Rhapsody Channels and External SD

Should I be able to drag Rhapsody channels into the External SD on my Fuze?  I can drag them into the ‘Internal Memory’, but cant drag to the ‘External uSD’ card

Probably not, since subscription Rhapsody still uses DRM.  Even though SD cards in general are supposed to support DRM (after all, it stands for “Secure Digital” and has SDMI technology built in), the music industry still doesn’t trust them.  You’ll have to limit the MicroSD card to DRM-free music.

I can drag protected DRM tracks to the SD card, just not Rhapsody Channels – which are essentially just a bunch of the same randomly selected DRM tracks.

The Rhapsody Channels feature is configured for the Internal Memory only.  The µSD card gets a license from the host device when using DRM files like Rhapsody, meaning that you can send your Rhapsody tracks to the internal or SD cars seamlessly, and the files will play!

Now here’s where it gets really cool:

You can use the µSD card with multiple Sansas, and the files transferred with each individual device will play only on the matching device. I have unprotected mp3s from my CD collection that will play on any device, but subscription tracks will only play on the matching device.

You’ll get the pink “synchronize” error message if the file belongs to the other Sansa.

Now for something completely different:

If you are running the Rhapsody 4 client on your PC, you must update to the new version 4.0.4.311 by clicking Help > Check for updates.  The new build of Rhapsody has patches specific to the new Fuze. Oh, and it Vista isn’t enough of a headache, the new build supports 64 bit as well, if you’re running in this mode.

Bob :stuck_out_tongue: 

Thanks Bob… After additional research, I did figure out that Channels are only supported on the internal memory… Thats OK… But, in light of that, I already downloaded a bunch of subscription tracks to the internal memory which I would like to now move to the SD card to free up space for Channels… I am using Rhapsody 4.0.4.311 already… I cant drag files from the Internal memory to the SD card within Rhapsody, but I can do it from Windows Explorer… The device is in MTP mode… Is there any danger in moving albums in this matter as far as the database goes?  Or does MTP mode take care of that behind the scenes when moving albums around with Windows Explorer?

Secondly, I also notice on subscription tracks on the SD card, I get no album art, and within Rhapsody, I cannot rate those tracks, view them in the Rhapsody music guide, or purchase them.  Is this normal behavior as well?  Like I said, the subscription tracks play fine on the SD card.

Thanks,

Rick

Rhapsody has some glitches regarding album art, as the art is not always transferred when sending to the µSD card.  I have plenty of tracks where the art does transfer to the card, and others that don’t.  Go figure.

The easiest way to transfer the Rhapsody tracks between the two devices is to use either the R4 client or Windows Explorer in MTP mode.

I haven’t tried it on my devices, but MP3Tag has a utility that takes the embedded album art from the ID3 tag, and exports is as a file.  Tell the application to use the name folder.jpg for the Fuze, and set the attributes to hidden, or the Fuze will list all of your album art as photos in that mode!

Since I am comfortable with importing my own album art, I simply  do it the old-fashioned way, by inserting the album art jpg file in the require album folder while in MTP mode.

I have to be careful, as the e280v2 likes album art to be named album art.jpg.

Bob  :stuck_out_tongue: 

Bob,

Thanks again… I have found many of your responses to be quite helpful throughout the entire forum, so for that – thank you.

One other question – the Fuze introduces a terrible gap between each track when I am listening to an album… This is especially problematic on live albums… Is there any way to correct this problem?

Rick

Yes, the dreaded song gap is a pain.  It is a combination of two factors: using Rhapsody, I believe that they insert a 2-second default gap between tracks, and the file load time for the device compounds the issue.

There’s something inherently cool about a well laid out new age composition, like Robert Rich or Michael Stearns, or even Mark Isham’s works, where one song leads into the next passage.  On CD, what is done is a merging of the two tracks via the time data.

Listening to thematic works like Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and his earlier albums, the feature of the CD allows the music to seamlessly transfer through individual tracks.  In the day of the LP, the engineer simply sped up the cutting head inward to make a visible gap, while an audio signal continued being cut.

As Rhapsody transfers each track into their library, the draconian clip of the end of each track can be annoying.  Well, I won’t even start on what that does to Classical pieces.  It’s kind of a trade, though; how are they suposed to separate tracks?

In a perfect world, I’d offer complete albums without gaps for those cool passages, but who am I to know?

There is plenty of interest in “gapless” playback. The way this actually works is quite simple: the player stores a few seconds worth of data in a buffer, and when the tracks change, decoding is continuous.  With a little luck, perhaps the development team will find a successful way to implement it on the Sansa.

Because of the multitude of wee differences in the source tracks each user loads, it’s a bit of a can of worms to implement the feature successfully: what if the bit rate of two successive tracks is different, or if one track is MP3, then WMA, or a WMDRM track?  See the basic issue?  It might cause a device to hang or pause anyway as it must “switch gears”, for lack of a simpler analogy.  Thus, we don’t have “gapless”, in my opinion.

Bob  :smileyvery-happy: 

@neutron_bob wrote:

it’s a bit of a can of worms to implement the feature successfully: what if the bit rate of two successive tracks is different, or if one track is MP3, then WMA, or a WMDRM track?  See the basic issue?  It might cause a device to hang or pause anyway as it must “switch gears”, for lack of a simpler analogy.  Thus, we don’t have “gapless”, in my opinion.

 

Bob  :smileyvery-happy: 

Well, I dont know about Sandisk, but my 1G iPod Nano does it without a problem :slight_smile:

Hey, that’s a bit of encouraging news.  The burning question is what are the filetypes used on the Nano?  Are all files iTunes, or have you tried the gapless mode with other formats?

The kicker is if the device will blend different file types.

Does the gapless mode only work with one album, or can it blend various songs?

Bob  :dizzy_face: 

Bob,

I have mostly unprotected MP3 and AAC files on the device, but a few protected AAC files purchased from the iTunes store… I wouldn’t say its entirely gapless – theres a very slight tick you can hear when it changes tracks – but its definitely OK for listening to live albums.