The heavily promoted method is: subscribe to Rhapsody-To-Go and buy a Microsoft PlaysForSure compatible portable player (most newer non-iPod are or will be after firmware upgrade)
The (almost) unpromoted method is: subscribe to Rhapsody Unlimited and buy a notebook that runs XP. I dunno how many people went this route but I did. (Hey, that's 50% of the reason I bought a new notebook!)
Here are the steps:
0) (if you haven't done this before) Choose Tools->Authorize Computer from your Rhapsody 3.0 client
1) Add your songs to your library
2) Go to "My Library" and choose songs to be downloaded, right click your mouse and choose "Download track"
3) Now you could listen to these downloaded tracks offline (and even online as you might prefer 160KBps WMA versus streaming compressed at 128KBps)
However, like most Windows/Real software, this process might not be as trouble free as you'd hope. For me my computer tripped at Step 0! Without that step, when I tried to play a downloaded song, it showed a yellow triangle next to it, moused over the yellow triangle it said "Helix error c00d0bbe." And choosing Tools->Authorize Computer simply did nothing and the computer remained unauthorized.
I figure it probably has something to do with Microsoft's DRM (digital right management) so I opened Windows Media Player 10. It's the first time I run it (See! setting up and running Rhapsody are so high priority for me!) so I went thru some setup and it seems to have downloaded some components over the internet. Looks like that's the missing piece that prevented me from authorizing the computer as I was able to complete Step 0 afterwards (The choice became "Deauthorize computer" afterwards)
BTW, I submitted this issue to Rhapsody's support 4 hours ago, before I figured this out myself. No response yet. Well, the Windows/Real combination is certainly not for the computer skill challenge crowd. My money advice to Microsoft and companies: if you want to beat your competition (you know who, the name of that company starts with an "A" >:) you gotta make things that work smoothly, for everyone, not something that requires 2 Computer Science degrees!
