So I’ve had this Sansa 2GB Clip model for maybe a month and it worked fine up until very recently. At some point, it began to only allow the first fifth of my library to play, alphabetically from the artist menu, and then for every artist thereafter, I’d get the message ‘Synchronize to continue your music subscription’ when trying to play a song, and then it’d skip that song, go to the next, and repeat the message, and then skip that song, and so on. It would do that voraciously and I’d have no control, unable to power down or access the menu for some time. It would eventually allow me to.
I should mention that preceding this, maybe two weeks before I ran into the ‘empty music folder - full device’ dilemma, but one format solved that issue.
So now I tried formatting it again and put my entire library back on the device. Same issue. Format again, and only added an artist that began with A. It worked like it did previously. Then I went and added an artist starting with S, and that didn’t work at first, but after I was able to get to the menu again it allowed me to play the first 2 songs, and went again to the subscription message.
And that’s where I’m at now. The A artist on my player works fine, every song. The S artist, not so much. I don’t know what to do and would really appreciate any and all suggestions.
Thank you.
–James
Be sure to update your firmware to the latest version, as sporadic “subscription” (DRM) error messages have been addressed.
Is any of your media WMA with DRM? If transferred from Windows Media Player, ripped from CD, was Copy Protection unchecked?
Bob 
All the media that was on the player worked fine up until recently. I did the firmware update and and still experiencing the same issues. As per your other question, I am unsure as to whether or not Copy Protection was checked or unchecked. A box of that nature sounds foreign to me for WMP. I’ll go back and check it all though and see if I can find the issue. Any other information you can lend would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Hi, I am having similar problems with audiobooks. It almost seems that once one book expires, the system becomes tainted for other books? Up until recently everything was working fine.
Anyhow I did get my current book (WMA, freshly downloaded/checked out today, plays fine on Windows Media) to work by changing the USB mode to “automatic” in settings. But the problem is still a bit confusing…
I think it’s a licensing issue with the music. I recently switched from Windows to Ubuntu, but I moved my music from my Windows machine. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t. The music that didn’t play on my Linux machine also didn’t play on my Sansa because the files were “encrypted”. On the Sansa, it gave me the same error you’re getting. I only get them on the WMA files, not the MP3 files.
Since I’m not using Windows, I can’t troubleshoot this issue for you, but I’d recommend testing a few different settings on WMP when you rip a CD:
1) Try ripping the CD to WMA format with a local license.
2) Try ripping the CD to WMA format without a local license.
3) Try ripping the CD to MP3.
Let us know which ones play and which ones give you that error. I think if your files have a license attached then they’ll play, but it might be the other way around. I do know that I attached licenses to some of the WMA files and didn’t with others, but again, I haven’t had the issue with MP3 format files, and once I upgrade the firmware on this thing, I’m expecting I won’t have this problem with my OGG files, either.
