Zune, Analysts, and Navel Gazing

Zune, man do you get some hate out of the Apple fanboy camp. I will wager that few if any of them have used the damn device, and all they can say is that it sucks. I can say from using both that either will play your music, and games with the only real difference being the software and pricing options for music. The Zune pass is pretty damn compelling for the younger set, I remember buying several cd's a month in High School I have to imagine that there are several parents that would find this a cheap alternative (though Pandora and Last.fm may make this moot).

The analyst in this article thinks MS should buy Palm and try to emulate Apple seems all kinds of off base with his recommendations, given that the Zune software is not a mobile telecommunications device, and Palm's historical response to those types of situations (remember HandSpring) is not positive. Couple all of this that the stand alone media player may be going the way of the Dodo Bird even the Zune HD coming, we may see the Zune device folded into Mobile offerings I doubt much would come of Palm talks or at best a partnership with Palm so that their device can sync with the Zune software.

Zune software is way more usable than that Crap iTunes

So I moved computers again (I'm a masochist), but it is the last time I swear. Or at least it is the last time until next time.... Continuing on, I moved my Wife's iTunes library again, and was annoyed at the number of dupes, and albums that showed up as multiple albums because of collaborators. Now If I had spent the amount of time on her music library that I have spent on mine (prior to Zune) the number of dupes and erroneous info would be much lower (and there would be artwork for the damn albums too). I have probably spent upwards of 40 hours grooming my music collection and when necessary re-ripping so the bitrate is consistent, and the ID3 tags are close to correct, so when I first installed the Zune software imagine my dismay at having a startling amount of bad meta-data. Pushing north of 27gb of music all ripped at 320kbps, I was far from pleased to see so many unknowns and Blank FT Blank artists. The Zune software lets you drag an "album" onto another one, and the meta-data like Album title, and Artist will be corrected auto-magically. That is incredibly intuitive and useful. Should that not be enough, you can look up albums using a very poorly designed search UI, that lets you find and select the correct album, pulls cover art, and lets you assign songs to the correct song number, which fixes the titles too. The UI is only weak because it pops up in the middle, cannot be re-sized, or moved from the center where it conveniently blocks info that you may have forgotten in between starting your search and finding the correct album info. The end product of meta-data is amazing, the UI, could use some work.

I did manage to get my Wife's data mostly cleaned up, but it was painful and not nearly as nice to use as Zune's way of doing it, plus if iTunes doesn't find the album art automatically, you have to add it manually from an external source. There is not search and select UI, not even a poorly designed one.