Zune software review

So the world has been obsessed with Microsoft's version of the famed "iPod killer," and now that the device is lurking the streets and craftily making its way into the homes of unsuspecting musicphiles, side-by-side comparisons with Apple's products are inevitable.

And yes, we're going to feed the inevitability by providing you with a brief overview of Microsoft's new, unproven Zune software, compared to Apple's battle-hardened iTunes.

As you may have read yesterday, I made the ultimate sacrifice: I paid $250 of my own hard-earned (ha!) money and bought a black Zune, as well as a Zune Marketplace subscription. To review Microsoft's latest foray into the desktop jukebox/music store market, I'm going to post a bunch of screen shots and provide some opinion on its features and functionality.

Click on to read all about the new Zune software...

I'll skip the install stuff, since Engadget already covered that in great detail, and just get right to the meat: this software, for lack of a more articulate and eloquent term, sucks. It's basically URGE repackaged into the Zune interface. Same functionality, same basic UI, same frustrating, upsetting, aggravating glitches.

Words alone cannot describe the decrepit nature of this sin against man, so I'll illustrate most of this review with screen shots. (I'll also try to complement Engadget's review, as opposed to providing an identical one. I'll focus more on screen shots and minor observations. For a far more in-depth review, check out Engadget.)

Jukebox

The jukebox itself is fairly solid: standard iTunes-esque features, playlists, options, etc.

This is the main window, viewing by artist. There are three main views: icon, title, and details. Users familiar with WMP and iTunes will catch on to the interface right away. The buttons on the bottom are fairly standard, from left to right: shuffle, repeat, stop, previous, play/pause, next. (Interestingly, the little Zune controller is used as the play/pause button, but clicking the sides of it doesn't change the track as it would on the Zune itself. It's just eye candy. Sorta.)

This is the Zune 'compact player.' Nothing particularly unique about it (except that annoying Zune controller mock-up that doesn't actually behave as it does on the Zune itself.

(Note, however, that unlike iTunes, if you go to the compact player without first selecting a song, the Play button doesn't actually do anything. You have to start the song first, then go to the compact, whereas in iTunes — if you're selected on a playlist — you simply hit Play and it does its thing. )

This is a standard playlist. Curiously, when viewing a playlist, you can only use the "Detail" view. (In iTunes, of course, all views work in almost every mode.)

This is where there's some major deviation from iTunes. On the right side of the window you have your Zune control center: where you can manage your basic tasks: playlist creation, disk burning, syncing, and 'now playing' options.

Just a basic view of the Track Info window. Every component is nearly identical to iTunes.

This is also a major deviation from iTunes. To manage syncing photos to your iPod on the Mac, you use iPhoto and some settings in iTunes itself. Since Microsoft has no globally-accepted iPhoto equivalent, they built photo management tools right into Zune.

There are three buttons on the top right: Music, Videos, and Photos. Switching between the three allows you to view that particular media, and manage how they're synced to the player.

Double-clicking an image in the Photo view allows you to view the images as a slideshow. You'd think it'd be nice to play some music with the slideshow, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. I also couldn't find transition and timing options.

Syncing

If you're not one to fiddle with options, syncing is fairly straightforward. When you plug in your Zune (I named mine "antiPod") it shows up in the source list on the left and in the control box on the right. It'll automatically sync all new files added to your library. And contrary to Engadget's review, I was able to add more files even after the initial sync without having to unplug and re-plug the Zune first.

The Sync Results mode will show you what's on your device and what is being synced. This is where I had a lot of troubles: like my experience with URGE and numerous PlaysForSure players, synchronization was sporadic and terribly unpredictable. Sometimes the songs would fly onto the device; others, it would get stuck on "100%" for nearly three or four minutes before crapping out with some general error message, such us...

Clicking "Web Help" offered absolutely no help. When I got this error, the software stalled on the Sync screen and the Zune itself froze. I had to reset it (by holding the Back and the Up buttons) before it was able to re-interface with the software.

Marketplace

I almost decided not to actually review this component, since for virtually two hours I was figuring out how to troubleshoot it.

This is the homepage of Marketplace, Microsoft's URGE-y iTunes knockoff. The music selection is petty compared to iTunes, and there are no other media like TV shows, music videos, or movies.

When you search for an artist, a pane pops-up and provides you with live search results...that don't actually work very well, at least in the 'live search' sense. The results will flash on the screen as you're typing, disappear, then, once you've finished, after a few seconds of catching up, come back. Which basically nulls the advantage from the start.

Sometimes, particularly when searching on a page other than the Marketplace home, the results will flash on the screen briefly, then disappear completely. The only way to remedy the situation is to return back to home and search again.

This shows you all of your downloads in your current Zune session. I can't for the life of me figure out how it sorts those.

This brings me to an interesting point: sort settings in the Zune software are only temporary. You can click on the headers to change how the list sorts — but as soon as you click to another list and return, they're back to their original, confusing order.

This epitomizes the problem I discussed yesterday: Even though I'm paying $15/month for a supposed 'unlimited music' subscription, a great deal of albums (I ran across five in just twenty minutes of browsing) require actual purchases, negating the benefit of the subscription in the first place. You also can't burn subscription music, nor can you back up your files (according to the DRM description).

The regular a la carte download scheme is pretty wacky, too: you have to first buy Microsoft 'points.' You have to buy them in increments of $5, and 79 points is equivalent to 99 cents.

Bugs, Glitches, Icky Features, Etc.

Aside from the bugs/glitches/icky features I noted above, I ran across several more:

• After viewing a photo slideshow, instead of returning to the photo list, the screen goes black. Nothing happens until you click back.
• On numerous occasions the scroll bar in the control pane on the right was unusable. I could only scroll using the wheel on my mouse.
• The software is slow and laggy. Whenever you click to a new song, there's a brief "Opening Media" period of nothingness.
• The Marketplace log-in is virtually broken. When I quit out of the app and returned, it told me I was still signed in. But whenever I tried to download an album, an error message popped up, explaining that my computer was out of memory and I needed to quit other apps. A valid recommendation, sure, if I had other apps open. It took me twenty minutes and two reboots before I decided to log out and back in and blammo...downloads worked fine. So if you're using Zune and you get the "Out of memory" error, that's simply Microsoft's sly way of telling you to log in.
• Attempting to move the Zune window or click to another mode or view another playlist when a song is playing causes the song to stutter. (I'm using Windows on a Core Duo MacBook with 1.25GB of RAM, for those who are wondering.)

The Zune device itself

This is technically supposed to be a software review, but I thought I should mention a little about the Zune itself.

• It is big. I try to tell myself that doesn't matter, but it really does make it feel less like a music player and more like a PDA. It's hard to take it seriously as simply a music device.
• The buttons work well, but are very...shoddy. They're small and difficult to hit if you aren't focusing. The center button is very plasticky and loose. (As one reader noted, the "wheel" in the center is not a wheel at all, but rather four separate buttons: up, down, left, and right.) Up and down controls the volume while playing a song (you can't change the volume unless you're in the Now Playing view).
• The Zune interface is slick. It's very graphically-influenced, making it easy on the eyes and fun to look at. It's intuitive and offers a few advantages over the iPod: for instance, if you click an album to view its songs, the other albums are listed horizontally across the top — so you can use the Up and Down buttons to scroll through the songs, or hit Left and Right to change albums. Transitions between views are smooth and, for the most part, pretty snappy.
• It's obviously missing a lot of iPod features (Notes, podcasts, audiobooks, games, calendar, etc.) but this is the first version of the software: Microsoft will undoubtedly add to it with subsequent versions.
• I would talk about the sharing feature, but uh...I don't know anyone else who bought a Zune. Right now it's more like a non-feature.
• It locked up only once, after a failed sync with the Zune software. Other than that, it's been fairly reliable.

Questions

Some questions from readers:

Can you download the Zune software without buying a Zune?

Nope, at least not that I've found. (Update: Fellow blogger Erica and reader Joel Ivory Johnson point out that yes, you can in fact download the Zune software, here.)

What is the data rate of the Zune Marketplace songs?

192 Kbps. Beats iTunes there.

Explain the subscription model.

Not a question, but: You basically pay $15 a month for sorta-unlimited access to the Marketplace library. You can download all the songs you want and transfer them to your Zune. Once you stop paying the subscription, however, you can no longer play those songs. You also need to plug your Zune in at least once a month, so it knows your subscription is still active.

But as I noted yesterday, the subscription model, while great (for some of us) in theory, sucks in practice.

Conclusions

OK, I know I started kind of harsh: calling it a decrepit sin against man, etc. And in all honesty, for Microsoft to take the same buggy URGE and rebrand it as a great new piece of software...well, it's frustrating. The Zune device itself is promising: slice it in half, add some more iPod-esque features...you have a really solid player, at least compared to the swarms of clunky PlaysForSure devices once touted as iPod killers. It has an intuitive, good-looking UI, decent, predictable controls (unlike the notoriously ghastly Sansa), and it feels right in the hand.

But then you throw in the Zune software and its Marketplace store, and all of a sudden the whole thing looks like one big last-minute throw-together. The jukebox works as expected, but it's not like there's much you can do to screw up a simple music player. The syncing is unreliable — I do a small prayer before every sync — and even confusing when it comes to figuring out what syncs and what doesn't. (There is no simple "Sync All" or "Sync Just What I Select" a la iTunes). The Marketplace store is just embarrassing: the limited music selection, the offensive details of the subscription service, the deceptive points scheme, the harsh limitations, the bugs, glitches, holes.

It feels like a beta. Or an alpha, even. And that's no good, especially when they're marketing it as a direct competitor to the battle-hardened, reliable iTunes/iPod combo. And it's easy to pin-point one of Microsoft's most obvious flaws in their Zune strategy: they're so obsessed with unseating Apple, they've become the record industry's lap dog. Paying the $1 fee to Universal, crippling their subscription service, imposing horrible limitations on the DRM'd media and sharing functionality. While Apple tends to be a customer advocate, fighting the record industry for its and its customers interests, Microsoft has taken the opposite approach — something that will inevitably and critically hurt their efforts. Until, at least, they decide to back off.

I can understand why this first Zune implementation is so pathetic: they rushed it out the door for the Christmas launch. But I have high expectations for the future of the Zune and its software. If Microsoft is really committed to making it a decent, reliable, and customer-friendly iPod alternative, I can certainly see them putting forth the resources and man-power necessary to achieve that elusive goal. It all depends on if the market will tolerate their initial stumbles.

Zune could be an eventual hit, or a total bomb. I'm hoping for the former, to give Apple a little competitive boost. But, at least for now, Apple has nothing to worry about.