Zune Thoughts: Zune 101: Creating and Using Sync Groups (Auto-playlists)

One of the new features in the 2.5 spring update for the Zune is the ability to create sync groups, which are auto playlists - easy ways for you to get the music, photos, and videos you want onto your Zune, automatically. This video shows you how to do that.

One important note though: because the Zune software uses the "date added" as the primary attribute for sync groups, if you've just installed the Zune software, or if you have to reset your Zune collection to fix metadata issues (which is what I had to do), sync groups are a complete and total disaster. Let me explain: rather than using the EXIF date taken attribute of a photo to determine the date when the photo was taken, or the file creation date of an MP3 to determine when the MP3 was ripped, the Zune software uses "date added" which means when you create a sync group for "all photos from the last 90 days" you might get every photo on your hard drive. That's exactly what happened to me - right now I can't use any date-based sync groups, which completely sucks. I don't know what the Zune team was thinking when they did it this way, but the results are ugly. There has to be a better way!