LAS VEGAS (AP)—RealNetworks Inc. is preaching digital inclusion with its launch Wednesday of a music download store and media player that support the top two audio formats.

The idea is to offer greater flexibility than rivals Microsoft or Apple in a market fragmented by incompatible formats and copy-protection schemes than frustrate consumers.

By supporting the competing encoding formats, as well as the older no-strings-attached MP3 format, Real gives consumers the option of using a single media player on their PCs to play or organize music purchased from all the major online music stores.

The new version RealPlayer 10 supports the Advanced Audio Coding, or AAC, format used by Apple's iTunes Music store, as well as Microsoft's Windows Media Audio, or WMA format, which dominates the other major legal music sites.

Real accuses Microsoft of unfair dominance in digital media, a burgeoning consumer market expected to grow by leaps as more homes get broadband. Last month, Real sued Microsoft for more than $1 billion, accusing it of illegally monopolizing the field by requiring users of its Windows operating systems to accept the company's media player.

Songs purchased on the new RealPlayer Music Store will be based on the AAC format, which Real's senior vice president of marketing Dan Sheeran says he believes will eventually replace the MP3 format that many use to compress and encode their music.

Real's player is a veritable "Swiss army knife," able to take music purchased from multiple online music stores and songs ripped from CDs and play them smoothly, said Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox.

Next page: Real's audio quality.

Moreover, Wilcox noted, Real's new online music store provides audio tracks encoded at 192 kilobits per second, better quality than most of the current online stores; Napster and iTunes offer 128 kilobits per second.

"They have an attractive new store with the highest encoded content and a slick new player that will play all the major content that you can buy or rip on your own," Wilcox said.

Real's music store, offering more than 300,000 tracks from all five major music labels as well as 200 independent labels, allows consumers to take their purchased tracks and burn up to five CDs without changing the playlist. The copy-protection scheme also allows songs to be played on up to three separate PCs.

Music tracks cost 99 cents each and most albums cost $9.99, prices comparable to Real's competitors.

RealPlayer 10, available in free as well as premium pay versions, supports more than 50 media player devices, including digital music players from Rio and Creative Labs.

Songs downloaded from Real's music store are encoded with the company's own Helix digital rights management scheme, however, and cannot be transferred directly to an Apple iPod.

That's something of a letdown for iPod fans, who saw Apple chief executive Steve Jobs announce a lower-priced entry-level model, the iPod mini, at Tuesday's Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco.

Real has some 1.15 million paying subscribers for its premium players and streaming services.

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in eWEEK.