Remember RealNetworks, the once-giant streaming company who boldly circumvented Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management to make their own media player work with iTunes files? Now they’re back with Rinse, a new effort to organize and clean up your iTunes library. Wait -- what?

All Things Digital’s MediaMemo is reporting that RealNetworks has gone from trying to directly compete with Apple to essentially making accessories for iTunes. At least that appears to be the case with the company’s new $39 Rinse software, which claims to “seamlessly organize and repair your iTunes music library” on Mac OS X, Windows XP or Vista.

That’s a far cry from the days when RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser boldly reverse-engineering Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management into something called “Harmony,” the company’s effort to play DRM’ed iTunes music tracks in their own RealPlayer. Needless to say, Apple’s legal eagles had a field day shutting that one down in no time.

Anyone hanging around the internet prior to MySpace probably remembers RealNetworks well, since a lot of music and video content was encoded using the company’s technology back in the day. Since then, the company has largely been displaced by Adobe Flash, Apple’s QuickTime or most anything else.

Flash-forward to today, and RealNetworks introduces Rinse. MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka tried out Rinse over the weekend, but found mixed results. The journalist “found that it could find some songs in my collection that previously been mislabeled -- while it was stumped by some others.”

Ironically, Rinse uses Sony’s Gracenote database to work its magic, which is exactly the same one that Apple uses for iTunes in the first place. Whether or not the software is worth $39 ultimately depends on how messy your iTunes library is in the first place.

So does software like Rinse signal a shift in RealNetworks’ overall strategy? Geekwire seems to think so.

“The program is part of the Seattle technology company’s bid to reinvent itself by providing technologies for managing and distributing digital media -- shifting away from being an actual content provider,” the website remarked.

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(Image courtesy of All Things Digital)