I got a Zune for Christmas and the device itself it quite nice. I'm pretty pleased with most of it's features but I'm having issues with others. Mainly the windows based Zune software to "manage" the collection of music is complete garbage.

First issue was I hate auto sync mode, why should it know what music in my 80gb collection should be on the 30gb portable drives me nuts. So the very first thing I did was disable the auto sync features for music.

Then I selected all the albums I wanted on the player and hit add to sync list. Went downstairs and continued with other Christmas things. Later on in the day I returned and found the sync finished. Unplugged the unit and started to play around with it. It was missing about 95% of the album art, and quite a few of my ID3 tags need some help.

So I went through and updated a bunch of albums manually, manually because the right click > find album info selection sucks and can't match all the tracks in the album it usually fixes half the tracks and skips the rest. It doesn't even give you the reason why it couldn't match a track which is clearly an exact match based on the title and tracknumber. Is it that hard to add a tooltip or something that explains why it couldn't figure out a few tracks on every album and provide a UI to go though these and correct them?

Then after I'm finished updating the tags and album art, I plug the zune back in figuring it would update those tags on the player (I thought this because the zune software doesn't allow you to edit any tags on the player, you need to change the local windows copy) Nothing happens and I can't even click the sync button (it's grayed out). So, I promptly format the device and create a new folder and make copies of about 25gb of music (the selection I want on the player, keeping the non-microsoft i.e.. empeg version of my music clean), I then re-enabled the auto sync feature and updated the library paths and manually did a rescan of the collection.

The rescan didn't remove the files which were included in the old folder I removed from the zune settings, it didn't add any files because they already existed in the collection. So I select all and delete, everything is removed except for about 6 albums, they won't let me delete, or actually they seem to let me delete but they don't actually disappear, reboot etc, nothing.

I couldn't find any info on how to delete the "library" on the pc and start fresh so I uninstall and reinstall. After that it scans my StupidZune music folder which contains what I want, and I let the software auto transfer everything with the auto-sync feature.

After all this, the zune updates itself when I update the tags on the files, but one would think if you manually add an album without the auto-sync garbage enabled it would also update the tags, album art when they're updated on the pc. In either mode you can't edit any of the tag data directly on the device, if you right click on a song or album the Edit item appears but it's grayed out.





Now for my gripes about the Zune itself...

You can't append, enqueue or replace tracks in the current playlist

When you play music, and go into a slideshow. You can't go back to the current running playlist.

You only have one playlist you can add files into directly in the player and it's the quicklist. Why not make that a setting when you press right it will open a menu with a list of the current playlists on the player and allow you to create a new playlist and title it with an on-screen keyboard?

There are like 3 settings to adjust, need way more...

You can't manually adjust the EQ settings. No bass/treble controls.

The code used to determine the Artists to display in the first music menu varies from the code used in the PC based application. The PC based application uses the "Album Artist" tag if it's defined, otherwise it uses the "Artist" tag. However, the Zune uses both at the same time. So if the tags vary because the data in the metaservices webservice isn't standardized when dealing with various artist albums. Either change the Zune to work like the pc software, or add a setting which will allow me to filter out these duplicate items from the display. One would think you'd want to see the info displayed like that on the PC, but when on the go with the zune you should have the simpliest and smalliest list possible, or just have options and settings to let the user customize their player.

Why can't I charge my device and play music at the same time? Oh, that's what the $30 adapter to plug the sync cable into the wall is for right?

Is it really 1999 again, is that why both gapless and crossfading are missing?