The RealPlayer plug-in should initialize. The audio file should automatically play and loop. If the file does not automatically play and loop, your browser, most likely, is not correctly passing the parameters to the RealPlayer plug-in. In case the file does not automatically play, you can manually start playback by clicking the play button on the RealPlayer plug-in interface. If the file still does not play, then your browser really messed up and initialized the plug-in without any data instead of displaying the alternate content. This, most likely, means your browser does not correctly pass the object element's data attribute value to the RealPlayer plug-in and or your browser does not honor the codebase attribute properly. This probably also means that your browser initializes the plug-in before checking for the existance of the file instead of after checking for the file because if your browser isn't using the data attribute and there's no file to load, the plug-in shouldn't initialize.