I've been meaning to write something about Zune fans for a while, so here goes. They are just as annoying as iPod fanboys.

I recently subscribed to a few Zune blogs in my feed reader so I could keep up with firmware updates (or the lack of them), and it seems most of the Zune related blogs offer nothing but the same tired "can your iPod do that?" arguments and blind praise for seriously flawed software. Makes me wonder if Microsoft is actually paying for this kind of garbage to be written, kinda like this completely realistic review of the Zune car charger/FM transmitter on Amazon:

I'm so glad I finally broke down and bought one of these. It's tiresome trying to find a good song on the radio or burning CD's all the time when you find new music you want to listen to in the car. With the FM Transmitter, you can listen to whatever you want, whenever you want. And couple that with the Zune Marketplace and your listening choices are limitless!

Please.

Dear electronic device owners: If your electronic device of choice works better for you than somebody else's electronic device of choice, keep it to yourself. Nobody cares except other people who use the same electonic device... And even then, you're just annoying a lot of them too.

I am writing this right after reading yet another article praising how awesome the Zune software is, and if you read my blog at all, you already know my thoughts on the Zune software. I immediately wanted to reply, but like most annoying blogs, I had to register before I could even comment. After registering, I posted my comment but it looks like it has to go through some kind of approval process first. Wouldn't want any negative (aka truthful) comments, would you? If my comment actually gets approved, I'll be surprised.

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Keith pointed out to me today that my last few posts on Twitter have been nothing but complaints about Microsoft products. It started off with a red-ringed Xbox, followed up shortly by disappointment resulting from an upgrade to MSN messenger (it is really ugly, please don't upgrade). I've complained heavily about my Zune before, but my frustration with their software resurfaces whenever I try to sync a large amount of songs. To my surprise, my complaint about the Zune software on Twitter today was somehow received automatically by the ZuneFAQ Twitter account. It was surprsing because requests to any kind of Microsoft support system usually result in a series of automated replies. The last one I recieved denied support to me because it somehow assumed I lived in the UK, where Zunes are not sold. I think the guy (or gal) behind the ZuneFAQ twitter account expected me to reply with a fairly trivial support problem, because after replying with 4 major flaws that I've found in the Zune software, I did not receive a single reply in return. Nice.

In the past, I've attempted to register my Zune online in order to request it be sent in to fix a battery problem, but I was unable, due to a horribly broken request form. It asked me to fill in my name and address, but the address fields were both disabled and required. Submitting the form just brought me back to the same page, telling me that I needed to fill out the entire form. Maybe if you would let me, I would. I ran into a similar problem when I tried to register my recently broken Xbox online to see if it was still eligible for warranty. I went to the registration page where I was told to fill out a form, but there was no form. Just a header saying "Register Your Console" and a blank page. I guess they figure the harder they make it for customers to request repairs, the less they'll have to spend fixing their own mistakes.

Microsoft, if you are reading this, I am going to pirate Windows 7 just like I pirated Windows XP and Windows Vista. I am going to pirate it and send it to my friends so they can use it for free, too. You don't deserve my money.

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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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