Zune software review

So the world has been o e ed with Microsoft's version of the famed "iPod killer," and now that the device is lurking the streets and craftily making its way into the homes of u u ecting musicphiles, side-by-side compariso with A le's products are inevitable.

And yes, we're going to feed the inevitability by providing you with a brief overview of Microsoft's new, u roven Zune software, compared to A le's battle-hardened iTunes.

As you may have read yesterday, I made the ultimate sacrifice: I paid $250 of my own hard-earned (ha!) money and bought a black Zune, as well as a Zune Marketplace su cription. To review Microsoft's latest foray into the desktop jukebox/music store market, I'm going to post a bunch of screen shots and provide some opinion on its features and functionality.

Click on to read all about the new Zune software...

I'll skip the i tall stuff, since Engadget already covered that in great detail, and just get right to the meat: this software, for lack of a more articulate and eloquent term, sucks. It's basically URGE repackaged into the Zune interface. Same functionality, same basic UI, same frustrating, u etting, aggravating glitches.

Words alone ca ot describe the decrepit nature of this sin agai t man, so I'll illustrate most of this review with screen shots. (I'll also try to complement Engadget's review, as o osed to providing an identical one. I'll focus more on screen shots and minor o ervatio . For a far more in-depth review, check out Engadget.)

< an style="font-weight: bold;">Jukebox

The jukebox itself is fairly solid: standard iTunes-esque features, playlists, optio , etc.



This is the main window, viewing by artist. There are three main views: icon, title, and details. Users familiar with WMP and iTunes will catch on to the interface right away. The butto on the bottom are fairly standard, from left to right: shuffle, repeat, stop, previous, play/pause, next. (Interestingly, the little Zune controller is used as the play/pause button, but clicking the sides of it doe 't change the track as it would on the Zune itself. It's just eye candy. Sorta.)



This is the Zune 'compact player.' Nothing particularly unique about it (except that a oying Zune controller mock-up that doe 't actually behave as it does on the Zune itself.

(Note, however, that unlike iTunes, if you go to the compact player without first selecting a song, the Play button doe 't actually do anything. You have to start the song first, then go to the compact, whereas in iTunes -- if you're selected on a playlist -- you simply hit Play and it does its thing. )



This is a standard playlist. Curiously, when viewing a playlist, you can only use the "Detail" view. (In iTunes, of course, all views work in almost every mode.)



This is where there's some major deviation from iTunes. On the right side of the window you have your Zune control center: where you can manage your basic tasks: playlist creation, disk burning, syncing, and 'now playing' optio .



Just a basic view of the Track Info window. Every component is nearly identical to iTunes.



This is also a major deviation from iTunes. To manage syncing photos to your iPod on the Mac, you use iPhoto and some settings in iTunes itself. Since Microsoft has no globally-accepted iPhoto equivalent, they built photo management tools right into Zune.

There are three butto on the top right: Music, Videos, and Photos. Switching between the three allows you to view that particular media, and manage how they're synced to the player.



Double-clicking an image in the Photo view allows you to view the images as a slideshow. You'd think it'd be nice to play some music with the slideshow, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. I also couldn't find tra ition and timing optio .

Syncing

If you're not one to fiddle with optio , syncing is fairly straightforward. When you plug in your Zune (I named mine "antiPod") it shows up in the source list on the left and in the control box on the right. It'll automatically sync all new files added to your library. And contrary to Engadget's review, I was able to add more files even after the initial sync without having to u lug and re-plug the Zune first.



The Sync Results mode will show you what's on your device and what is being synced. This is where I had a lot of troubles: like my experience with URGE and numerous PlaysForSure players, synchronization was oradic and terribly u redictable. Sometimes the songs would fly onto the device; others, it would get stuck on "100%" for nearly three or four minutes before cra ing out with some general error me age, such us...



Clicking "Web Help" offered a olutely no help. When I got this error, the software stalled on the Sync screen and the Zune itself froze. I had to reset it (by holding the Back and the Up butto ) before it was able to re-interface with the software.

Marketplace

I almost decided not to actually review this component, since for virtually two hours I was figuring out how to troubleshoot it.



This is the homepage of Marketplace, Microsoft's URGE-y iTunes knockoff. The music selection is petty compared to iTunes, and there are no other media like TV shows, music videos, or movies.



When you search for an artist, a pane po -up and provides you with live search results...that don't actually work very well, at least in the 'live search' se e. The results will flash on the screen as you're typing, disa ear, then, once you've finished, after a few seconds of catching up, come back. Which basically nulls the advantage from the start.

Sometimes, particularly when searching on a page other than the Marketplace home, the results will flash on the screen briefly, then disa ear completely. The only way to remedy the situation is to return back to home and search again.



This shows you all of your downloads in your current Zune se ion. I can't for the life of me figure out how it sorts those.

This brings me to an interesting point: sort settings in the Zune software are only temporary. You can click on the headers to change how the list sorts -- but as soon as you click to another list and return, they're back to their original, confusing order.



This epitomizes the problem I discu ed yesterday: Even though I'm paying $15/month for a su osed 'unlimited music' su cription, a great deal of albums (I ran acro five in just twenty minutes of browsing) require actual purchases, negating the benefit of the su cription in the first place. You also can't burn su cription music, nor can you back up your files (according to the DRM description).

The regular a la carte download scheme is pretty wacky, too: you have to first buy Microsoft 'points.' You have to buy them in increments of $5, and 79 points is equivalent to 99 cents.

Bugs, Glitches, Icky Features, Etc.

Aside from the bugs/glitches/icky features I noted above, I ran acro several more:

• After viewing a photo slideshow, i tead of returning to the photo list, the screen goes black. Nothing ha e until you click back.
• On numerous occasio the scroll bar in the control pane on the right was unusable. I could only scroll using the wheel on my mouse.
• The software is slow and laggy. Whenever you click to a new song, there's a brief "Opening Media" period of nothingne .
• The Marketplace log-in is virtually broken. When I quit out of the a and returned, it told me I was still signed in. But whenever I tried to download an album, an error me age po ed up, explaining that my computer was out of memory and I needed to quit other a . A valid recommendation, sure, if I had other a open. It took me twenty minutes and two reboots before I decided to log out and back in and blammo...downloads worked fine. So if you're using Zune and you get the "Out of memory" error, that's simply Microsoft's sly way of telling you to log in.
• Attempting to move the Zune window or click to another mode or view another playlist when a song is playing causes the song to stutter. (I'm using Windows on a Core Duo MacBook with 1.25GB of RAM, for those who are wondering.)

The Zune device itself

This is technically su osed to be a software review, but I thought I should mention a little about the Zune itself.

• It is big. I try to tell myself that doe 't matter, but it really does make it feel le like a music player and more like a PDA. It's hard to take it seriously as simply a music device.
• The butto work well, but are very...shoddy. They're small and difficult to hit if you aren't focusing. The center button is very plasticky and loose. (As one reader noted, the "wheel" in the center is not a wheel at all, but rather four separate butto : up, down, left, and right.) Up and down controls the volume while playing a song (you can't change the volume unle you're in the Now Playing view).
• The Zune interface is slick. It's very graphically-influenced, making it easy on the eyes and fun to look at. It's intuitive and offers a few advantages over the iPod: for i tance, if you click an album to view its songs, the other albums are listed horizontally acro the top -- so you can use the Up and Down butto to scroll through the songs, or hit Left and Right to change albums. Tra itio between views are smooth and, for the most part, pretty a y.
• It's obviously mi ing a lot of iPod features (Notes, podcasts, audiobooks, games, calendar, etc.) but this is the first version of the software: Microsoft will undoubtedly add to it with su equent versio .
  
• I would talk about the sharing feature, but uh...I don't know anyone else who bought a Zune. Right now it's more like a non-feature.
• It locked up only once, after a failed sync with the Zune software. Other than that, it's been fairly reliable.

Questio

Some questio from readers:

Can you download the Zune software without buying a Zune?

Nope, at least not that I've found. (< an style="font-weight: bold;">Update: Fellow blogger Erica and reader Joel Ivory Joh on point out that yes, you can in fact download the Zune software, here.)

What is the data rate of the Zune Marketplace songs?

192 K . Beats iTunes there.

Explain the su cription model.

Not a question, but: You basically pay $15 a month for sorta-unlimited acce to the Marketplace library. You can download all the songs you want and tra fer them to your Zune. Once you stop paying the su cription, however, you can no longer play those songs. You also need to plug your Zune in at least once a month, so it knows your su cription is still active.

But as I noted yesterday, the su cription model, while great (for some of us) in theory, sucks in practice.

< an style="font-weight: bold;">Conclusio

OK, I know I started kind of harsh: calling it a decrepit sin agai t man, etc. And in all honesty, for Microsoft to take the same buggy URGE and rebrand it as a great new piece of software...well, it's frustrating. The Zune device itself is promising: slice it in half, add some more iPod-esque features...you have a really solid player, at least compared to the swarms of clunky PlaysForSure devices once touted as iPod killers. It has an intuitive, good-looking UI, decent, predictable controls (unlike the notoriously ghastly Sa a), and it feels right in the hand.

But then you throw in the Zune software and its Marketplace store, and all of a sudden the whole thing looks like one big last-minute throw-together. The jukebox works as expected, but it's not like there's much you can do to screw up a simple music player. The syncing is unreliable -- I do a small prayer before every sync -- and even confusing when it comes to figuring out what syncs and what doe 't. (There is no simple "Sync All" or "Sync Just What I Select" a la iTunes). The Marketplace store is just embarra ing: the limited music selection, the offe ive details of the su cription service, the deceptive points scheme, the harsh limitatio , the bugs, glitches, holes.

It feels like a beta. Or an alpha, even. And that's no good, e ecially when they're marketing it as a direct competitor to the battle-hardened, reliable iTunes/iPod combo. And it's easy to pin-point one of Microsoft's most obvious flaws in their Zune strategy: they're so o e ed with u eating A le, they've become the record industry's lap dog. Paying the $1 fee to Universal, cri ling their su cription service, imposing horrible limitatio on the DRM'd media and sharing functionality. While A le tends to be a customer advocate, fighting the record industry for its and its customers interests, Microsoft has taken the o osite a roach -- something that will inevitably and critically hurt their efforts. Until, at least, they decide to back off.

I can understand why this first Zune implementation is so pathetic: they rushed it out the door for the Christmas launch. But I have high expectatio for the future of the Zune and its software. If Microsoft is really committed to making it a decent, reliable, and customer-friendly iPod alternative, I can certainly see them putting forth the resources and man-power nece ary to achieve that elusive goal. It all depends on if the market will tolerate their initial stumbles.

Zune could be an eventual hit, or a total bomb. I'm hoping for the former, to give A le a little competitive boost. But, at least for now, A le has nothing to worry about.