ZuneHD

Technology and Gaming
#101

So I went poking around the Zune Media Player today…

First things first, I ran a speed test. Cold start up to playing music for Zune was exactly the same time (roughly 7 seconds) as for iTunes. Zune started up faster but took a second to load the funky music playing screen.

A few comments on cosmetics: The Zune player looks much nicer than iTunes does. The nice coverart background in the player screen is superb, compared to the, well, nothing in iTunes. But functionality wise, its pretty much exactly the same. The Quickplay screen just shows the equivalent of your ‘My Top Rated’, ‘Recently Added’ and ‘Recently Played’ playlists in iTunes. Nothing new here.

As much as people rave about its snazzy looks, if you look at the ‘collection’ screen, its like you’ve jumped straight back into iTunes. You can sort the lists by Artist, Genre, Album and Song Title, exactly the same way you can in iTunes. Except that in iTunes you can also sort by a whole range of other criterion, such as Year, Date Added and even Bit Rate.

I also noticed a few things when I went digging around in the more technical aspects of the Zune player. Importing songs was the thing that got me; in iTunes you can import in MP3, AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless and Wave straight out of the box, and even convert any music to any of those formats very easily. In Zune you’re limited to MP3 or WMA (which means you’re basically limited to MP3), and you can’t convert between formats.

I can’t speak to how Zune manages its library, since I was always happy for iTunes to do it itself and don’t want to screw anything up, but I’ve heard that that’s better for those that want that kind of functionality.

Anyway, that’s just my observations for now. Will post back when I have more.

#102

foobar2000 starts playing music in roughly 1 second.

#103

Try looking around more. You know, like Right Click > Select Columns

And exactly like the media players before that, what do you expect?

I personally use this view which I am growing to prefer with the selection options over the cover flow or tiled view in iTunes.

Don’t get me wrong, iTunes does have a few organization options I wish Zune had (such as the album tile view listing it by Artist > Year). I find myself living without them, but it is probably the one thing I miss.

ZuneHD supports AAC

#104

Hmm… Paradise Lost, Amorphis, Fear Factory, Sepultura, Lamb of God, Sentenced, Arch Enemy, Shadows Fall, Dark Tranquility…

Nice collection thar!

#105

Ah cool, wondering where that was…

Ah so like this then:

That’s nice…how does one do that when the Media Player can’t import or convert songs to it?

#106

Yeap, but with more selection options.

Are you retarded? Seriously. If you had spent more than 5 fucking minutes trying to actually use the software instead of judging it by “LOL APPLE MADE SOMETHING SIMILAR” You would have noticed…Zune indeed imports AAC Files.

In fact, I just pulled out my copy of Rush’s Moving Pictures*, opened iTunes and ripped the CD to my music library (Encoded in AAC)… I started up the Zune software…and guess what was importing to the library? The Rush album I was ripping in AAC.

Sorry for such a large picture, dual 22" and 23" monitor set-up.

*I chose the Rush album because it’s the only one I never ripped.

Now excuse me while I convert those files to a worthwhile format.

#107

Something I keep forgetting to mention; I installed itunes on my computer and not only did it force me to install quicktime which I have absolutely no interest in, when I told it to automatically import songs for me it started importing .wav files from Half-Life 1 and 2, so I canceled it and uninstalled it. On my mom’s mac everytime she buys a video from itunes store it automatically downloads the standard and HD version of it and she cancels the HD version but then it comes back. I’m sure there’s a way to fix this, but it’s not stunningly obvious.

#108

Set iTunes to rip to mp3. Much better, plus you can use them in Audiosurf :retard:

#109

My version of winamp doesn’t even take 1 second to load, it shows up instantly and starts playing even when some other program is using 100% of my CPU.

#110

and your secret is?
.

#111

He’s Sersoft. He could build a car out of an old mobo and you’d get the fuel in bonus.

#112

When I get more ram I’ll probably have it running nonstop because I only close it to save memory.

#113

Hey Elpants, how about you take that stick out of your ass? I’m trying here, and calling me a dick for doing so isn’t actually helping. I was talking about importing from CDs. Example:

Where exactly is the option to import in AAC? And can you convert files to AAC? Or do you have to convert them in another program? I’d be interested to know if there was one, to compare conversion/import times.

My point wasn’t so much advocating for AAC, but just making a point about diversity of formats; people like to have a choice, since there are a lot of advantages in the different formats, so limiting someone to WMA and MP3 seems very…limiting.

Yeah, it makes you install Quicktime. No idea why it does that; probably something to do with watching videos. Meh; doesn’t affect my computer in any way.

I don’t know why your iTunes started importing songs from your Steam folder…I always just get it to sort through my ‘My Music’ folder. And when I got Mad Men Season 3 Episode 1 for free off iTunes (Christmas giveaway, yay!), it only downloaded the single (SD?) version, so I have no idea what’s going on there. Maybe some strange US store malarkey.

#114

Hey, same here, I was just taking his phrasing and putting the lowest amount of seconds in there. Maybe I should have said 0 seconds, but it’s slightly more, obviously.

Tbh, everyone should use foobar2000 in stead of all that iTunes and Zune crap.

#115

Tadaa!
See i did know what I was talkin about.
https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35406535/ns/technology_and_science-wireless/

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