Zune HD

Most certainly. I’m just saying there are people who care, apparently. I’m not one of them. I’m not sure people would pay much extra for it, either. But Zunes are prices in line with iPods (at times they’re a little cheaper).

What’s the itunes equivalent for you Zune users?

I think they’re also supposed to be announcing some motion control stuff. Way too samey (but 2 years late to the party) to the Wii for me to bother buying one.

The Zune software. And it’s much better than iTunes.

ooooh. My bad.

Agreed.

Like iTunes, it’s free. Go to www.zune.com and just download it. It will play (and index and so on) all the non-DRM stuff you buy from iTunes, too, not just MP3s.

If you have an Xbox Live gamertag, you can use that as your Zune tag. Just log in with your email/password associated with your Xbox Live tag. That’s optional, but it enables all the social stuff (friends lists, tracking your music plays so it can provide suggestions, etc.)

No reason not to give it a whirl, unless you have a whole mess of stuff with iTunes DRM on it. You can always uninstall and go back to iTunes, or use both, or whatever.

I found the Zune software to be flaky and half-baked, like a demo somebody whipped up in Flash (or Silverlight, I suppose). But at least it doesn’t destroy your computer, so it’s one up on iTunes.

In my experience newer releases of the Zune software are pretty solid in terms of robustness, but I do get the Flash/Silverlight reference. I’m not a huge fan of desktop “RIA” apps that look/feel almost like web apps if the apps are relatively complex (not just an RSS feed reader or whatever). Zune’s UI, while I have gotten used to it, feels a bit clunky to me from a pure usability perspective primarily because it attempts to look like a gee-whiz web 2.0 app.

YMMV depending on preference, but I’d prefer something more boring and straightforward. I just want to organize and listen to music with it, not build my lifestyle around it. It is WAY better than iTunes for Windows, though… no debate from me on that.

Have you tried it in the last year? I agree on the initial release. But the more recent versions are awesome.

All this hype… but what’s the storage on it? It listed pretty much all the specs (screen size, res, wifi, etc) but not the storage.

I was about to say that yeah, it was pretty recently… but then I looked back to see when I actually tried it, and it turns out to have been 18 months ago, with version 2.1. So, I guess I should shut up, and maybe it’s better now.

While we’re on the topic, how well does the DRM work on the Zune Pass? I’ve always loved the idea of music subscription in theory, but in practice, it sucks. Between my wife and me, we’ve used multiple PlaysForSure services (Yahoo and Rhapsody) with a small handful of devices (an iRiver, a Dell, and a Creative), and it’s always been flaky as hell. Is Zune Pass based on the same technology, or does it actually not require periodic deletion of directories/reformats of devices?

PlaysForSure is dead and gone. Microsoft should’ve refunded everyone every penny they ever spent on that.

I’ve been using ZunePass since December 2007, and we use it on five Zunes (you can have up to three on a single ZunePass, so we have two accounts now). Every once in a while, the Zune will refuse to play something & the only error message you get is that your usage rights have expired & you must re-sync. Most of the time that’s true. Sometimes it is unable to re-sync because Zune Marketplace no longer carries that song or album, but the software doesn’t have a clear way to tell you that. You can look at the list of songs that did not sync, then check the error message individually to figure it out. At least it lets you tell the software not to sync any of those songs again.

Once we did have a Zune lose all of its permission & refuse to play anything. We had to do a hard reset to delete its contents, then just plugged it in again & the software re-synced all of the content. Easy fix, took about 10 minutes.

Now that the ZunePass gives you 10 songs a month to keep, I am amazed anyone bothers with iTunes anymore. Amongst our Zune accounts, we have over 12,000 songs downloaded, and we’ve paid a total of about $400 over the last 18 months for it (didn’t have two accounts the entire time). It reminds me of the old Napster days, but we’re 100% legal.

The logo program is gone, but the technology is still alive. Or perhaps “undead” is the better term. If you use Napster or Rhapsody with a Creative, Sansa, or other player, you’re using the same DRM technology that underlay PlaysForSure, and it’s still every bit as broken and flaky as it was three years ago.

On the one hand, I’m not too upset, because hey, death of DRM is good. On the other hand, subscriptions are neat.

ZunePass - it “similar” to PlaysForSure, but it seems the robustness is improved. I think the fact that it only works on Zunes helps in that regard. Basically, you can register three PCs and three Zune devices on your one account, which can all play your subscription content, and if they haven’t “checked in” in over a month, they’ll need to do that to make sure you’re a subscriber still. Obviously. As with other subscription service things, you don’t have burn rights on the subscription tracks.

The bitrate is really good. If you set up the Zune software and/or Windows to share with your Xbox 360, you can in fact listen to Zune Pass subscription music streaming on your 360 over your home network.

You get 10 tokens for free songs on the first of the month, which are “use it or lose it.” You can buy a regular DRM’d track (not Zune Pass…the DRM’d songs you don’t have to refresh, and have burn rights and stuff) with them, or you can buy a non-DRM MP3 with them. The only reason not to choose the MP3 is if it’s just not available for the tracks you want (though the vast majority of the stuff in the marketplace is available in MP3 these days).

I’ve used it for well over a year now and love it. You find yourself just downloading full albums to check 'em out. It’s great for downloading things like comedy albums that you may listen to once or twice but don’t really want to pay to keep, because you won’t listen that often.

I hate DRM and I don’t want to buy something with DRM on it if it’s possible to avoid. But ZunePass isn’t “buying” music, it’s “leasing” it. And like all leases, it makes sense that you give up certain rights in exchange for paying a lot less money - instead of paying more to “own” it, you’re paying a lot less to “use” it.

Agree. Microsoft seriously has to step up its PR on this device and service; I still hear people diss it out of ignorance.

The only reason Apple doesn’t offer a subscription service, that i can fathom, is that they must see it as a model that would cost them money. For, while they might extract 10$ a month per iPod on average more a month (vs. whatever, 1$ a month on average or something), their bandwidth costs would blow up to 50x or 500x what they’re serving out now, necessitating a huge increase in infrastructure and reducing their profit per dollar extracted. There are also probably licensing issues and fees that are cumbersome to overcome as well.

The money Apple makes on iTunes is a pittance relative to the money they make selling iPods. So I think if the company thought a subscription service would sell substantially more iPods, they’d do it.

Part of their problem is that the FairPlay DRM doesn’t have the necessary features to support subscription music (checking in on a persistent clock) and I don’t think all the iPods have a secure internal clock (not that much of a problem, because Apple would love to make you buy a new iPod for it).

I’m having trouble right now finding the name of the company Apple bought the FairPlay DRM from (it wasn’t named FairPlay at the time), but it wasn’t developed in-house. So it may not be a simple matter to make DRM that does the subscription thing.

Still trying to decide whether to take the plunge… I’ve been sorely tempted since I first saw the screen in person - video is spectacular.

But I’m MUCH closer to pulling the trigger now that I see I can actually order a Crackdown 2 version from Zune Originals! Skills for kills…