RealPlayer Gold and RealPlayer SP on Mac explained

Remember when Prince went through that phase of changing his name a thousand times? One day he was “The Artist Formerly Known As Prince (TAFCAP)”, then he was “The Artist”, then he was “Slave” etc. Well sometimes developers also seem to do their utmost to confuse users with version numbers and names. None more so that RealNetworks who have confused Mac users by changing the name and version number of RealPlayer.

There are two versions of RealPlayer currently available for Mac – RealPlayer Gold and RealPlayer SP. RealPlayer Gold is the original version of RealPlayer which went “Gold” after beta testing was finished between versions 10 to 11. RealPlayer Gold stopped at version 11.0.0.

However after that, confusingly RealNetworks dropped the “Gold” bit and went back to version 1.0 again and re-branded it RealPlayer “SP”.

Even more confusingly however, RealPlayer SP is labeled as version 12.0.0 in the program’s “About” section:

But version 1.0 on the RealNetworks download site:

All this has lead to quite a bit of confusion for Mac users over exactly what version of RealPlayer they should be running. RealPlayer SP is the most recent version but RealPlayer Gold remains very popular because it offers extra features – mainly CD burning – that have been removed in SP and you can still download it here on Softonic even if it’s not on the RealPlayer site.

For those that haven’t upgraded to RealPlayer SP, it’s definitely worth it if you like to transfer videos to your mobile device as RealPlayer Gold doesn’t offer anything like the mobile features you get in SP. However, for those that just need a simple version of RealPlayer with CD burning capabilities, RealPlayer Gold is still more than enough.