Before you read this post, I must warn you that it is very TEXT HEAVY. It is text heavy because i am VERY PASSIONATE about this issue. Now that you have been warned, you may continue reading:

I got a new Zune 80GB MP3 player recently, and I've had a couple months to get really familiar with it. So far I've been pretty pleased with everything, but my only issues are with the software. As I expected, Microsoft only lets you use their software to sync your music between your player and PC. That means, even if you don't like it, you are stuck with it. Some people have developed a utility that lets you sync using WMP11 or iTunes, but it is kind of buggy and (I'm hoping) still in development. I am willing to live with using the Zune software, since it is fairly easy to use, except it behaves rather poorly when it comes to tags.

I have a bit of an obsession when it comes to my music being encoded and tagged exacly how I want. I spent a good portion of the past couple months re-ripping, re-downloading and re-tagging my entire music collection so I could have it just right, and I am happy to be finally done (so is Billie). When I finished, the last thing I did was set my entire music folder to read-only so that nothing could ever modify it without my knowledge. I right clicked on the folder, looked at the properties, and saw that there were 3594 files total. I deleted my previous iTunes library, dragged in my fresh new read-only folder, and confirmed that it had imported exactly 3594 songs. It did, and I was happy. +1 for iTunes.

The next step was to perform the same process with the Zune software. After dragging everything in, it told me there were 3592 songs total. Awesome. Two missing, now only if I knew which ones it decided to ignore. I deleted everything from the Zune software and tried again. 3592. Every time. I was forced go through album by album until I found the missing two songs. Eventually I narrowed it down to a song from Mezzanine by Massive Attack and another song from Rated R by Queens of the Stone Age. The problem was duplicate song names. In the case of Mezzanine, track 5 and 11 were both called Exchange and (Exchange), and I guess the Zune software wasn't smart enough to distinguish the two, even though they were correctly tagged with separate track numbers, and the 2nd even had brackets around it. On Rated R, the problem was with Feel Good Hit of the Summer which was is the first song on the album, but also included as the first song on a bonus disc. I guess the Zune software wasn't smart enough to distinguish between disc number tags, either. I was forced to (with great pain) rename the songs so that the software could realize they were indeed separate songs.

After confirming that both the Zune software and music folder contained exactly 3594 songs, I synced them with my Zune and again, confirmed that it contained 3594 songs as well. I quickly browsed through my Zune to make sure that it had correctly imported all of the album art (another thing I am terribly picky about), which it had, but another tag related issue was brought to my attention. The Zune software actually was smart enough to sort multi-disc albums properly, in the expected order of disc 1, track 1-10 first, then disc 2, track 1-10 second, however, the software installed on the Zune likes to do it a little differently. Instead of what you'd expect, it sorts it as track 1, track 1, track 2, track 2, etc., mixing disc 1 and 2 while completely ignoring the disc number tag. My only option in this case is to rename the 2nd disc as "Album Title (disc 2)", which is really ugly. Since I only have a few albums with more than one disc, I decided to leave them as they were and hope that Micorosft fixes the problem in a new patch, although it baffles me as to why the software on the PC and the software on the Zune player would behave so differently.

The next step in my epic journey was to copy all of the songs from my Zune to my computer at work. I figured that since I had already taken care of the tag issues, it would be a breeze. I dragged everything to my PC, and did a quick check to see how many songs it had found. 3592. AWESOME. I checked the Massive Attack and Queens of the Stone Age folders, and saw everything was there. I haven't had the time to narrow down the problem this time, but I dragged everything into iTunes anyway. I wasn't surprised to see that iTunes managed to import 3618 songs. Somehow during the process of copying everything from my home PC to my Zune to my work PC, 24 extra songs were fabricated out of nothing. I'd like to hear these songs, but it'll have to wait for another day to figure out what they are.

On the plus side, the Zune software didn't overwrite any of my tags, despite a quick scare when I noticed some differences between how it displayed "featuring" artists. I specifically formatted all songs featuring another artist to be written as "Feat. Some Guy", but the Zune software, for reasons currently unknown, displays them somtimes as "Ft. Some Guy" or "feat. Some Guy". After checking the tags, I found that they were untouched, and it was just the software that was displaying them differently, and inconsistently. Why. It also "forgets" the album art and release year when displaying your library on a PC other than the one in which you originally imported the songs. And again, after checking the tags, everything appears how it should be.

After browsing a few forums, I noticed other Zune owners are having similar (and other, more annoying) problems as me. Hopefully Micorosft takes notice and does the right thing.

In somewhat related news, I watched this video with Adam Savage from Mythbusters over the weekend. He talks about his obession with various things, and if you think I am too obsessed with trivial things like MP3 tags, then watch this video.

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