I don't get it. I have Yahoo and Rhapsody to Go services, and I am confused. I loaded my 4GB Sandisk m260 with 3.5 GB of subscription music from both services. I am aware that I must reconnect the mp3 player once in awhile to renew my subscriptions. But when, and how I do this is unclear. Just when I think I "get it" something goes wrong. For example:

Rhapsody's renewal they told me, is the day of your billing statement. Yahoo's seem to be the first day of the month, but they don't answer their email, so I can't be sure. So, does this mean that for Yahoo, I need to plug in the Sandisk on the first of every month, or can I do it before and it renews for 30 days? And if it's the first of the month, is it the first, or the day after the first? How can I avoid my licenses expiring. It would appear that if you download music on 12/31/05 it will expire on 1/1/06, only a day later. This is wierd.

And another thing. Just what are you supposted to do whenyou plug it in? Both user manuals imply that simply pluggin in the player while running Rhapsody or Yahoo is good enough, but this is NOT the case. At the least, it would appear that you need to click on the player icon in the application to force the software to read the contents of the player and then, hopefully, renew the licenses. But today I found out that this is also not the case.

I downloaded music from Rhapsody onto my iRiver H10 a month or so ago. I plugged it in a week ago. But my Rhapsody renewal date is the 27th, so when I play music, it tells me that the licenses have expired. Now, I loaded these songs on my home computer. But I plugged it into my work computer and logged into my Rhapsody 3.1 account. I clicked on the H10 icon/link and it read the contents. But, the songs are still expired! Rhapsody support tells me that you need to physically have the songs on the local drive ... that it's not good enough to simply have an account in good standing. This means that you can only renew on the computer which has the files originally. It also would appear that if you delete the files on your local PC to make space, that the licenses won't renew on the mp3 player! This makes no sense at all! If you have an active account you should not need to have the files local on the PC!

Then there's the synchronization issue. Rhapsody support told me to sync my music again on the original machine. But when you sync with Rhapsody it adds another copy of the music to your mp3 player! So you end up with two copies of everything! I suppose you can tell it to replace, but then it deletes the Yahoo files and the non subscription files, too!

What a mess.

I have looked in Google for some answer as to how Janus DRM 10 really works. Does anyone out there have any answers. Thanks.

I think what they WANT you to do is... every month, when you renew, you erase the entire contents of your player... and transfer the files over again with the fresh licenses.

This is one of the reasons I never use DRM'ed files. Ever. Under any circumstances.

Janus DRM is very bad news its EVIL you should stay well away from it never have any DRM files all you will ever have is trouble with them.

For legal music downloads, allofmp3 should suffice. They give you prices based on encoding, so if you want CD-DA quality, you pay the standard price of a CD.
And best of all, no crappy DRM. DRM is an unnecessary evil that should be axed, and its vile creator should be burned on a haystack.

bobpenn: use any of the various transcoders you can find online to convert your drm-ed files to standard mp3.