Zune Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

So I sort of got on a roll with yesterday's device suggestions, and I thought I'd try my hand at picking out some of the small things that bug me in the Zune Software. These should be mostly small fixes, but ones I think would greatly increase my enjoyment with the software.

Sync screen:

• Separate out things I've chosen to sync with things synced automatically through friends' ZCards, Picks, and Channels.
• Progress bars. I like progress bars, and I miss them from Windows Media Player 11/Zune v1. They provide a granular view of everything syncing, with options for each track. The Zune 2.0 and 3.0 software feels very spartan in this regard.

Find Album Info and Album Art

• Simply put, the code for "Find Album Info" should be re-written. It hangs on me 90% of the time, and has only worked a couple times. Even then, it typically doesn't work work on more than one album without restarting the software.
• The browse for album art dialog always opens in My Pictures (or in Vista, Pictures). Most times when I'm downloading album art from the web, I save it to my desktop. The software should remember my last-used location.
• Lastly, I wish there was an option to resize the album art. The new "Albums" view of the music field is cool, but really doesn't address the core issue of either hard to see thumbnails or oversized album art. Give us a slider control like in Windows and Windows Media Player.

Now Playing screen:

• There needs to be an option (a la Windows Media Player and practically any other jukebox software) to interrupt the screen saver when playing a video.
• Similarly, in most programs, hitting the space bar will pause the currently playing item. In Zune, it repeats the last action performed (e.g. advancing a track, turning on and off shuffle, etc.). This is especially a pain while watching a video, since you have to press the space bar once to bring up the controls, then again to pause it. Make space bar = pause on a high level.
• I love the album art tiles screen, and so I wish there were more settings. If I could control the idle timeout before going to the tile screen, or disable a mouse interrupt (e.g. have to click the button to leave Now Playing), that would be awesome.

Did I miss anything? Anything you'd like to see changed? Sound off in the comments!

The Holiday Season may have passed, but Steve Smith still has a few requests for the Zune Team. Two of his three requests have to do with wirelessly syncing while on a dock, and the other is a request for deeper car integration. I'm with him on these, and the two wireless sync requests could (and should) be included in the next update.

On that note, here are a couple things I've been wishing for in the Zune for a while, most of which could be easily implemented:

Music:

• The number-one feature request I get from iPod-owning friends when they use my Zune is for a "view all tracks by artist" feature. It's annoying to have to look through every album by a particular artist just to see what I've got in my collection.
• Bring back the Quick List. Playing another song, album, or artist will erase any playlist you've been working on, which is quite annoying.
• A "remove from now playing" feature would be awesome to have, as would a "remove from list after the song has played" feature.

Games:

• Don't force a restart after quitting out of a personal or community-built game. XNA superhero Michael Klucher has a write-up about why they did it, which basically boils down to securing the code and DRM'd files, but I just don't see why they can't reset the flags without completely rebooting the device. This should definitely be a priority for the XNA team.
• Not really a game, but a simple RSS reader, synced on-the-go or at sync time would be awesome.

Social:

• Allow videos below a certain size to be shared via wifi. I'd love to be able to beam short YouTube videos or music videos to friends.

Misc:

• Add an alarm feature so I can wake to music without having to use a third-party XNA app.

That's what I can think of for now. Do you have any suggestions for the device? Sound off in the comments!

While the 2.5 update fixed a number of missing features and introduced several new ones, the Zune team still has a long way to go to make everybody happy (don't they always?). GotZune's Jason Rasmussen posts a nice article highlighting the important features that he'd like to see in upcoming releases. Several of these are no-brainers that the Zune team can and should implement in the next release. Some, like DivX/XviD support would be killer, but I don't see anything happening on this front until Zune Gen3 at the earliest.

Jason talks about the need to further integrate Zune into Windows Media Center and Xbox. At this stage in the game Microsoft has so many services that are not only incompatible, they compete with each other. It's time to bring the Entertainment & Devices division on the same page and build a fully compatible ecosystem. I shouldn't have to deal with several different stores just to get the content I want on the devices I already own. The whole point of inconveniencing Zune owners with the Microsoft Points system was to allow greater interoperability between the systems.

Jason also mentions the need to bring back flagging and a five-star rating system. I don't know about other people, but my main use of the flagging/rating system is to remind me to do certain things. Delete a song, for example was a single star (or now a broken heart); remember to add a certain song to a list, or fix metadata was a flag. The problem with this system arises when I can't distinguish which flags or star/heart ratings mean what. If I can't tell if I don't like a song, just don't want it on my Zune, or want to delete it completely, then the rating system is useless. I hope the Zune team can create an elegant way to flag songs for later use. What I'd like to see is the ability to add songs on-the-fly to playlists or sync groups. For example, I could create a playlist called "songs to delete" or "fix metadata" or "for Julie's wedding", and when I'm listening to my Zune and encounter a song that fits this criteria, I could add it to the playlist. When I sync it back to my computer, my lists are all there, and I can do with them what I want.

This would of course go hand-in-hand with playlist arrangement enhancements such as track re-ordering and a more functional now playing system. Hopefully it won't be November before we see a few of these basic changes.

This past weekend on a visit to a friend in New York, we happened to go to the New Museum, a contemporary art museum on the outskirts of the East Village. One thing I noticed as we walked around looking at art I didn't understand was the number of people with iPod Nanos hanging on lanyards around their necks. Apparently the museum was using the Nanos to distribute their guided audio tours, a practice done at many other museums throughout the world.

This scenario got me thinking: why not put Zune's wireless sharing to good use? Sure sending songs and podcasts are fun amongst friends, but I would've loved to have someone beam me a recording of some deep-voiced academic telling me exactly what the artist was going for when she splattered paint across a canvas or he Googled and collaged hundreds of people sleeping*. Why can't the front desk send me an audio file to let me listen to the tour on a device I already own? Plus, if it's tagged as a podcast, I can send it on to a friend who is either with me or is planning on going to the museum—viral marketing, people!

There are tons of scenarios the wireless sharing enables that fall outside of the typical "hey, listen to this song. You might like it." There's not much technically that needs to be done to really open this up. Much of it comes from just general market adoption.

*Oh, I wish I was joking. The several-feet-by-several-feet piece consisted of assorted photographs the artist found on the internet. The common theme was that each of the subjects were in some state of sleep. You might call it art; I call it Flickr.