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If you own a portable audio player that supports subscription music services (Janus DRM), such as Yahoo! Music Unlimited and Napster To Go, you may have noticed the wait time before DRM protected tracks begin to play will increase over time. With the current players available, most users report 1 to 5 seconds before playback will begin, 3 seconds on average, but once this bug triggers the wait time increases to 30 seconds or more! 😯

Most users speculated the problem was with the subscription music services, but the problem was actually caused by using multiple programs to transfer music to the portal player. For example, exclusively synchronizing with the subscription music provider’s software would be okay, but synchronizing with additional applications, such as a competing music service or the Windows Media Player, would “break” the player until it was formatted.

A hotfix from Microsoft

Microsoft KB Article ID 902344, Revision 2.1, October 7, 2005, “FIX: Some portable devices may take 30 seconds or longer to start playing back a piece of content when you play subscription content that is protected by Windows Media DRM that uses chained licenses”

This problem occurs because the computer incorrectly sends duplicate root licenses to the portable device. This causes the playback startup performance to decrease because the portable device is forced to enumerate duplicate root licenses.

Follow the link to the KB article to download the hotfix, or go to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com (with Internet Explorer) and select it from the list of optional software updates. If your player is already experiencing the “30 second bug,” you will have to reformat it to fix it.