Sansa loses music without membership

Those are rented and when the rent is shut down the tunes should expire.

What I use are old fashioned (?) CDs and use content from there.

Bob

If you have a wide taste of music, then renting (by subscribing) might be economical in the short run, as you can download songs to your heart content or until you fill up your player.

If you are picky like me, you only want music you like in your player then buying the music might be best.

Buying CDs and then ripping the songs yourself is a way to go. If you want to buy music digitally then I suggest you search for a store that sells them without DRM like Amazon.

If used to its full potential. If you're just playing the same 100 songs over and over again, then you're better off buying the songs or albums individually. Subscription services such as Rhapsody have millions of songs in their catalog. You don't have enough room for all that music, nor the time to listen to it all. But some people download thousands of songs in a relatively short period of time(days, weeks, months). When their tastes change, they can delete those songs and get new ones. When people download this much, that's where a subscription really pays off.

Someone already mentioned buying DRM-free songs off of Amazon, which is a really good idea. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, which restricts what you can do with the music that you've purchased. The most well known music store, iTunes, uses DRM. Its because of this that you can only put their songs on iPods. iTunes does offer some DRM-free tracks, known as iTunes Plus, but they can only be used on players that support AAC. However, you can easily convert these to mp3 without doing the burn to audio cd then rip back onto computer method.

Also, DRM restricts how many computers and mp3 players you can put your music on. It also restricts how many times you can burn them to audio cds (but there are ways around this). Sometimes, DRM is what makes your music unplayable after the store folds, as is the case with Sony's Connect Store. And it also makes your music stop playing when you terminate your subscription, but it is necessary.

If you want to buy your music rather than "rent" them via subscription, the best way to go is DRM-free. Usually they are sold as mp3s, which is the most universal format. Right now, Amazon seems to have the best selecction, having all of the major record labels on board as well as a bunch of indies. And of course, you can still buy cds.

i have a sansa e250 and i absolutely love it. no subscriptions needed. i'm able to use windows media player to move all my music from my hard drive or rip a cd to it.

don't give up on sansa, you said it right "The wife went and did it based on cost without any investigation." at least she got the cost right, just the wrong version.