The RealAudio player is both a plug-in and a helper-application that works with the most popular web browsers. Much like a web browser, it sends a request for a file to a server and awaits a response. The reply from the server comes in the form of data "packets". The player will "buffer" (temporarily store) the first few packets and then begin playing the sound as it receives the remaining packets, queuing them in the buffer for playing. There is no way to guarantee the route that packets will take to a client (the player) and therefore no way of guaranteeing the order in which they will arrive. The player will then, in the buffer, arrange the packets in the appropriate order and request replacements for any lost packets allowing an ordered unbroken stream.

The Player can be launched as an application that is external to the WWW browser, so you can continue browsing while listening to a long streaming RA file. This raises bandwidth issues because the RA stream will be competing for available bandwidth with HTTP transfers - web pages and graphics.