcodecs

* almost forgot, also backup the pncrt.dll file located in c:windowssystem * (or C:winntsystem) for Win2K

3. Uninstall Realplayer and restore your registry if you did a backup as suggested in #1

4. Copy the 3 folders you backed up to their original locations, and pncrt.dll file to c:windowssystem

5. Paste the text below in notepad and save as a .reg file

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTSoftwareRealNetworksPreferencesDT_Plugins]
@="C:Program FilesCommon filesRealPlugins"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTSoftwareRealNetworksPreferencesDT_Codecs]
@="C:Program FilesCommon filesRealCodecs"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTSoftwareRealNetworksPreferencesDT_Common]
@="C:Program FilesCommon filesRealCommon"


6. Click on the .reg file you just saved.

7. Enjoy, of course you must have one of the winamp realplayer plugins. (For example, Tara 1.0.3.b.exe)
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It IS a nicer solution.

You could get the plugin from:
http://innoreal.kiwidream.com/
But it seems the site is currently down.

So, get it here, available for a limited time:
http://www.inf.ufpr.br/~rja00/ireal16.exe

Works perfectly with DSP, visualization, output...
The downside is that you must have Real Player 8 installed to be able to use it.

Regards;

Roberto.