OK, several months back I decided to give the new Zune 8 a shot. I’ve always despised iTunes and found the iPod hardware to be fairly pedestrian overall, so this seemed like a good fit.
First the good, the Zune 8 hardware is simply great. The screen displays video superbly and it sounds terrific. Great battery life, built in FM tuner and simple syncing. This part they nailed. My only complaint is that you can’t create playlists on the Zune, you need to do it on your PC.
That brings us to where the problems are. This Zune software is utterly and completely atrocious. Just crap, strange since Microsoft is primarily a software company.
Problem 1: They ditched the near-universal “5 star” rating system that iTunes, WMP and just about every media player uses. This system is so common that websites like Netflix, Amazon and CNET use it. Of course MS somehow felt that it would be better to go with a binary “like it”/“hate it” rating system. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Problem 2: There’s no way to directly edit the ID3 tags and download album art work. What a terrible flaw this is.
Problem 3: It’s designed to import music from you iTunes music folder, which it does, but it only preserves some of the ID3 info making this somewhat useless. I have about 2,000 songs and iTunes has gotten pretty good about pulling in the CDDB information and managing my My Music folder but after importing them to Zune about 1/3 of the album art gets lost.
Problem 4: It doesn’t add played tracks into my library, you have to drag them into the collection window. I’m to the point where everytime I add a new MP3 I need to run it in iTunes first in order to get the track info and have it added into the right folder in my iTunes folder.
Problem 5: The podcast controls are terribly limited. It only allows me to keep 1-10 episodes or ALL episodes of a podcast. Some radio shows are broken up into 12 or more segments every day, so I either have to keep them all in perpetuity or settle for only 10 of the 12 segments.
Problem 6: No equalizer. Why?!?!
Problem 7: No automatic or dynamic playlists. Again, what are they gaining by dropping this stuff?
Anyways, this is a pretty random rant. Haven’t really seen any Zune threads around here and I was looking for some empathy so we all can bitch about how crappy this early version of this software is.
I hope it gets better because I really like the hardware.