I just downloaded and installed Realplayer so that I could listen to mp3's on my computer. At the minute I can only open one song at a time. Is there any way I can open a selection of songs and have real player play through them (like a playlist) or is there any software which will allow me to do this?

Try Audacious http://audacious-media-player.org/Main_Page

Realplayer can read playlist files with the .pls extension. The format of the file is simply a plaintext list of song files (and the paths to them if they are in another directory).
For example, going to a directory on the command line and typing
ls *.mp3 > playlist.pls
will generate a playlist for that directory.

I'm running slackware and I've been using audacious since xmms stopped working. I generally go to the subdirectory containing what I want to listen to and type 'audacious creedence*' or whatever. I want the playlist to come up so I can choose which songs I want to hear.

Several weeks ago the playlist started blinking out of existence as soon as it popped up. I've been tweaking settings, but nothing I can do brings the playlist back.

Nor can I compile a new version. Everything looks normal, it just doesn't create an executable from the makefule. No error messages, no nothing. It just doesn't work.

Mostly all I ever want to do is what I mentioned in the first paragraph. Other players offer complicated playlist editing, which I do NOT want to do.

Any ideas?

Cheers, TIA, etc.
Bev