PLEASE tell me why Zune isn’t compatible with Windows Media Player!
I recently got a Zune. I got it because I like Microsoft, don’t like Apple, and have been frustrated with iTunes and iPods in the past. I read that the new Zune could play podcasts, that it could sync up wirelessly, and it was a big improvement over the original Zune. I live in Canada, so I couldn’t go down to the store and buy it, so just read a few early reviews and got someone to smuggle one across the border.
I must say, this is one of those times when I’m just genuinely disappointed, even angered. It’s the same kind of disappointment that Jar Jar Binks imposed on mankind in 1999. The Zune itself is actually pretty cool. It’s easy to navigate, it looks cool, it’s a decent size, the wireless stuff is fantastic… but the software… I just can’t understand how that went so terribly, terribly wrong!
I have about 101 complaints about the software, but here’s some of the worst:
It runs so slow you’d think it was working on the human genome project or something. It seems like I can run a 20 gig project in Adobe Premier faster than I can run the Zune software. It constantly crashes my computer, which is a couple years old, but come on… it’s just a media player for crying out loud. Winamp loads in about half a second.
The software navigation is non-standard and, although it looks cool, it’s frustrating as hell to find your way around.
I can only rate songs “love it” or “hate it.” What about all the songs in between? They tell you to just leave the ones in the middle as unrated, but I like to rate all my songs. If a song is unrated, to me that means it hasn’t been rated, not that it has been rated as “in the middle.”
It just doesn’t work. Random tracks that are clearly in the folders it should be monitoring do not show up. This is really frustrating, because monitoring folders seems to be the ONLY way to copy stuff onto the Zune. I’ll be missing 1 or so tracks out of every chapter in an audiobook for example. The other day I wanted to put a single photo onto my Zune. I tried adding the photo into my pictures folder, but it never showed up in the library. I tried making a new folder and telling Zune to monitor that folder. The folder showed up about an hour later, but I forgot to put the picture in. So I removed the old folder from my Zune library, made a new folder, put the logo in the new folder, and added the new folder with the logo in it. One week later the software is still including the old folder (which I removed) and hasn’t recognized the new folder. To this day I can’t get the picture to show up. It seems the Microsoft Zune doesn’t even play well with Microsoft Windows!
What kills me is that I absolutely LOVE Windows Media Player. The smart playlists, the fast automatic monitoring of folders, the 5 star ratings, the speed that it updates album art and info, the number options it gives you for tagging and browsing your media, the powerful smart playlists, the mini-player… I could go on and on. WMP does everything, except sync up with the Zune!
Every windows machine has WMP, so why does Microsoft make you download and install a completely different and crappier player? The only reason IE is the most popular browser on the web is because it comes pre-installed on almost every computer, so why didn’t Microsoft leverage the same concept with WMP and Zune? There MUST be a logical reason, and if someone could please tell me what that reason is it may ease my pain a bit. Was Microsoft worried that if they made the Zune compatible with WMP they would end up in anti-trust lawsuits like they did with IE? Has it got something to do with the music store contracts? There’s just got to be more to it than a simple matter of poor judgment on Microsoft’s part. There is no way anyone could honestly tell me that Microsoft simply felt that they’d sell more Zunes by making an brand new piece of software that was less functional and harder to use than the software everyone already has on their computer.
So what is it? Anyone?
Tags: wmp. windows media player, zune
