Share your Zune Pass, not your Social

Wednesday, May 21 2008 - , , - 2 comments

I love the Microsoft Zune Pass, since to me it's the most economical way to discover and enjoy music.  Currently with a single Zune pass for $15 a month, you can connect 3 computers, and 3 Zune devices, with unlimited downloads of music.  It allows you to have separate music libraries on multiple profiles on a single PC, or multiple PCs. 

This is a much improved model over the Apple iTunes "Buy" model which seems to lock you in to pay more, and get less ability to consume media how you may want too.  However, with the addition of the Zune Social community some issues are apparent with sharing a Zune Pass that I think MS should rectify to promote the Zune pass.

XNA 3.0 CTP and Zune on x64

Saturday, May 10 2008 - , , , - 0 comments

This morning I was excited to see a tweet that the XNA games studio 3.0 CTP is out. With the tweet, came the reminder to make sure you read the accompanying README information. So after folloing the link to the download site, I find this in the readme: 1.1.1. Zune Development Is Not Supported on 64-Bit Operating Systems The XNA Game Studio 3.0 (Preview) does not support development of games for Zune if XNA Game Studio 3.0 (Preview) is installed on a 64-bit operating system such as Windows XP Pro x64 Edition or the x64 versions of Windows Vista®. Doh! All of my home machines are running on Windows...

Transcode media for Zune

Friday, May 09 2008 - , - 4 comments

One of the features that made the original Zune stand out from the iPod product line, was the ability to transcode your media in your collection to a lower bit rate when syncing to your portable Zune device. This made it simple to have Lossless copies in your media collection kept on your PC, which are often encoded at a higher bitrate yielding larger file sizes. With the Zune80, which supports Lossless, the large files would be copied to your Zune, with no options to control how the media was encoded. When you chose these files you wish to sync to your portable device, the software would transcode...

Zune Update 2.5 on the way...

Thursday, May 08 2008 - 2 comments

It looks like Zune will be getting some spring update love this Tuesday...

Xbox Live games now on Zune

Thursday, February 21 2008 - , - 4 comments

It appears that with the demonstration that Xbox Live XNA games are coming to the Zune! These are the community developed games using the XNA studio 3.0 tools, but I would venture to expect 1st party published games as well. Cesar on the Zune Insider blog was smart to point out that XNA is available to develop for the Zune device, but that no time frame is currently announced when games will be available. So far some points known are: Touchpad based games - This could mean this feature is limited to generation 2 Zunes. Wireless Mobile Games - Does this mean Head 2 Head multiplayer, or possibly...

Music from Zune Commercials

Thursday, January 31 2008 - , - 0 comments

This seems to be a popular page on the site for people looking for the Music from the Zune Commercials, so I am going to update it with the latest information I could find on the commercials since the original 2006 post. Since I originally had posted this, the Zune Marketplace has been upgraded so I added all the links to the albums and songs as well. I tried to include a link to the video of the Ad as well. If I missed any, or you have missing information please leave a comment on the post and I will update it for others to find. Many of the Zune Arts ones can be found on www.zune-arts.net as...

Use v1 Zune A/V Dock with v2 Zunes

Sunday, February 03 2008 - - 16 comments

Here is a photo guide to using the Zune80 in the v1 Dock. Since the v2 dock came out which supports the Zune30/80/8/4 via removable face plates, the v1 dock has been on clearance (Originally $99, now $25!) at places like buy.com. So since we had 2 Zune30's in the family, and love having the Zune hooked up to the living room TV for media enjoyment, I thought it was a good idea to pick up another one for the TV upstairs. Shortly after it arrived, I ended up picking up a Zune80, which of course does NOT fit in the v1 Dock, since the dock connector on the Zune is in a different location than on the...

Zune Multi-Format Support on Vista64

Wednesday, January 30 2008 - , - 1 comments

The Multi-Format registry keys to allow you to use non-WMV video on your Zune for awhile now, but those of us with Vista 64 found that they did not work. This has to do with the WOW (Windows on Windows) subsystem that has the 32-bit Zune software running in a 64-Bit environment. The problem is that the registry keys imported are for the 32-Bit OS, and on the 64-Bit there is a different location for some key registry settings and files. An easy way to spot this, was to use Process Monitor , and watch what Zune.exe was doing upon startup. The rest is just string replacement. The good news is, a simple...

Zune, Codecs, and Debugging

Wednesday, January 30 2008 - - 1 comments

A few weeks ago I had wanted to put some downloaded video onto my Zune, but it was not in a format that was easily recognized without additional software. The problem appears that my PC was missing the proper CODEC needed, so I had decided to install one of the many "Packs" that are around. These packs are usually a distribution containing several CODECs like DIVX, xVid, but they also contain some obscure codecs which might be useful to have if you need to view or convert the video. Well it turns out after installing one of these, the Zune software started crashing during synchronization...

Zune to come - My Wish List

Thursday, January 31 2008 - - 0 comments

As I play with the Zune, I have to say I love the experience. Even in the v1.0 product you can see the long term plan starting to emerge, and I think it will be exciting to see what revisions come after these. I believe the community and framework features will really set it apart from the simple Ipod platform. Overall I have been satisfied about the feature set of the product, but I figured I'd post some of my annoyances and suggestions of what should be added in the future versions. Zune Player: Ability to turn off video screen when playing videos - It sounds backwards, but I download a lot of...