Over All Rating Reviews :
I never purchase songs off the net. Instead, I have ripped most of the CDs that I own and also borrow CDs from the library. My focus is the full CD, not the individual songs on the CD.
I purchased the Zune to upgrade a 20 GIG Dell Dudebox MP3 player because I had filled it up with 667 albums ripped as WMA files - this may seem like a lot of music but I like to have a lot of choices as to what I listen to. All of the music on my Dudebox is backed up to an external disk drive. I manage the music on the Dell using Red Chair Software's Dudebox Explorer. Except for the fact that my Dudebox was full, I was completely satisfied with what I had.
My choice was between the 120 GIG Zune and the 120 GIG Apple MP3 players. Since the Apple MP3 player could not support my hundreds of WMA ripped albums, the choice of the Zune seemed obvious.
I am satisfied with the Zune hardware but the Zune software is horrible. Of the 667 unprotected albums that I had ripped for my Dudebox and saved on my hard drive, the Zune software was completely successful for only about 400 albums. Some of the other albums were partly imported but many were totally ignored. I have tried to modify the tags on the songs in the albums with only limited success and each album must be done individually which is very time consuming.
Ripping albums is not much better. The Dell Dudebox software was easy to use. Microsoft's Windows Media Software is convenient to use for ripping CDs and has a good database that automatically finds cover art work. The library features on the computer is convenient to use.
The Zune software does none of these things. The software is a kluge. Album covers are rarely automatically found forcing you to do a manual search for the album cover and often the cover is not found at all. When this happens, you need to create a pseudo album cover manually.
As a final last straw, the software almost always fails to put the artist name on the first track of a CD. The first track artist is almost always listed as "unknown" forcing you to edit each file. As a part of this problem, the "unknown" track is not put in the same directory on your disk drive as the rest of the album but instead in a folder labeled as "unknown artist" with 1 file in it. This makes disk file management almost impossible.
The software on the Zune device itself is also a mess. It was easy for me to manage the 667 albums on my dudebox since I could go directly to the first letter of the album. This means that I do not have to scroll through the entire set of albums to find an album that I know starts with the letter "Y".
The Zune software does not have this alphabetic feature but forces you to scroll through the entire alphabet. Based on the ratio of the sizes of my Zune and Dudebox hard drives, I could potentially have almost 4000 albums on the Zune. The thought of having to scroll through 4000 albums to find the album I want is daunting.
Since the Zune hardware appears to be good, I hold out hope that Microsoft will fix the software problems. However, since we are now on version 3 of the Zune software and the problems still exist, I am not optimistic.
I am stuck with my Zune but I can not recommend that other people should buy it.
DON
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