Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Microsoft Answers Your Zune Questions
Posted by Darius Wey in "Zune Talk" @ 05:51 AM
Cesar at the Zune Insider blog and David at the Zunester blog took time out to answer some of the more popular Zune-related questions out there. Here's a summary:
Podcast Support
In a nutshell, podcasts are supported. By having the WMA or MP3 file in your Zune library, you can simply transfer it and play it on the Zune. Extended support (for example, subscriptions, automatic downloading, etc.), as currently visible in iTunes and the iTunes Store, is still a while away, though should be present in future Zune releases.
Additional Codecs
David had this to say: "First, a lot of folks wanted to know why Zune isn't supporting some additional codecs - notably Ogg and FLAC. This is a good question, and we did spent a lot of time in the early days going through lists of codecs. In the end, we opted to focus on the most mainstream codecs first (and really getting them right - each codec is its own implementation challenge). We’re certainly actively considering codecs in the future, but for now we think the list we’ve got answers the most users’ needs."
Tagging and Indexing
David went on to mention that the Zune indexes all supported media (music, pictures, videos), and its operation is fast. If you have missing tag data, a background web service automatically fills in any holes (I'm just hoping this is miles ahead of what Windows Media Player currently offers).
Podcast Support
In a nutshell, podcasts are supported. By having the WMA or MP3 file in your Zune library, you can simply transfer it and play it on the Zune. Extended support (for example, subscriptions, automatic downloading, etc.), as currently visible in iTunes and the iTunes Store, is still a while away, though should be present in future Zune releases.
Additional Codecs
David had this to say: "First, a lot of folks wanted to know why Zune isn't supporting some additional codecs - notably Ogg and FLAC. This is a good question, and we did spent a lot of time in the early days going through lists of codecs. In the end, we opted to focus on the most mainstream codecs first (and really getting them right - each codec is its own implementation challenge). We’re certainly actively considering codecs in the future, but for now we think the list we’ve got answers the most users’ needs."
Tagging and Indexing
David went on to mention that the Zune indexes all supported media (music, pictures, videos), and its operation is fast. If you have missing tag data, a background web service automatically fills in any holes (I'm just hoping this is miles ahead of what Windows Media Player currently offers).
