Zune Love it, Hate it… comparison
Posted by ctitanic on 11/17/07 in Music Players, Zune
A day or two ago I wrote at least two times about how disappointed I was with this latest Zune Software release. And probably many of you thought that I’m one of those crazy iPop fans going around singing 1234. But I’m far from that. do you think that Microsoft would give a MVP Award to a "Apple" guy? 
There are things that "I love" in the new software but there are other things that "I hate". But more important than what I love or what I hate is the repercussion that those points have in the way I use my Zune. And this last thought makes me go back to the new song rating system implemented: I love it/I hate it. It’s like the old Roman rating system of Thumb Up and Thumb Down. We live in a different society where we are used to have a lot of middle options. If we would go back to the gladiators time I’m sure we would not be happy with that rating system of "Kill Him" or "Let Him Live", we would ask for other options like… "Throw him to the Lions!" Hum… Lets come back to our Zunes… I love the 5 stars rating system. I had two groups of songs organized by their ratings in two smart lists - another missing feature - the 5 stars and the 3 to 5 stars. And I use to select which group depending on my mud or depending on how much time I had to listen music. And I have a lot of music un-rated. That does not mean that I do not love that music, it’s just part of albums or I have it for somebody else that has a little different musical taste than me - like my daughter. I need at least 3 rating levels to properly manage my music. And I need of course smart lists. But anyway… I thought that I probably was too picky with all this so I prepared a table with all the goods things I found in the Zune V2 and all those things I did not like it. And I shared my table with another Zune Fan, Adam from zune.adamentity.com and here is what came out:
The above table is another example of how it’s almost impossible for us two live with a two rating system. We do have a Love it column and a Hate it column but we still had to assign a rating to how important are these points to us.
You may ask, why you gave WiFi Sync a 3. Well, the Zune is sold with a sync/charger cable so the majority of us have to sync when we are charging the battery. That makes the wireless sync to lose part of the importance. The other thing that we found that it does not work if you are not broadcasting your Network ID, Zune does not find the Wireless network and you can’t synchronize. For security reasons many people do not broadcast that ID.
Summarizing, the end score was 34 points against 43. In another words, we have more reasons to "Hate" - Using Microsoft’s own rating - the new Zune Software release than to "Love it".
Of course, that does not mean that Adam and me are going to sell our Zunes. We still see a lot of potential in these devices and we are sure that Zune Team is going to stand up from this fall. Just give them a little time. We are not going to abandon the boat now that Microsoft did let us without a new firmware update in our old Zunes.
Written by ctitanic · Filed Under Music Players, Zune
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You have 3 ratings… Like, Don’t like, not rated. How many people use more than 3 anyway?
One of your negatives, “No browsing by genre” is actually still possible, albeit less convenient:
If you go to your music collection, in the upper right you can click on ‘list’ for the list view. Then, if you right click one of the columns you’ll see you can choose which columns you wish to view. Select Genre, then once genre is there you may sort on that column as well.
Not as convenient as before, but it is certainly possible!
I’m amused that sites like Gizmofo.com complimented Zune so highly on upgrading the previous generation of Zune, and pretending like Apple didn’t do the exactly same thing when they added podcast support to the platform. It would be a lot more work for them to give old Zunes podcast support and hold-back say “wireless sync” or something petty. The big decision Microsoft will need to make is what other software things they feel they can afford to put on Zunes. Right now, Microsoft is opting to ignore a whole category of basic things like “Calendar”, “Stopwatch”, and “Games”.
5 star rating system is more for videos and the like, but fo music I prefer the new rating system It is much easier and fun. It dont need to create more time-consuming playlists (unless for party reasons). Just shuffle all.
I ever used the old rating system and probably won’t use the new one.