Mindful Musings

I recently upgraded to Rhapsody 4 from Rhapsody 3 since I was having trouble transferring playlists to my Sandisk Sansa e260 and created a large mess. Rhapsody would not start after upgrading to 4.0 and everything would lock up or freeze. This was after trying to uninstall Rhapsody and install it again from scratch. Rhapsody online help was poor to say the least and did not help at all. However, after reading some forum posts and trying to use my programmers’ thinking cap, I made it all work and work much better. I now can transfer playlists directly to my device without any rigmaroll and everything seems to work smoothly and seamlessly. I do like the new interface a lot better than the old one. It is cleaner, more intuitive and is simpler to navigate. No more “mixer”.

Before I go into this, this advice comes with no warranty or promise. If this completely breaks your computer and everything else, I am not responsible. please proceed at your own risk, especially if you have purchased songs on your system from Rhapsody. If you have purchased songs from Rhapsody and have them stored on your system, I am not sure how cleaning the DRM will affect your music. Please contact Rhapsody tech support for a better answer. This method only works well if you JUST use Rhapsody to go.

Here is what I did (this is considering you had a previous version of Rhapsody installed and nothing seems to work, program will not start):

• Install Rhapsody 4 from the installation file but uncheck the box that says start Rhapsody after install


• Unplug your device and close rhapsody (and WMP or any other DRM program) if it is running


• Open up a command prompt (start->Run->type “cmd”->Enter key)


• CD to the Rhapsody program files directory


• Use the RhapDrmClean.exe program to clean the DRM files



• type in RhapDrmClean -hx -hxstore -clean_phd_keys


• Type yes a whole bunch of times as Rhapsody asks you if you are sure


• Close the command prompt


• Now that all of your DRM components are clean, open Rhapsody, log in and set it up again


• You will have to re-license your device to get it to transfer music


• Now you can drag and drop playlists onto the device and the lists themselves are transferred


• If the device is not found, follow the same procedure you used before (when installed for the first time) to find and install the device.

I believe that there are a whole bunch of DRM updates in Rhapsody 4 and it conflicts with everything that Rhapsody had setup on your machine prior. The installation program does not seem to take care of this for you and it needs to be done manually. I am transferring all my music to my Sansa e260 as I type this. I love the fact that I can transfer playlists using Rhapsody now, it was a source of major frustration in the past.