Help! I'm stuck in Clip Zip/Rhapsody purgatory!

I’m planning an overseas trip and wanted to use an MP3 player to play some of my playlists created on Rhapsody (I’ve been a streaming subscriber for years). My fear is that cell coverage may be spotty and that even if we get a good signal, we might be hit with huge data charges.

So, I looked up what MP3 players are compatible with Rhapsody and found a surprisingly short list. I’m a Mac user and my first choice was to use my 160-gig iPod, but no such luck. I now realize that Apple and Rhapsody no longer play well together (which I should have guessed since they’re streaming rivals).

I ordered a reconditioned Clip Zip from Amazon and then set about (using a friend’s PC) trying to load music from Rhapsody to my 8-gig, black Clip Zip. Weird things started happening almost immediately. A dialog box asked me to unplug and remount the device. I did that. After some more shinanigans, Rhapsody finally recognized it – I saw the name of the device appear in the rail and I saw a window allowing me to choose playlists I wanted to sync with the device. I chose a few playlists to test and it appeared to start loading tracks onto the device. The copying seemed to be very slow, however, and after at least 30 minutes of waiting, it managed to move over only about 10 songs.

Before trying again with my friend’s PC, I purchased a 32-gig micro SDHC card. Plugging the Clip Zip into the PC, I again faced the glitchy process of getting Rhapsody to recognize it. Eventually, though, I did see the same window with a list of playlists to sync.

In the same window, I saw a bar reporting that I had 28 gigs of space available. (Strange, because I would have expected to see 40 – 8 from what was built in the device and 32 from the micro card). Again, I chose a few playlists to sync, and pressed the “sync” button and saw a progress window pop up showing that tracks were downloading.

Long story short (thanks for sticking with me) once i dismounted the device and checked it, the display showed that only one track had actually loaded onto the device. It had apparaently removed the 10 that had loaded before.

Tomorrow, I’m going to give this one more shot. I saw in an earlier post that Clip Zips work better with Class 4 micro cards. Mine is a Class 10. So maybe I’ll take the card out and see if that helps. I also noticed that Rhapsody advices that devices be used in MTP mode. When I previously loaded the 10 songs, the player was in USB mode.

On my second (and less successful attempt) I had chosen MTP, although now, I see MTP is flagged under the “AutoDetect” label.

Any advice or guidance would be greatly appreciated. Like I said, I’m going to try one more time and hope that I haven’t wasted my time and money on a quixotic adventure with personal electronics. All this has made me realize how dependent I’ve become on streaming. The prospect of being without my music for two weeks has me shaking in my flip-flops!

Thanks!

Sam