So what's everyone's thoughts on the new Zune firmware and software?

[bucwylde23]

Originally posted by: blurredvision
You know, from playing songs all day on my upgraded Zune 30, I've been thinking a lot that the sound quality was better than before. I didn't give it much more thought, though, because I just figured I was imagining it from all of the newness of everything. But many others, I've been reading, also say their sound quality is definitely improved after upgrading their Zune 30's. Anyone else hearing clearer music?

I"m not sure if it sounds better without some more listening, but I do know that I used to play the volume on 15 pretty much the time. With the new firmware, 15 is way too loud and I've had it set on 10-11.

The FAQ on zune.net says you have to only play a song for 20 seconds for it to show up in your zune card. I've played about 30 songs and none have showed up in my zune card yet. (actually one has, but I played that off the marketplace)

 

[swatX]

Originally posted by: SmoochyTX

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
http://www.zunerama.com/zune-80-review.php

3/4 the way down

No equalizer. In a design decision that surprised me, the Zune team did not include EQ capability in this release. I queried Microsoft about this and got some insight into this decision. The Zune team evidently went to great lengths to ensure top quality throughout the signal path - delivering 32 ohms of signal to the headsets. (Indeed, the first-gen' player was favorably-viewed for its sound quality.) EQ obviously modifies the sound content, which can have a significant battery impact. And, while some users clearly make extensive use of EQ, it is apparently not considered a "must-have" feature by many. The decision came down to an attempt to balance performance, quality and price.

That's a pre-release review. MS changed at the last minute and added an EQ.

ETA - My bad jdoggg12. After reading some more, I thought they had also added it to the 80. Apologies and sorry for the confusion.

From what i have reading, i though Zune 80 does have EQ but its not changeable.

Guess i was wrong.

 

[blurredvision]

Originally posted by: Penth

Originally posted by: blurredvision
Wow, I'm loving the Zune Card online functionality. Here's mine:

http://social.zune.net/member/blurredvision06

EDIT3: That auto-wireless sync is at it again. I changed in the settings to automatically sync all podcasts, and I still had some in a folder that I had downloaded from iTunes from well over a year ago. The Zune software had recognized it, properly organized it, and started syncing by itself. I had to stop it and delete all that crap .

Next up is the test to download a album and see if it syncs automatically when it gets done downloading.

EDIT4: Well, it seems to automatically sync wirelessly when you start up the software after downloading stuff in the previous section. However, not sure if it has some kind of timer to attempt an auto-sync if you leave the program open. Not that big of a deal I don't guess, you can always just click the sync button to make it start instead of closing and reopening.

EDIT5: Looks like everytime I download something, it automatically starts syncing it immediately. Awesome :thumbsup:.

Are you saying that if you add something to your library by downloading it that the zune automatically syncs wirelessly? If so does this only happen when you download something or can you like add a playlist and have it sync up?

Yes, it will start syncing if I delete or add something to a playlist, also. Just a couple of minutes ago, I added a song to a playlist, and the little Zune icon in the lower left started it's little animation showing that it was syncing. My Zune is in my car right now .

 

[bucwylde23]

Ok, after using it for a while last night I have a few complaints.

There is no more "Recently added" list, unless I just can't find it. I liked to use that list to sync up new music instead of having to dig through and find it.

You can't browse by Genre anymore. I don't know why this was removed...

My recent plays still don't show up on my Zune card. It's not that big of a deal, I still want it to work though.

The old software showed music on the marketplace as "In Library" when I already had music. The new software doesn't, but that might be a carry over from the problem with the recently played music on the Zune card.

They also really need to implement gapless playback.

 

[blurredvision]

Originally posted by: chrisg22
Ok, after using it for a while last night I have a few complaints.

There is no more "Recently added" list, unless I just can't find it. I liked to use that list to sync up new music instead of having to dig through and find it.

You can't browse by Genre anymore. I don't know why this was removed...

My recent plays still don't show up on my Zune card. It's not that big of a deal, I still want it to work though.

The old software showed music on the marketplace as "In Library" when I already had music. The new software doesn't, but that might be a carry over from the problem with the recently played music on the Zune card.

They also really need to implement gapless playback.

I also hated that there no longer is a "Recently Added" list. It made it easy for me to dole out songs to playlists a couple of days after downloading them.

As for browsing by genre, I think you still can, but I only glanced at this screen. While in your main music library screen with the 3 sections, in the upper-right corner below the minimize, maximize, and close buttons is two options....."Browse" and "List". The default view is Browse, if you click on List, I think it brings up genre options.

As for the old software showing "In Library", it still does this, only now it says "In Collection". I've downloaded quite a few songs with my Zune Pass, and I saw no problems with the marketplace correctly showing songs I already had downloaded.

Gapless playback is definitely something that needs to be done.

One complaint of mine is it seems that I cannot sort any category in the playlist view. I like to keep my bigger playlists organized by artist, but I have not found any way to sort them by any criteria. Clicking on any category column header (artist, album, etc) does nothing, and I see no other options for sorting.

 

[bucwylde23]

Originally posted by: blurredvision
As for the old software showing "In Library", it still does this, only now it says "In Collection". I've downloaded quite a few songs with my Zune Pass, and I saw no problems with the marketplace correctly showing songs I already had downloaded.

One complaint of mine is it seems that I cannot sort any category in the playlist view. I like to keep my bigger playlists organized by artist, but I have not found any way to sort them by any criteria. Clicking on any category column header (artist, album, etc) does nothing, and I see no other options for sorting.

Well, when I download music from the marketplace it does show "In collection". But only for music that I download.. for the other 7700 songs it doesn't do that, and the mp3 tags are exactly the same as they are on the marketplace downloads. It's really weird but after reading the forums over at zune.net it appears there are definitely some issues that need to be fixed.
It seems like the zune team is replying to and reading posts trying to figure it out over on zune.net. Hopefully they actually stick with it this time and don't abandon the software.

 

[SmoochyTX]

The more I try to use the software the more it pisses me off. Yeah, it looks pretty but too much functionality was taken out of it.

 

[tdawg]

Originally posted by: RandomFool
Something went wacky when I ran the sync, I've got tons of double songs showing up now. I don't think it's the new software's fault because I've been messing with my tags and noticed there were some issues pre-update. It's just worse now. I'm gonna wipe my Zune and try resyncing it.

*edit*
What the heck happened to the update info button in the Zune player?

Mine doubled up tracks too when it synced the first time after all the updates were installed. Confused the heck out of me. What's worse is that there's no "advanced user" option to use the software so that we can see some sort of database-type list to edit information and root out these doubles. I can't believe they left out the main edit option that allowed you to update all the info for a track, or multiple tracks even. The software definitely looks nice and is fast and simple to use, but there are definitely times when I would like the advanced options. I'd like to be able to see the list of physical locations on the disc for each track.

What really pisses me off is that I had weeks upon weeks of This American Life podcast episodes on my computer. When I went to delete them from my library so it wouldn't update on the Zune, it just deleted them from my computer without asking! There were some good episodes in there that I'm absolutely going to miss! At least they can be streamed online from thislife.org, but dammit...!

 

[Gooberlx2]

Originally posted by: blurredvision

As for browsing by genre, I think you still can, but I only glanced at this screen. While in your main music library screen with the 3 sections, in the upper-right corner below the minimize, maximize, and close buttons is two options....."Browse" and "List". The default view is Browse, if you click on List, I think it brings up genre options.

Unfortunately that just brings up a raw list which happens to display a genre column. Yeah, I really can't imagine why they took out the ability to browse by genre. That's always how I approach my music collection...through the genres. I only have the Zune software installed so I can properly stream mp4/m4v files to my Xbox360. I guess I'm going to go back to using WMP11 for now.

 

[chazdraves]

Yeah, I don't know about anyone else, but my Zune got shafted with the update. First I had songs synced onto my device sometimes with as many as 10 copies! (not kidding) I managed to move them to a different folder and clear down my library to only one copy of each song. After playing music for a while I discovered that many songs come up as that wrong artist/cd/album art or a combination of all three. They're correct in my music folder on the computer, but the Zune software managed to screw that up as well. Finally, I cleared out my entire library on both the computer and the zune, but now it won't download track information when I rip my CD's.

This is a ruddy lot of fun. Have any of you ever actually talked to Zune tech support? Worst customer-support experience of my life, including Logitech e-mail support...

- Chaz

 

[Raduque]

I can't wait for this firmware update so I can sync tracks without having to get the zune out of my truck

 

[Gooberlx2]

Originally posted by: chazdraves
Yeah, I don't know about anyone else, but my Zune got shafted with the update. First I had songs synced onto my device sometimes with as many as 10 copies! (not kidding) I managed to move them to a different folder and clear down my library to only one copy of each song. After playing music for a while I discovered that many songs come up as that wrong artist/cd/album art or a combination of all three. They're correct in my music folder on the computer, but the Zune software managed to screw that up as well. Finally, I cleared out my entire library on both the computer and the zune, but now it won't download track information when I rip my CD's.

This is a ruddy lot of fun. Have any of you ever actually talked to Zune tech support? Worst customer-support experience of my life, including Logitech e-mail support...

- Chaz

It seems there's a fix for library tagging issues from the upgrade.

- Close the Zune software
- Goto C:\Documents and Settings\<USER>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Zune
- rename CurrentDatabase_365.wmdb to CurrentDatabase_365OLD.wmdb
- rename ZuneStore.sdf to ZuneStoreOLD.sdf
- restart the Zune software and allow it to find everything in the monitored folders.

I didn't really have such a problem, but it seems many people have and these are the instructions I found at http://forums.zune.net

 

[chazdraves]

I appreciate the idea. At the moment my old library is toasted, I trashed it all. Unfortunately, the Zune software isn't having any better luck finding track/artist info this time then before. I'll either wait for a patch or sell the ruddy thing.

It can't even identify Led Zeppelin... oy!

- Chaz

 

[RandomFool]

Well I figured out part of the problem I was having with my library. I keep my music on an external drive and if I connect my Zune before I connect the drive it thinks of it as a new computer and tries to sync eating up a large chuck of space and duplicating songs. I'm not sure where it's pulling the songs to sync form since the only place I have it checking is the external drive.

 

[ultimatebob]

The software update totally scrambled my music library, and put a ton of duplicate songs on my Zune. I had to use the instructions from the Zune forums to completely clean out both the Zune library and Zune itself, basically starting from scratch to fix it.

 

[Raduque]

I am definitely loving the new firmware. The new software, not so much. It synced one song in my library 237 times, that song played literally every 3 songs when in shuffle mode. Worst part was the software said there was only one copy on the Zune! I deleted it from the library, but that still left about 80 copies on the Zune.

I just dumped the contents of the Zune and am resyncing by Wifi now, my entire 2280 collection. We'll see what happens.....

 

[SaoFeng]

i'm loving it!!!!

 

[ObscureCaucasian]

Is there any way to add custom Podcasts using XML? Also one annoying thing is I am not allowed to subscribe to Explicit Podcasts because I have a child account, even though I'm 19. It's setup like this because I signed up for Xbox Live when I was 16 and I attached it to the email I've been using since I was 12 (so I couldn't lie about my age). Anyways the geniuses at MS didn't make the system so it reverts you to a full account when you turn 18. I've contemplated calling MS and insisting that they fix it because giving my father control of my account is an invasion of my privacy and I question the legality of it.

I can download individual explicit podcasts after signing into my dads account and changing some family settings, but it still refuses to let me subscribe to them. I first ran into this problem with the spring update on the Xbox 360 when Messenger was added, but when I try to use it, it say "Messenger is not available on Windows Live child accounts." I remember reading into it on the time, and MS's position on the issue was something along the lines of too bad for you.

EDIT:

Link

Heres hoping a fix comes with the impending Fall Dash Update.

 

[jdoggg12]

Any free/easy programs to convert video files (avi, divx, etc) to zune compatible files?

 

[Gooberlx2]

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
Any free/easy programs to convert video files (avi, divx, etc) to zune compatible files?

Try Super Video Converter or AutoMkv. You could also try dumping them into Windows Movie Maker and using a custom Zune profile. I would think this might be the better route since the profile uses the wmv9 codec instead of wmv8, resulting in better quality/filesize. Both Super and AutoMKV use wmv8 for their Zune profiles.

I don't think the old registry hack works any longer for the new software.

 

[Gooberlx2]

Actually, a great way to batch encode for the Zune is to use the Windows Media Batch encoder.

1) Have a decent codec pack installed like CCCP or the K-lite standard codec pack. This should allow any and all video files to play in Windows Media Player.
2) Have WME9 installed.
3) Have WME9 SDK installed
4) Download the custom Zune profile
5) Use the Windows Media Batch Encoder like in these instructions.

So if you have a bunch of files you want to encode, this makes the process a lot easier. However, WME9 is sometimes picky about files. They say that if they play in Windows Media Player then WME9 will encode it. Still, it sometimes hates life. I wouldn't try anything too exotic like m4v, mp4, mkv, d2v, etc...

If you have troubles your best best is to check out the doom9 forums.

Edit: Well, I thought this would work. It doesn't. It converts WMVs and AVIs with supported codecs just fine, but not DIVX/XVID files. So instead I'm importing those into Windows Movie Maker and using the zune profile in there. End result is the same, just not a batched process.

Edit2: Well, I tried Encode360 a long time ago, and it didn't work very well. It seems he's worked towards a stable release though. Might try that as well.