The other day woot.com had a good deal on the Microsoft Zune, and I had wanted a 30GB player for a while so I pounced on it. I got it today and haven’t really spent a lot of time with it but I do have some comments.
The Zune application (on the PC, not the player) is an excellent lesson in UI design, both how to and now not to do things. Microsoft did a really good job on making it easy for Aunt Tillie to set up a Zune, but a guy like me can hit a lot of snags in the process. First, I had no visual feedback on the initial synchronization because I lost track of the privacy options dialog I was using to turn off the usage data; since it never got closed the setup dialogs never fully shut down and I didn’t see the Zune application itself until I accidentally stumbled upon the dialog again. MS should have made it topmost or at the very least a child form of the setup dialog, particularly since the Zune app won’t display until it’s gone.
Setting up your library is painless… if you have been organized from the start and don’t have special requirements. The Zune combs your My Music folder and assimilates any audio and playlist files it can find. This was a problem for me since over the years I’ve switched media players and ripping methods several times. I was primarily using my iTunes playlists, and Zune picked them up fine but for some reason decided to make a copy of each so it could include the playlist twice in my list.
When I set about pruning folders I didn’t want from the library, it turned out to be a hassle. See, Zune knows that other media players are too complicated and concepts such as “add just this file” are too confusing for the user to deal with. Zune keeps your library by accepting a list of folders which it will monitor for new files. Unfortunately, if you add a folder, then remove some items from the library, it’s going to add them back the next time it checks the directory. The only way I have found to selectively add files is to first add the individual folder the files are in, then tell Zune to not monitor that folder, then delete the files you don’t want. This sounds fine, but I have a list of about 15 folders and Zune is only monitoring 1. It would have been much better to let people who know what they are doing add files manually.
The sync process needs work. My initial sync had about 200 “errors”. The error was described as “The file has no media rights” or whatever the message that means your file isn’t DRMed means. I spent about 15 minutes looking for a solution to this until I thought to check the device itself. The error messages were spurious and all of the files were present on my device. I don’t really know what the deal was there.
Putting photos and videos on the thing is kind of unintuitive. You have to make a playlist that you add videos or photos to, then you tell Zune to sync that playlist with your device. On the device, the playlists don’t exist, and your navigation options are file date or the folder the picture was in on your PC. This is awful if your images are already organized by rough date on the PC. I synced about 30 images in my first test and there’s no real way to pick just the images from that list. Also I have yet to figure out how to get the videos/images that came preloaded off of the blasted thing.
All in all, the application suffers from trying too hard to deliver an easy user experience; somewhere along the line Microsoft forgot to provide an interface for experienced users as well. I found iTunes extremely difficult to use compared to WinAmp when I first made the move, but over time I learned it just had a special way of doing things and I came to like it. I don’t think this will happen with the Zune media player because I’ve already effectively hit the top of the learning curve; there’s no advanced functionality for me to learn that will make my experience easier. Unfortunately, as is the case with most media devices, I have to have this software to sync with the Zune device.
I’m very pleased with the hardware itself but I’ve had much less interaction with it than I have had with the software at this point, so I’m reserving comments until the Zune has spent a day at the office with me tomorrow.
