I couldn’t find a place to send my Zune wish list, so hopefully the Microsoft product managers are reading my blog…
Zune Hardware:
Alphabet ToC Navigation in addition to click-wheel
Ratings categories (so I can play 4-star or 5-star music only, for instance)
The ability to remove songs from my “quicklist”
Setting EQ attributes to a song or album uniquely
Inline normalization
category…or put a recently added link at the top of each category
Make playlists of video files
Zune Software:
Faster *My software has long periods of unavailability, though I realize I have an over-sized library
Automatic playlist creation
Support for OGG
Insight into the folder monitoring – some sort of progress or status on this
Better album art application – album art isn’t always displayed immediately after you add it
Without knowing any better, I wish the album art was embedded within the ID3 tag of the file rather than being added as a hidden file in the directory
Perhaps support for a real database backend – I feel the need for enterprise class media management
Real Problems:
Crashing…the software crashes, the hardware crashes. Sometimes it’s solid, but then it goes into a fit and crashes consecutively all to often. **UPDATE – I found out that the hardware is most likely crashing due to an electrical protection feature. Static electricity is not the Zune’s friend.
Renaming/hiding MP3’s. This could be related to crashing – I’m guessing that MP3’s were being indexed and something went wrong. Then, the Zune software went and renamed a *lot* of MP3’s to their cataloged GUID and hid them. The files won’t play until I rename them back to a .mp3 extension. It will annoy me when it comes up – so far only a few of these songs have come up in my shuffle list.
That’s what I’ve got after two months of using my new Zune (received at Christmas). As I’ve said before, the device does what I expect it to. Some of the features found in iTunes but not found in Zune are a little frustrating to some, but I’m likely to want more in my Podcasting software anyway, so I’d likely go to an external application anyway.