Daily Archives: November 13, 2007

Zune v2: The Good

Posted by on November 13, 2007 Comments Off

A few of the things that I do think are really very good about the new Zune software are both the Podcast and the social/community support. I have been using services like Last.fm, iLike, and a large variety of others for a very long time now and am really happy to see that kind of support built-in as a basic feature that is incredibly simple to use and visually fairly appealing. So far, in the couple of hours I’ve been playing around with it, it’s wonderful.

Podcast support also is very well executed. The v2 software was able to use my existing cache of downloaded podcasts to seed the Podcast view and while I did have to do some cleanup and am having some difficulty getting some of the really old stuff integrated into single items in the Podcast list I was able to get up to date with the majority of what I regularly listen to simply by finding the existing item and hitting the “subscribe” button in the interface. I can not say enough positive things about how well this got implemented that it almost makes up for the total absence of support for the past year.

Oh, and the software is very, very pretty. No really, it’s quite nice to look at which is a rarity.

Update: I can’t believe I forgot to link to my profile page!

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The good with the bad

Posted by on November 13, 2007 Comments Off

Microsoft launched the second version of their Zune hardware yesterday and their software today. For the most part I am really very happy with the progress that the platform has made, but I am also quite disappointed in a couple of choices that I do really consider a big step back. I’ve already commented in a couple of locations about the change to the ratings system from 5 Star to Heart/Broken Heart, but I just posted the following message in the Zune Forums about the lack of auto playlists:

As a software engineer I do understand that sometimes the process of creating software involves making trade offs and sometimes good features get cut for good reasons. Given that auto playlists seemed to function pretty well in the first version of the software, what was the design decision around not implementing auto playlists in version 2? I am really honestly curious.

I would have put this in one of the existing posts complaining about the removal of this feature but I really want to try and start from a position not of blame or anger, but one of curiosity.

Too be honest I am very disappointed since auto playlists is one of the features that I consider to be absolutely required for me to take media management software seriously. I have a really hard time thinking of any media management software that doesn’t have this sort of feature as significantly lacking. In many cases software in this market that does lack auto playlists at least have a compensatory feature of allowing some sort of extensibility to the application through plug-ins or whatever but that is also missing from Zune v2.

Thanks for the work that you have done in the software and the great improvements that do exist. I’m going to give it a serious opportunity to see how the software fits into the way that I consume my music collection but without something that I consider so fundamental to the way I perceive the ideal method of that consumption I have a hard time seeing how this can work for me in the long term which makes my monetary investment in the hardware seem like a really very bad idea.

I hope I get an answer, though I don’t expect the majority of the replies to keep the tone of the message too civil.

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