If you spend most of your day at your desk and love music, the chances are that you and your music playing software have become quite close. For nearly every one of you reading this, that means one thing: iTunes.
I want to introduce you to, in my humble opinion, the best way to manage your music: Zune. I am not saying that is has the best music store, it doesn’t. However, if you already have an extensive media collection, you must give Zune a try. It will change the way that you enjoy your music.
To clarify, I use iTunes when I need to sync with my iPhone. That happens twice a month when I cycle the music. Twelve hours a day I have Zune running.
Zune is an immersive music experience. When you fire up the main screen you are shown a three column interface: an artist list, albums displayed with cover art, and the current track listing. It looks like this, all screenshots from my desktop:
Zune invites you to order all the columns as you wish. The first (artists) column can be done alphabetically forwards or backwards. Albums can be displayed by date added to library (my favorite), alphabetically both ways, by release year, and by artist (alphabetical artist listing), and the third column can be sorted by song first name, user rating, and by original album track listing. Need more options? I didn’t think so. Of course, all three columns are fully scalable.
Once you select and start playing music, Zune shows off its pretty. The Zune now playing screen is one of the best interfaces ever created for music. It works in one of two ways, depending on how popular the artist is that you are playing. Once a track is playing you can either select to head to the now playing screen, or wait and have Zune do it for you. Once the screen is loaded it will display a panorama of album art in your library. All the square images are randomly sized, making some albums large, and others quite small. They all revolve, creating (slowly) a fresh screen. It looks like this:
If the artist that you are playing is famous, Zune has at the ready a number of photos of the artist, which they fade in and cycle through while the music is playing:
Especially if you are running Zune alone on an external monitor, the effect is immersive. Zune has some great shots of Tool, if you are so inclined. Zune is designed to make music glamorous. The colors cycle. Text hovers and skates over the images, displaying how many times that song has been played across Zune in total. People will walk past your desk, stop, come over and ask what software you are running.
Even more, Zune has great playlist capability. I put together an auto-playlist that tracks my music based on how often I listen to it, with one caveat: no song is allowed to be on the playlist unless I have played it five times. Result: a constantly updated and updated playlist of my all time favorite music. Of course, I can slice, dice, and sort it any number of ways.
Zune has the best folder management, the best genre management, quick search, and also a strong social aspect. When you use Zune, you can sign up for a Zune Tag. Add me as a friend, my Tag is WarKaiser42. It’s like a Last.fm for iTunes users, but integrated. Zune also has a badge system not unlike what Foursquare uses (Zune did it first, I think), to track how much you listen to a particular artist. For example, I have four Silver Artist Power Listener badges, meaning that I have given four artists over 1,000 plays each (Metallica, Eminem, Slayer, Jedi Mind Tricks).
As a final note, Zune is fast. On all of my very capable computers, Zune is leaps and bounds faster than iTunes. I am nearing some 10,000 tracks, so my library is not as massive as some friends that I have, but in Zune there is never a second of lag. iTunes has buckets of lag and a 2 minute start cycle.
I could go on for another 700 words, but that would be ridiculous. These are just my favorite parts of Zune, what you like will be different.
If you have never used Zune, you owe it to yourself to try it out. It only works on Windows at the moment, so to the 6% of you on Macs, I do apologize. Windows users can download it here.
I agree. Zune Software is way better than iTunes. I have to use iTunes from time to time, usually to reinstall iPhone software. I get so frustrated with how slow and ugly itunes is. Zune Pass is also worth mentioning.
You mentioned “Zune” 28 times in one post. :-)
It might be worth mentioning the minimalist installer which is oozing with MS Smugness and the fact that, like iTunes, it won't touch videos which aren't mp4 and gets in a mess when your mp3s aren't all perfectly tagged.
Pretty, but not exactly a killer app.
Winamp FTW.
I could add some more in?
Zune pass is, but I wanted to just discuss the playing music bit.
You know, because they haven't announced support for other video formats coming to Zune in the near future…
WinAmp is old hat. Get with the times, man.
I wouldn't have expected more, but from the gushing tone of the article I anticipated miracles. What i found was certainly faster and prettier than the dreaded iTunes but functionally not far removed…
It does, however, have the ability to tag your tracks for you, which is not something that iTunes does.
The Zune software is pretty, but it doesn't play FLAC. Sigh.
Yup, Zune is far and away a more pleasant and generally pleasing experience than iTunes for me. The one thing missing are dedicated global hotkeys, one of the *only* things keeping me using iTunes due to the difficulty in re-assigning media keys to another media application. There is an app. called Zunekeys which has a bunch of preset global hotkeys for Zune and works like a dream (even on Win7)
http://shawnoster.com/Blog/ZuneKeys-Global-Hotk…
Zune is better than iTunes. Why does Apple always put a letter “I” before the name of every program them develop?
What are y'all talking about tags??? … Like editing the song info or what???
Well it also plays .WMV ;-D
MediaMonkey does so much more for those of us with really large music collections. The tag-editing, format conversion, and track look-up capabilities are huge for me. It has all the cute stuff, too, and the playlisting and DJ functions, etc. and it's my interface with my Creative Labs Jukeboxes for synchronizing. I subscribe to and automatically download all my favorite podcasts, too.
I tried using a number of different, mostly common (and a few not so) apps including iTunes, Real Player, Media Money to organize my music. iTunes really messed up all of my file names and tags. I ended up trying to rip everything off of my Zune and iPod again and trying to redo it. I ended up with (obviously) tons of duplicates and some mysteriously cut off songs.
I finally tried Zune (in combination with NoClone) and found it steps above the rest. It shows you when you have duplicate songs and lets you get rid of them and then reorganize them.
My least favorite feature? Don't bother converting any movies to anything other than wmv is you're going to sync to your Zune, or they will just end up getting reconverted.
Actually it plays xVid and AVIs now as well
Yep a tag when it comes to music is the song info like the title, album, and/or artist.
Only if you have a older zune, the newer ones work with more formats.
This is ridiculous. Does anybody here actually organize music? I've used almost every piece of music software out there, and although Zune looks nice, it is absolutely the most horrible, and featureless thing I have ever used to 'Organize' music with. The only thing I have ever found useful when it comes to Zune is the feature to find album info which is useful for when you need to fix tracklistings. Otherwise the ID3 tag editing features are sad, and what is with the rating system? Heart or no heart… What happened to the 5 star rating system the entire rest of the planet uses? As for the rest of the features mentioned in the article, Zune isn't doing any leaps and bounds to bring any new features to the table its all industry standard (and below at that). As for speed, are you kidding?? Zune is literally the slowest software period I have ever used. Yeah maybe it can run smoothly with a couple hundred songs. But if your like me and have 30 000 + lossless encoded songs, it runs like crap. I hate iTunes, but it runs at least 2x as fast and uses up far less memory in retrospect to what your article claims. But yeah your right, it does look nice, I guess if you listen to your music while starring at the Zune program that would be useful.
OK, since you seem to be rather more knowledgeable and opinionated than the normal rabble, may I ask you what you consider the best non-iAnything management s/w? I am something of a luddite, as I just want to move and slightly organize my music on a soon to be purchased Zune HD; not interested in album covers, size of the artist's feet, whatever, just listening to the music. Not an overly large library, maybe 10-12000 tunes, but I am going to have to move them from the computer to the new device, as my old Creative brick has gone to its last concert. And although a luddite in my planned use of the device, I am computer literate. Suggestions or recommendations? Thanks
Depending on the extend of media management you would like to archive, the best overall music management software I've used is MediaMonkey. If you prefer automatic media tagging, I would suggest:
MusicBrainz Picard + The “Last.Fm Plus” Plugin – To automatically tag: genre, mood, situation, occasion, and decade.
iTunes Last.FM Tagger ( http://www.svankruistum.com/itunes-tagger/ ) – For additional genre organization, but you need iTunes to use it
Jaikoz – For tag management (such as filename>ID3 tag functions). It will also analyze the acoustic structure of your songs and attempt to match it with the co-inciting MusicBrainz release ID, which could in turn acquire additional tag information from Discogs since Discog release ID's are sometimes through MusicBrainz. This is useful when you have absolutely nothing tagged in a set of songs.
iArt (needs itunes) – If you ever decide you want to automatically download album art covers, this is the cleanest and straightforward program I've used.
With a combination of all that software I have sufficiently organized about 3/4 of my music collection automatically to a high degree of accuracy. I literally only use the Zune software in order to sync music with my Zune. Because Zune runs so slow in comparison with MediaMonkey, I organize everything in Media Monkey, and then drag-and-drop the the library contents of MediaMonkey straight into the Zune library. Which from my experience is far easier than organizing it in Zune alone. Alternatively if you don't like MediaMonkey's interface you can use Winamp, which I would use instead – except it doesn't support extended ID3 tags such as mood. If you're really obsessive about your tags (such as record labels and occasion) you can use “Helium Music Manager” which has a couple features you wont find in any other software such as artist biographies and the like built right into the program. Link: http://www.helium-music-manager.com/screenshots/
I think you summed up the “experience” of the software pretty well. I downloaded and used it for awhile, and enjoyed it, particularly compared to what seemed to me the bloated iTunes that often tries to download and install software that I don't want (such as Safari).
It was only when I subscribed to Zune Pass and paired it with a Zune HD player, however, that I came to fully appreciate the value of the service. I've gone through several personal media players over the years, but Zune is absolutely the best experience and value I've found.
iDon't know…..
Really nice read.. i just came across Zune while looking foor an alternative to MediaMonkey..
now inclined to try Zune.. lets see
thanks
Itunes surely is just too bad.
I am fine with winamp
Logitech Squeezebox FTW.
I have 7000 songs accessible through my squeezeplayers. They are stored in lossless FLAC format but I can transcode them on the fly to mp3, or the non-DRM’d versions of Apple and Microsoft’s lossy formats.
You can run the server piece on any mac, windows or linux system; or you can use the Logitech server on the Internet at no monthly charge. You can tune in 3000+ Internet radio stations, too. Or pandora, or last.fm, or facebook, or myspace, or Amazon….
You can buy the beautifully simple squeezebox hardware from Logitech, or roll your own using mac, windows, linux or BSD hardware of your choosing. If you are an audiophile you can get the outrageously expensive Logitech Transporter to go with your zero-oxygen cables and hand-carved Bolivian walnut speaker cabinets.
You can run a remote control app on your phone, or your laptop, or your own homebrew gumstix system, or buy the logitech controller.
Add a cheap chinese MP3 or Ogg player and you’ve got something that iTunes wanted to be!
I like Winamp e Helium Music Manager. iTunes is crap and Zune is eyecandy only.
I have had my Zune 120GB device for over a year now. Here is the truth about the software and the Zune Player experience.
Regardless of weather you allow the Zune Software to download information about your music, from the internet or not, the Zune Software has a mind of its own. The Zune Software will do as it wishes regardless of how you configure the software to work. Be very careful when using the Zune Software to organize your music, it will change file names, folder names, and ID3 tags while you are not paying attention. If you should happen to accidentally delete music from your computer, and not just remove it from the collection, and do not have it backed up anywhere, you have less than 3 days to replace the files from your Zune device into your collection. After 3 days, the music will still take up space on the Zune device, but will be completely inaccessible until you purchase the “lost” media via the Zune Store. If you are able to replace an identical copy of the “lost” media, in the same location as it was in the Zune Collection via the Zune Software, you may or may not be able to gain access to the “lost” media on the Zune device. I haven’t ever had that kind of luck though.
Don’t even think for an instant that you will be able to sync any form of video file via ANY wireless connection, that means Bluetooth as well as WiFi. Microsoft has determined that transferring any form of video files via ANY wireless connection is a complete waste of time, so don’t even bother. The best and fastest way to sync ANY kind of media onto the Zune device, is via the Zune Software. It is the only software to date, that I have had detect the Zune device. If seeing a collage of your music album pictures, while listening to your music is of interest to you, then you are in luck! The Zune Software after timing out, will start loading up album pictures, and randomly creating a collage to display for you, in random muted colors. I think once or twice, I might have seen the collage, actually use the actual colors from the pictures, then again, I could have been hit in the head at the time and was seeing vibrant colors to begin with.
Turning on the wireless feature for the Zune device will cause the battery to serious deplete in record time. If you are going to use any wireless feature, I highly recommend that you leave your Zune device plugged into a wall, that is, assuming that you have bought the Home AV bundle. If you only own the Zune, and whatever it came with, you don’t own an AC adapter to charge your Zune device. If you have purchased the Home AV bundle, you can plug either the docking station or the data cable into the AC adapter, which then plugs into a standard AC outlet. The Zune will charge from an AC outlet MUCH faster, then from any USB port. And incase you haven’t noticed, unless the port is USB 2.0 or better, you will be lucky if the Zune device EVER charges. More than likely, if the Zune is plugged into a 1.1 or earlier USB port, the Zune device will detect, but will drain rather than charge.
So, you want to actually organize your media and not destroy the existing ID3 tags? I recommend using Helium Music Manager. Helium Music Manager is to ID3 tags and media collections, as Photoshop is to pictures. Granted, because is uses database and spreadsheet functionality, you will find that from time to time, you will have to delete your existing database from Helium Music Manager, and completely rebuild it from scratch as constantly organizing and changing the contents of the database causes errors. I re-create my database from Helium Music Manager about 3 times a week, but then again, my collection is in excess of 200GB.
Helium is extremely invaluable for detecting duplicate files. Not only will it determine if you have multiple files with the same name or tags, it will also show you the lengths of the duplicate files which will help in determining if they are indeed actually exactly duplicates, or just sharing the same information.
Install the Zune Software. Use it for a week. When you think that you are used to how it works, put it to the side, and forget it for a while.
Install Helium Music Manager. Use it for a week. When you think that you know everything that there is to know, think again, there is more to learn, but it isn’t important, the longer you use Zune, the more you will learn inevitably. I am confident in saying that Helium Music Manager is by far a much more superior product that the Zune Software. The only thing that I haven’t had any luck with as of yet, is transferring anything from Helium Music Manager, to the Zune Device. Which is the only reason I keep the Zune Software around, to add media to my Zune device.
I’ll have to look into MediaMonkey, compare it to Helium Music Manager and the Zune Software. When I have, I will be sure to come back here to share my opinion.
Personally, the main thing that I can think of to make the Zune device better? Replace the internal HDD with an SSD like a flash drive or something to that effect. Replacing the HDD with an SSD, will increase the battery life, and decrease load times. The access rate of a standard HDD is between 10,000 and 30,000 ms, compared to the access rate of a SSD which is between 10 and 100 ms. Because there are no moving parts in an SSD, the power drain is substantially less. Also, because an SSD is basically RAM with a battery backup, there is no need to worry about fragmentation as the SSD doesn’t require sequential data to run at peak efficiency.
Oh, and if you want games for the Zune… You better start programming them now. Microsoft has released a few games with the Zune Software, but they are all pretty simple and only hold the interest of children. Microsoft has however released software for programmers to create their own software for the Zune, but have made it so complicated and difficult to understand, that it will likely be years before there is anything available for installation, other than the software that was bundled with the Zune Software.
Never tried Zune. But for south Asian music lovers who use a lot of labels, mediamonkey is far more useful than winamp, itunes, helium….but its sound output quality is only about 90% of the other software in that..that extra ‘lift’ is missing, unless one uses a stereo enhancer like Dfx. The volume-levelling while playing is also suspect. But the ease of data management makes it a microERP. But let me try Zune.