Don't let the title fool you, I'm not completely fed up with Rhapsody quite yet, but I had some troubles with the media manager after I posted my last post that I wanted to write about.
First of all, my computer flirted with sound again. I plugged in headphones and it was flaky...since I'm at school I didn't want to take the headphones out and try it, maybe I'll try it at home.
Second of all, I just read a good post on Lifehacker, roughly along the same lines of what I'm going to post about right now... CDs vs. Downloads... My favorite quote, "DRM...is the love child of Satan and Osama bin Laden." Quite true...
Now I continue with my story.... So earlier today I decided to reload my MP3 player with podcasts and updated playlists, it turns out this isn't as easy in WMP as it was for iTunes. One thing I discovered today is that my MP3 player has two file systems, one in which I can sync music through WMP and another closed system that allows me to manage playlists through Rhapsody (I'm assuming this is for DRM purposes). I do think I can play music using both, however it turns out that if I want to actually manage my music using Rhapsody into pretty playlists I need my files to be listed in a music folder that is contained in my Sansa's system folder (this is the closed file in WMP). So if I want to manage playlists, and still use the services I mentioned before (like Audiobaba) then I needed to find some way to put them into this system folder. This worked ok with iTunes, dragging my playlist files from the one in the iTunes window to another I created in Rhapsody worked fine...it did not work fine for WMP though. I couldn't copy and paste the files into the system folder either...I'm not sure if it's because they weren't officially imported or if it was the way WMP imported them in folders corresponding to the artists, but the Rhapsody software still didn't recognize them. Maybe it does in the player but I wanted custom playlists so there was not way I was going to assign the songs one at a time (either in the media software or my player).
I think I wrestled with this for a few hours this morning before I finally came up with a solution that eventually worked for me. What I could do in WMP was sync to a device so I decided to try my flash drive as a device...of course this worked...happy day! Then I cleared out the files in "My Library" of the Rhapsody software (careful not to check the option to also delete them from my hard drive, other was I'm screwed.) From there I was able to import all of the music files I had saved on my flash drive into the Rhapsody manager by browsing to my flash drive. Since I had started with a clean list for my library in Rhapsody I knew that all of those files could then go onto a new playlist for my device.
It was kind of a pain in the ass but I did eventually get it to work. I was also reading that there may be some issues with downloading music from Rhapsody too, although I'm not too much of a fan of paying per download, I would much rather just pay for the service to listen to whatever music I want.
I'm not saying that either Rhapsody or my Sansa player are bad, I'm just saying that just like every other personal music device, it does have its own issues. I'm still digging the player! If I ever do sign up for the Rhapsody service and try it out with my player you can expect a review of how it goes.
