my Sansa Fuze 4GB will not play songs anymore and says that I need to renew my subscription to Rhapsody… Why the heck do I need to have a subscription? The songs that I loaded onto the mp3 player were from CDs that I purchased myself - there is no way I’m paying to listen to them after I already purchased it… What am I doing wrong?
Did you rip them in Windows Media Player?
Dis you rip them in WMA format?
By default, WMP adds copy protection to WMA files unless you turn it off in the Rip Settings. Delete the files from your player, re-rip either in .mp3 format or _ non _-protected .wma and re-transfer them.
honestly, I’m not sure what that means. I saved the songs onto the computer from the CD and had saved them onto iTunes. I then had figure out how to change the format from iTunes to so that I could get it transferred to the mp3 player. Does that help explain?
The music subscription message is badly written. It means that digital-rights information allowing you to play the songs is missing.
When you converted the CDs in Windows Media Player it sneakily copy-protected them, meaning your computer has to send over hidden codes allowing you to play them .If the Fuze doesn’t see those codes, it displays the subscription error message.
Basically those files are now messed up. The best thing to do, sorry to say, is to rip the CDs again. But this time rip them to mp3, a format that has none of the copy-protection garbage. You have to tell iTunes to mp3s instead of Apple’s m4a or aac.
In iTunes, go to Edit/Preferences/Advanced (different from the visible Advanced tab up there) and under Importing, change from .aac or .m4a to .mp3, with good quality, at least 192 kbps. From now on, every time you Import a CD, you’ll get mp3 files that play on both the Fuze and those doPi players.
However, iTunes makes tags–the electronic labels that tell the Fuze Artist, Album, etc.–a little differently from what the Fuze likes. They’ll usually work, but the track numbering gets messed up because iTunes does 1/12, 2/12, etc., and the Fuze doesn’t read the slash (/), so it will play 1/12, 10/12, 11/12, 12/12, 2/12.
You can fix them with a great free program called mp3tag.
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/download.html
Install it and check Add to Context Menus while installing. This will let you right-click on album folders and open them with mp3tag.
Open mp3tag and go to Tools/Options/Tags/Mpeg and Write. Chose ID3v2.3 and ISO-8859-1. Save that change and forget you ever did this.
Now, find an mp3 album, right-click on it and open it with mp3tag. Highlight the songs and make sure they are in playing order, top to bottom. You can click on the Track Number heading if you want. Then go to Tools/Auto-Numbering Wizard and choose Leading zeroes. This changes iTunes tags (1/12, 2/12) to tags the Sansa likes better (01,02).
You’ll need to do that with each album, and with any album tagged by iTunes. I do it with every album I’m going to put on the Fuze. But it’s simple and quick, a few seconds. Kind of like straightening your collar before you go into the office.