What happened, apparently, was that Windows Media Player ripped your old CDs to its own format, .wma (Windows Media Audio) and put in its nasty digital-rights management codes. Then those codes started telling the player not to play the files.
When you change the Rip format to .mp3, you don’t get any of those evil codes. Just the audio file.
Once you have the mp3 files in your computer, you can send them over through Windows Media Player as you have been doing.
On the Fuze, if you go to Settings/System Settings/USB Mode, you’ll see Auto Detect, MTP or MSC. MTP lets Windows Media Player control it, and Auto Detect sends it to MTP when it detects that you have WMP on your computer. If you’re going to keep using WMP, you might as well switch it to MTP, because Auto Detect is just one extra step.
You could also do a more direct, hands-on transfer using MSC mode.
MSC just makes the Fuze look like a thumb drive to your computer. So if you have the ripped .mp3 files in a folder in your computer, you could put the Fuze in MSC and just drag and drop the folder onto the Fuze or its memory card. The Fuze memory and the card slot show up as two separate drives, Sansa Fuze and Removable Disc, in Windows Explorer (Computer or My Computer).
I always use MSC because I dislike Windows Media Player. So if you continue to have trouble with WMP, try switching to MSC and just drag-and-drop the audiobook folders.
