Renting Music: Boatloads of Tunes for a Monthly Fee
Many options exist for buying music files online, but a subscription service could expose you to many more new artists. And renting songs may be the least expensive way to populate your audio player with music.
The best-known services are Napster To Go, Real Rhapsody, Urge, Virgin Digital, and Yahoo Music Unlimited. Most of them charge about $15 a month for a plan that lets you load an unlimited number of files onto your portable audio player. Most also offer $10-a-month plans, but those usually prevent you from moving the files off of a computer and onto a portable player. Some discounts are available if you pay annually.
The Format Fine Print
Of course, your player will need to be compatible with the service. For example, the Sansa e260R has close links to Best Buy's Digital Music Store, which runs on Real's Rhapsody 4.0 service. The service includes Rhapsody Channels, which automatically update the player with new music each time you sync.
In most cases, a PlaysForSure device will work with most of the five services mentioned here--but despite the moniker, compatibility is not always guaranteed. For example, the Toshiba Gigabeat S30 is incompatible with Yahoo Music Unlimited. Worse, the Microsoft Zune doesn't use the PlaysForSure DRM format, and so will work only with Microsoft's Zune Marketplace. Apple iPod owners can't rent music, period: iPods work only with iTunes, which doesn't offer a subscription service.
Nevertheless, a PlaysForSure device is currently your best bet for enjoying wide-ranging compatibility. Though files purchased from Rhapsody 4.0 will play on both PlaysForSure devices and iPods (though not the Zune), audio files rented from the Rhapsody To Go subscription service will play only on PlaysForSure devices. As you might expect, these services won't let you burn rented tracks to a CD.
Typically, a subscription service requires that you download songs to your PC and then transfer them to your music player. If you want to conserve hard-drive space, you'll like that Rhapsody 4.0 allows you to drag files directly from its download list to your player (the files temporarily reside in your PC's cache, but don't remain on your hard drive).
Syncing and Expiration
The SanDisk Sansa e260R is the first player we've tested that touts special integration with an online music subscription service (the R stands for Rhapsody). One plus is that the e260R will notify you when your subscription is about to expire. That's a helpful feature considering that you could lose all your music if you forgot to renew your subscription and then tried to sync your player--a likely scenario if you and your player spend an extended amount of time away from your PC.
Eric Butterfield
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