I;m getting REAL FUCKING SICK of companies taking features OUT of a perfectly fine system to get us to use the new garbage.

That should be illegal.

I mean, it really should. Software updates that do nothing but remove functionality? Of all the stupid nonsense that IS a law, that should be one.

I would be embarrassed if my job was "removing perfectly functioning features from perfectly fine hardware." I know it's a rough economy, but it's time to hang yourself if that job is the only option.

Five years and two zunes later I can say that they've come around a little on this neat device.
The reason that I'm posting here is because Microsoft announced a removal of some of the features that the zune used to be able to do.

No more apps.
I have three apps on my zune. Guitar chord finder, facebook (that works thirty to eighty percent of the time) and weather. There used to be around thirty or so apps available, mostly games and stupid junk that nobody would use anyway. BUT THEY WERE AVAILABLE. Now that's gone.
The social interaction stuff.
One of the big selling points was wireless trading of music to other zunes. You could be in a crowd situation and search for other zunes nearby and then trade songs with random strangers. That actually went away with the zune HD a couple years ago but the IDEA was cool.
Times I have shared songs zune-to-zune .....one time. So no big loss.
They've also taken away most of the social stuff using the software. I've never used it and could care less. I guess Xbox music is debuting next month and this is a prod to get everyone onto the next big thing. Whatever.
I use my zune for podcasts, audiobooks and occasionally music. The coolest thing is the wireless sync (as long as the device is on the charger and the software is running) Now for some weird reason this feature has stopped working since I came back from vacation. Again, whatever. I can live with plugging it in for one whole minute every day when I get home from work. The good points outweigh the software glitches. There's no bluetooth but the battery lasts for days.
There's 720HD video on a 3-1/2 inch screen, why would I use that?

It's a love/indifference thing


THE
SOMETIMES
AARDVARK

Well, I have a review in the works, It will have to wait a day till I get better. Too tired right now.

All I'm gonna say right now is that they have good hardware and crappy software.

[Later]


I am also wary of the PC hard drive going bananas without anything telling me what's going on, but Microsoft excels at this and that's what's happening now.

THE
PRETTY BRICK
AARDVARK

Creative. I'm still rocking my 30 gb one and going to pop in a new hard drive when I've got the time.

Uhg, but it seems like Apple is beating them out price to MB wise. HOLY SHIT! Looks like they finally saw the competition and have decided to use the fact that extra storage costs absolute shit as a selling point.

It's kind of in development. There's a port in progress for the Toshiba Gigabeat S, of which the Zune 30 is a rebranding. Whether it actually becomes able to be used on the Zune depends on the Zune's authentication scheme being cracked, as well as the port actually being completed.

The Zune 80 and the flash Zunes are built from scratch, however. I don't know what kind AArdvark has, but in any event it will probably be a while before we'll be able to break the bonds of Microsoft's horrid proprietary software.

Rockbox is Jukebox software that people seem to like, and I guess it is in development for the Zune.

http://www.rockbox.org/

So now I have a nice new Zune. A gift for me. Having a difficult time getting the software to understand what I want it to do. It seems to think that it should take all the music on my PC and stuff it into the device. Plus I keep geting file association errors which there is no real solution for on the help website. Details to follow. I do like the wireless link-up to my home network (and xbox 360) and I like the feel of the device. Heavy enough to feel important. I wonder if there is some homebrew software or non Microsoft operating system for it that I could stuff in there. I have a feeling that so many people are fed up with the difficulties of the thing that someone would have made something better by now. I will search around and check it out.

Oh yeah, there's no belt clip that comes with it. Downside.

I guess all the zunes can recognise each other when one is out and about and trade music somehow. Like a huge chatroom or something. I haven't looked into that yet. first I have to train it to understand simple commands, like only put the songs I want into the folders I want. I wish there was a check box that said:
"I am such a smart person that I can move things around in an orderly fashion on my own and have no need for zune to try to automate everything without asking permission first."


THE
I WOULD
CLICK THE
SIT OUT OF THAT
AARDVARK

Huh, the missus and I were considering getting one O them Zunes for the boy this coming Electronics Exchange on the 25th of Dec. Now I'm having second thoughts. What good is something that wont let you manage your own music...I never liked the sync-up idea. I always favored the drag and drop approach to stuffing music on portables. Must be too hard for the masses to figure out or something.



THE
EVERYONE SAY DUH
AARDVARK

So you didn't win it, huh?

I did a little research on DAP prices and it looks like the focus is shifting from disk-based players to flash-based players. In addition, a lot of the companies who are considered relatively big players in the DAP market, like Creative, Cowon, and iRiver, have yet to price their products competitively with Apple.

This is worrying me a little bit. It seems like a lot of these companies might be giving up in the field of DAP's since Apple and Microsoft are so huge and able to push tremendous storage capacity at relatively low prices.

That said, if I were to buy another non-iPod MP3 player, I would probably pick up a 16GB SanDisk Sansa View. It's pretty new, but their previous Sansa products have been well-received, and SanDisk is pretty much the only DAP company I've seen that has matched Apple and Microsoft's prices.

Anyway, that's my two cents. It looks like before too long, we might have a clash of the titans of sorts between Apple and Microsoft in the DAP field. If Microsoft wants a chance of winning, though, it had better not fucking cripple its products with poor software and draconian security schemes that make it damn near impossible for anyone to hack their own firmware onto the thing.

Thanks. I am getting Vitriola a new MP3 player, because the one I got for her only lasted a year (well, 10 months) before dying. It was a Chinese knock off, so I am not that disappointed. But she loves music, so this needs to be remedied.

The iPod is out. I think Apple has the most pretentious marketing in the world, and I don't want any part of it. They are pretentious, but also fucking idiots: in their attempts to paint the "PC" as a tool in their Mac ads, they give the dork role to someone genuinely funny, while their own products is the straight man hipster. Morons.

So yeah, fuck Apple.

I have no specific issue with the Zune, but it sounds like it's turning into some corpo-fascist cow bell, ringing with a subtraction of features and more dumb shit from middle managers. Fuck this, life is too short.

I bought my Zune back in May. It lived up to what everyone told me to expect: a great device and shitty software. I held out for a major update that would fix all the problems: namely being a tremendous resource hog and being fucking terrible at remembering how you tagged audio files.

That update came today. While it fixed the above problems, it also removed several features that should be fucking standard in PMP management software: namely ID3 tag editing and the motherfucking ability to turn off the motherfucking auto-synchronization. Yeah, I have to keep everything in my library on the PC or it is deleted from the device. I have about 16GB of music, much of it downloaded from torrent sites, and a 40GB hard drive. I don't want to have to fill 40% of my hard drive with duplicate audio files because of a poorly-designed piece of software.

So, thanks, Microsoft. In your hilariously misguided attempt to "increase usability" you have deliberately removed useful features. Fuck you. I'm never buying another Zune, and you shouldn't either.