A Visit From The Zune Squad
January 23, 2021 3:45 AM Subscribe
“Almost a decade after Microsoft terminated the brand, there is a small bastion of diehards who are still loving and listening to their Zunes. If you talk to them, they’ll tell you that these MP3 players are the best pieces of hardware to ever run a Windows operating system. Preserving the Zune legacy has just become another part of the hobby.” Luke Winkie reports on the denizens of r/Zune (The Verge). Previously.
This is a lovely piece and I'm glad to read of a community and its participants.
Zune would have been bigger if Jay Allard stayed longer at Microsoft. There are rumours why he mysteriously disappeared from his place of prominence and left the company quietly but I don't want to speculate and distract us from the joy of community centred on a great gadget.
posted by k3ninho at 4:45 AM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
Zune would have been bigger if Jay Allard stayed longer at Microsoft. There are rumours why he mysteriously disappeared from his place of prominence and left the company quietly but I don't want to speculate and distract us from the joy of community centred on a great gadget.
posted by k3ninho at 4:45 AM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
If you look up "damning with faint praise" in the dictionary....
If you talk to them, they’ll tell you that these MP3 players are the best pieces of hardware to ever run a Windows operating system
[This is a great article and I had more than one Windows phone that I found perfectly suited my needs. And which were so desperately uncool that they went all the way around the spectrum to in the end be cool. They also had extremely fragile glass screens; ask me how I know.]
posted by chavenet at 5:11 AM on January 23, 2021 [5 favorites]
If you talk to them, they’ll tell you that these MP3 players are the best pieces of hardware to ever run a Windows operating system
[This is a great article and I had more than one Windows phone that I found perfectly suited my needs. And which were so desperately uncool that they went all the way around the spectrum to in the end be cool. They also had extremely fragile glass screens; ask me how I know.]
posted by chavenet at 5:11 AM on January 23, 2021 [5 favorites]
"welcome to the social" was such a weird, creepy catchphrase, and I kind of want it to make a comeback.
Microsoft was so late to the mp3 player party. We were already at the ubiquitous low-end no-name flash-based player stage of the game. I had an device-- I think it was an iriver ifp?-- that was only slightly larger than the AAA batteries that powered it.
They're right that Zune was ahead of its time in the sense that they were pushing a model in which you didn't really own your music anymore, but I tend to see that as negative thing.
posted by phooky at 5:18 AM on January 23, 2021 [4 favorites]
Microsoft was so late to the mp3 player party. We were already at the ubiquitous low-end no-name flash-based player stage of the game. I had an device-- I think it was an iriver ifp?-- that was only slightly larger than the AAA batteries that powered it.
They're right that Zune was ahead of its time in the sense that they were pushing a model in which you didn't really own your music anymore, but I tend to see that as negative thing.
posted by phooky at 5:18 AM on January 23, 2021 [4 favorites]
that they were pushing a model in which you didn't really own your music anymore
Did it have some kind of streaming/rental thing going on? Because I don't even remember if it did, and just used mine to listen to my own music library.
In fact, my 250GB Zune was the last hard-disk MP3 player I bought, because everyone stopped making MP3 players that could hold a whole library. When my Zune was stolen I eventually wound up buying a used iPod Classic on eBay, which was a step down both in capacity and my satisfaction.
(And then I got a car with Bluetooth audio, started streaming for a couple of years. Then last year I went back to my own library so I could support artists by buying their albums on Bandcamp. Phones have plenty of storage now for the "hard disk MP3 player" thing, and SyncTrayzor/SyncThing make syncing from a PC automatic and absolutely painless once set up.)
Anyway, yes, the Zune hardware in its second or third generation was fantastic. The firmware was fine. But on the computer side, the Zune software was at least as awful as iTunes, and sometimes significantly worse. I think many people would have preferred it just act like a portable hard drive.
posted by Foosnark at 5:37 AM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
Did it have some kind of streaming/rental thing going on? Because I don't even remember if it did, and just used mine to listen to my own music library.
In fact, my 250GB Zune was the last hard-disk MP3 player I bought, because everyone stopped making MP3 players that could hold a whole library. When my Zune was stolen I eventually wound up buying a used iPod Classic on eBay, which was a step down both in capacity and my satisfaction.
(And then I got a car with Bluetooth audio, started streaming for a couple of years. Then last year I went back to my own library so I could support artists by buying their albums on Bandcamp. Phones have plenty of storage now for the "hard disk MP3 player" thing, and SyncTrayzor/SyncThing make syncing from a PC automatic and absolutely painless once set up.)
Anyway, yes, the Zune hardware in its second or third generation was fantastic. The firmware was fine. But on the computer side, the Zune software was at least as awful as iTunes, and sometimes significantly worse. I think many people would have preferred it just act like a portable hard drive.
posted by Foosnark at 5:37 AM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
Obligatory - "Got them all on my Zune" - I got a free 8gb one from work... It was a very stylish... "brown"... I am Canadian, work was US - I (and many co-workers) could not get it working with our Canadian "LiveID/Passport" for many months... Fun times!
posted by rozcakj at 5:58 AM on January 23, 2021
posted by rozcakj at 5:58 AM on January 23, 2021
Early adopter of Zune. I had a brown Zune. Yes, brown.
It was really good because I always wanted, effectively, a truly disconnected version of Pandora or (when it was using expert-curated playlists) Youtube Music. I heard things I loved, often from my own library, and things I would not have discovered along the same lines (hello Overseer, CSS, Dar Williams, and Mocean Worker to name a few).
At the time, I think it had either not occurred to anyone or they hadn't become very effective at it yet to let publishers pay to ensure their music showed up on your "more like this" so for a brief glimmering moment I was the user not the product.
Since wireless was very far from cheap and ubiquitous streaming was still something you did on your desktop or maybe laptop, if you wanted the same portability you used a portable player. Tons of software development and user time went in to extracting just the subset of your library you really wanted to listen to, but at this moment laptop hard drives had just jumped up storage sizes an order of magnitude becoming large enough many people could blissfully forget that they ever had to choose. If you're on a train to the beach and Peter Gabriel made you think of Pere Ubu made you think of Sugar made you think of Bob Mould you couldn't just follow that line unless you had the foresight to have all of those artists and albums on your device already. Hell most of what I wanted was to be able to edit and curate my playlists when I had time to focus on that, usually on a train or airplane and never at my desk.
The Zune software was a hard fork of Windows Media Player. WMP like most free Windows things started out as hot garbage meant to close a feature gap as perceived by low information buyers and eventually became among the better tools to consistently manage the garbage data that plagued many peoples' cobbled together libraries.
When it became possible to, effectively, not have to either burn and manage (often incorrect) metadata and find many things you wanted as well as pretty good recommendations on the Zune software, have them synced to your device (predating Genius by several years) it was a pretty great ecosystem.
I also once demonstrated the additional hardening of the device by tossing it across an office - it hit hard and tumbled ten feet or so - then picking it up undamaged and suggesting the iPod user I was discussing it with try the same experiment. They demurred.
posted by abulafa at 6:18 AM on January 23, 2021 [2 favorites]
It was really good because I always wanted, effectively, a truly disconnected version of Pandora or (when it was using expert-curated playlists) Youtube Music. I heard things I loved, often from my own library, and things I would not have discovered along the same lines (hello Overseer, CSS, Dar Williams, and Mocean Worker to name a few).
At the time, I think it had either not occurred to anyone or they hadn't become very effective at it yet to let publishers pay to ensure their music showed up on your "more like this" so for a brief glimmering moment I was the user not the product.
Since wireless was very far from cheap and ubiquitous streaming was still something you did on your desktop or maybe laptop, if you wanted the same portability you used a portable player. Tons of software development and user time went in to extracting just the subset of your library you really wanted to listen to, but at this moment laptop hard drives had just jumped up storage sizes an order of magnitude becoming large enough many people could blissfully forget that they ever had to choose. If you're on a train to the beach and Peter Gabriel made you think of Pere Ubu made you think of Sugar made you think of Bob Mould you couldn't just follow that line unless you had the foresight to have all of those artists and albums on your device already. Hell most of what I wanted was to be able to edit and curate my playlists when I had time to focus on that, usually on a train or airplane and never at my desk.
The Zune software was a hard fork of Windows Media Player. WMP like most free Windows things started out as hot garbage meant to close a feature gap as perceived by low information buyers and eventually became among the better tools to consistently manage the garbage data that plagued many peoples' cobbled together libraries.
When it became possible to, effectively, not have to either burn and manage (often incorrect) metadata and find many things you wanted as well as pretty good recommendations on the Zune software, have them synced to your device (predating Genius by several years) it was a pretty great ecosystem.
I also once demonstrated the additional hardening of the device by tossing it across an office - it hit hard and tumbled ten feet or so - then picking it up undamaged and suggesting the iPod user I was discussing it with try the same experiment. They demurred.
posted by abulafa at 6:18 AM on January 23, 2021 [2 favorites]
just here to praise the thread title.
posted by ominous_paws at 6:46 AM on January 23, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by ominous_paws at 6:46 AM on January 23, 2021 [2 favorites]
I never had a Zune, but l still slightly miss my Creative Zen Touch.
posted by knapah at 7:19 AM on January 23, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by knapah at 7:19 AM on January 23, 2021 [5 favorites]
Microsoft was so late to the mp3 player party.
That’s not entirely true - they’d built up a decent tech stack and stable of partners under the “PlaysForSure” umbrella in the years leading up to this, that they bafflingly decided would not be supported on this new flagship product of theirs. There was an entire ecosystem there, and it was dead within weeks of the Zune announcement. It was so strange, seeing them throw it all away.
posted by mhoye at 7:59 AM on January 23, 2021 [2 favorites]
That’s not entirely true - they’d built up a decent tech stack and stable of partners under the “PlaysForSure” umbrella in the years leading up to this, that they bafflingly decided would not be supported on this new flagship product of theirs. There was an entire ecosystem there, and it was dead within weeks of the Zune announcement. It was so strange, seeing them throw it all away.
posted by mhoye at 7:59 AM on January 23, 2021 [2 favorites]
Wasn't the problem with Microsoft branching out into areas that Apple would exploit to absurdly huge success ultimately about their different divisions competing against each other, with the Windows group quashing any division that they saw as a threat to their own hegemony? That was the explanation that I'd read/heard about why, for example, the Kin was practically stillborn, and why Windows Phone never really took root, despite Windows itself copying its look.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:34 AM on January 23, 2021
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:34 AM on January 23, 2021
I had a functioning 1st gen Zune from ages 17-19, it broke from some internal problem related to being dropped a lot by my teenage self. I've erased most of my memory from that time, and I would give a healthy chunk of money to see what music I had on there in the hopes that hearing those songs again might bring back some memories buried (justly) deep in my brain. If anyone knows of a zune repair service, please message me.
posted by Philipschall at 8:44 AM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by Philipschall at 8:44 AM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
I've long felt that the Zune was a good device hobbled by being a Microsoft product. The apparent lack of anybody interested or able to coordinate technologies within the company meant that it was bound to Microsoft-specific features that would occasionally change in non-uniform ways across platforms. And Microsoft's continued behavior through the 00s that Windows was the only OS meant it was prevented from making any inroads among Mac users; it didn't offer any value or feature advantages over the diverse iPods available at the time, certainly not any that justified the hoops-jumping necessary to use it with a Mac. Microsoft's earned reputation for dropping tech stacks and devices seemingly at whim made the Zune a harder sell than its competitors*.
Zune marketing, too, didn't help it reach out to Mac users or the platform-agnostic. They came up with an arbitrarily rule-bound way of sharing music files between devices and then bizarrely branded the feature Squirt for some reason -- only very briefly but word got out and allowed people to remember laughing about the Zune. And generally while the designs and marketing were slick and progressive by Microsoft standards, they just failed to seem as clued-in to contemporary design as Apple's marketing of the iPod. In some ways Microsoft's packaging looks less dated now than in the early 2010s, but that would have been no help in the early 2010s.
*(At the same time, Sony was making well-received portable media players which required docking software and internally converted everything to ATRAC, making them a kind of roach motel of audio files, so the arbitrary use of proprietary technology was not in itself a dealbreaker in the market.)
posted by ardgedee at 8:48 AM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
Zune marketing, too, didn't help it reach out to Mac users or the platform-agnostic. They came up with an arbitrarily rule-bound way of sharing music files between devices and then bizarrely branded the feature Squirt for some reason -- only very briefly but word got out and allowed people to remember laughing about the Zune. And generally while the designs and marketing were slick and progressive by Microsoft standards, they just failed to seem as clued-in to contemporary design as Apple's marketing of the iPod. In some ways Microsoft's packaging looks less dated now than in the early 2010s, but that would have been no help in the early 2010s.
*(At the same time, Sony was making well-received portable media players which required docking software and internally converted everything to ATRAC, making them a kind of roach motel of audio files, so the arbitrary use of proprietary technology was not in itself a dealbreaker in the market.)
posted by ardgedee at 8:48 AM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
I had a Halo edition Zune (30GB, I think?) and loved it. The hardware was excellent and surprisingly durable; the software was... have I mentioned the excellent hardware? The battery would last all day, it had great-sounding output, and the device controls were smooth and intuitive. I perhaps took the Zune's amazing durability for granted one too many times, and it died suddenly when its hard drive failed. By that time, I had a smartphone and, with a resigned shrug, gave up on a dedicated music player and moved my collection to the phone. Now, I can't imagine going back.
I hung onto the dead Zune for years, thinking maybe some day I'll repair it (for some reason that I'm sure made sense at the time, it lived in a box with a collection of Lik Sang console controller to USB adapters) and I finally threw it out last year during a COVID cleaning purge. I kept the Lik Sang adapters, though. I'm not a monster.
posted by xedrik at 9:15 AM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
I hung onto the dead Zune for years, thinking maybe some day I'll repair it (for some reason that I'm sure made sense at the time, it lived in a box with a collection of Lik Sang console controller to USB adapters) and I finally threw it out last year during a COVID cleaning purge. I kept the Lik Sang adapters, though. I'm not a monster.
posted by xedrik at 9:15 AM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
If anyone knows of a zune repair service, please message me.
When I checked at the beginning of the pandemic/lockdown/wfh/great cabin fever age, there were at least a few people offering repair services from the subreddit mentioned above (sorry, I can't make recommendations having done it myself), also there are guides on how to upgrade and modernize your existing older ones. It's like 1-2 brands of SSD that are left and for sale that will work with the older 30Gb ones and (ironically) an iPod battery replacement that will drop right in to restore playtime for you. I went ahead and got my shitbrick back and running, and was SO proud for about 5 min.
If you're going to do this be aware that following hardware/drive upgrades you also have to set up a local webserver with some custom config needed and edit the "hosts" file to trick the zune into updating it's firmware and reformatting the drive for use. It's not exactly pain-free but there are steps on making it work and a lot of discussion from others in the group who encountered most all the issues you could imagine. Be sure to disable/remove the webserver afterward. Presumably if you pay someone to do this they'd be performing that step for you. The zune software itself _did_ run under Windows 10 and allowed me to transfer all the stuff back onto the device afterwards. Honestly if I were to do it again I'd probably just have replaced the battery since the built-in smart FM radio was the coolest feature on the device.
One good thing is there is a ton of new-old-stock cables, adapters, docks for your stereo and all manner of other accessories still floating around on eBay and Amazon markets, and they're all dirt cheap at this point.
posted by mcrandello at 9:24 AM on January 23, 2021 [2 favorites]
When I checked at the beginning of the pandemic/lockdown/wfh/great cabin fever age, there were at least a few people offering repair services from the subreddit mentioned above (sorry, I can't make recommendations having done it myself), also there are guides on how to upgrade and modernize your existing older ones. It's like 1-2 brands of SSD that are left and for sale that will work with the older 30Gb ones and (ironically) an iPod battery replacement that will drop right in to restore playtime for you. I went ahead and got my shitbrick back and running, and was SO proud for about 5 min.
If you're going to do this be aware that following hardware/drive upgrades you also have to set up a local webserver with some custom config needed and edit the "hosts" file to trick the zune into updating it's firmware and reformatting the drive for use. It's not exactly pain-free but there are steps on making it work and a lot of discussion from others in the group who encountered most all the issues you could imagine. Be sure to disable/remove the webserver afterward. Presumably if you pay someone to do this they'd be performing that step for you. The zune software itself _did_ run under Windows 10 and allowed me to transfer all the stuff back onto the device afterwards. Honestly if I were to do it again I'd probably just have replaced the battery since the built-in smart FM radio was the coolest feature on the device.
One good thing is there is a ton of new-old-stock cables, adapters, docks for your stereo and all manner of other accessories still floating around on eBay and Amazon markets, and they're all dirt cheap at this point.
posted by mcrandello at 9:24 AM on January 23, 2021 [2 favorites]
Zune was better than iPod, full stop. The problem wasn't the product (especially the Zune HD, which was and remains an excellent piece of hardware), it was that Microsoft is so unbelievably bad at explaining why anyone should use their products. Their marketing strategy for the Zune was both high concept and super poorly done. Their product people have always, always, always been let down by marketing, for many years.
It certainly may be that there were internal conflicts that ended up deprioritizing the Zune in favor of other stuff... I too remember the Kin, I was at its launch event! Some great ideas in it, really interesting... but they seemed even then to know it was dead in the water. Windows Phone... where to even start. I'll just skip it. Jesus.
Anyway I've still got my Zune HD around and if it had more than 32 gigs of space I'd probably still be using it.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 10:15 AM on January 23, 2021 [2 favorites]
It certainly may be that there were internal conflicts that ended up deprioritizing the Zune in favor of other stuff... I too remember the Kin, I was at its launch event! Some great ideas in it, really interesting... but they seemed even then to know it was dead in the water. Windows Phone... where to even start. I'll just skip it. Jesus.
Anyway I've still got my Zune HD around and if it had more than 32 gigs of space I'd probably still be using it.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 10:15 AM on January 23, 2021 [2 favorites]
I have a pink brick original Zune and a red fancy 'modern' model (but not the HD) sitting right in front of me on my desk. Neither one has been used in over a decade and I've lost the connector cables for them, but I liked them SO MUCH, that I hold on to them for the memories.
In Brian K Vaughn's 'Private Eye' comic, a pink Zune plays a key plot point and my silly ass was over the moon about that.
posted by taterpie at 12:50 PM on January 23, 2021 [4 favorites]
In Brian K Vaughn's 'Private Eye' comic, a pink Zune plays a key plot point and my silly ass was over the moon about that.
posted by taterpie at 12:50 PM on January 23, 2021 [4 favorites]
Microsoft is so unbelievably bad at explaining why anyone should use their products
That and as mhoye pointed out, Microsoft is notorious for mismanaging consumer facing tech and then abruptly killing them, so why risk getting a soon to be orphaned product?
posted by Candleman at 2:04 PM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
That and as mhoye pointed out, Microsoft is notorious for mismanaging consumer facing tech and then abruptly killing them, so why risk getting a soon to be orphaned product?
posted by Candleman at 2:04 PM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
I can probably remember every mp3 player I ever owned--first there was an Archos Jukebox 6000, at a time when 6 gigabytes seemed like tons of storage. Later, I picked up a used Rio 500--it didn't have nearly the storage (192 mb with a SmartMedia card added to the stock memory), but it also didn't have a hard drive spinning inside it, and so it worked better for bicycling and such. I still have it, and it still works. Somebody (I think it was Jessamyn) gave me an old FireWire iPod, which I used for a while, and there was an iPod Mini in there somewhere--I gave it away, but I held on to the rest of them.
My last standalone mp3 player was an iRiver H140, which, with the Rockbox open-source firmware (I also used it with the Archos), was the slickest and best-sounding mp3 player I ever owned (sometimes I think about adding a big MicroSD card and a bigger battery--not too late, I suppose). I used it for a good long while before I got what turned out to be the first of many iPhones, and a succession of first portable headphone amps and then DACs (Audioquest Dragonfly Red, these days).
Never had a Zune. Maybe I missed out.
posted by box at 2:44 PM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
My last standalone mp3 player was an iRiver H140, which, with the Rockbox open-source firmware (I also used it with the Archos), was the slickest and best-sounding mp3 player I ever owned (sometimes I think about adding a big MicroSD card and a bigger battery--not too late, I suppose). I used it for a good long while before I got what turned out to be the first of many iPhones, and a succession of first portable headphone amps and then DACs (Audioquest Dragonfly Red, these days).
Never had a Zune. Maybe I missed out.
posted by box at 2:44 PM on January 23, 2021 [1 favorite]
I missed dedicated MP3 players entirely thanks to "big enough" CF and later MMC/SD cards that worked in PDAs, and later phones, I was carrying around anyway along with unlimited cell data and/or WiFi that would get me anything I suddenly decided I needed to listen to.
It didn't help that all the players I thought were even mildly interesting required the use of Windows/Mac software to load music on them. I sure as shit w wasn't going to pile the cost of a Windows license on top of the cost of an MP3 player. That was damn near enough money for a new phone or yet another hard drive, or what seemed like a lot of flash storage at the time or a plane ticket to go see my SO. Cloud surfing to the sounds of Paul Oakenfold's mixes was damn near the most fun a person could have, in my estimation. It was life changing when I managed to cut my travel load to a phone, a PDA, my wallet, and the clothes on my back. Not that my laptop was heavy or even large (the Thinkpad 560X was ahead of its time) but why bother when everything you really need fits in your pockets anyway?
posted by wierdo at 3:31 PM on January 23, 2021
It didn't help that all the players I thought were even mildly interesting required the use of Windows/Mac software to load music on them. I sure as shit w wasn't going to pile the cost of a Windows license on top of the cost of an MP3 player. That was damn near enough money for a new phone or yet another hard drive, or what seemed like a lot of flash storage at the time or a plane ticket to go see my SO. Cloud surfing to the sounds of Paul Oakenfold's mixes was damn near the most fun a person could have, in my estimation. It was life changing when I managed to cut my travel load to a phone, a PDA, my wallet, and the clothes on my back. Not that my laptop was heavy or even large (the Thinkpad 560X was ahead of its time) but why bother when everything you really need fits in your pockets anyway?
posted by wierdo at 3:31 PM on January 23, 2021
I was one of the engineers on the Zune (and the Portable Media Center precursors) and it's still one of the best teams and project that I've worked on. It wasn't the right product/market fit at the time, but I got a bunch of warm feelings this week from this article getting shared. I'm glad people keep enjoying them.
posted by temancl at 10:07 PM on January 23, 2021 [11 favorites]
posted by temancl at 10:07 PM on January 23, 2021 [11 favorites]
I'd pay good money to properly understand what it was about the Microsoft of that era that made it so fickle. It was precisely getting burned just one too many times by them switching direction out from under something I'd spent months on that meant I was warned off making any sort of investment in either the Zune or Windows Phone (allegedly v6 was Extremely Nice, but surprise, that got quickly canned for v7, which was... not) despite being smack in both the developer and consumer target market for both. It's also why I've not worked on an MS tech stack since about 2009.
Did they know the damage they were causing at the time?
posted by regularfry at 1:35 AM on January 24, 2021
Did they know the damage they were causing at the time?
posted by regularfry at 1:35 AM on January 24, 2021
I'd pay good money to properly understand what it was about the Microsoft of that era that made it so fickle.
Tech company org charts
posted by leotrotsky at 6:42 AM on January 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
Tech company org charts
posted by leotrotsky at 6:42 AM on January 24, 2021 [2 favorites]
I think I was probably on a 40GB iPod around the time of the Zune, because I can't think of any other MP3 player I would've had at the time. If you just looked at it as a music player and forgot about the part where you had to put music on it, it was great. It did its job perfectly fine and wasn't fussy. But dear god, the iTunes part. Before the iPod, I had a Dell DJ, and that just showed up as a USB drive on my Windows PC. The iPod would ONLY interface with iTunes, unless you tricked it with third-party software that would basically pretend to be iTunes, and to be honest neither options was particularly great but at least the third-party route resembled the way I put music on all my other devices, past and future.
I think ultimately the Zune hit at the wrong time for me personally: it was too expensive for unemployed me looking for a player with a big capacity, but by the time I had a job the Zune was close to dead and in danger of being superseded by players with similar capacities but way smaller (hello Creative Zen, the 2007 player that was about the size of a stack of credit cards and still had a then-whopping 32GB). Also, if I remember correctly, the Zune ALSO required proprietary software to put music on it, which was a significant barrier.
That Creative Zen ended up being the last standalone MP3 player I bought, but not before I stuck a crapton of podcasts on it and took it on a cross-country roadtrip a decade ago. It probably still works, and though I can't think of a ton of uses for it anymore, a standalone, non-networked audio player might still come in useful someday.
posted by chrominance at 2:26 PM on January 24, 2021
I think ultimately the Zune hit at the wrong time for me personally: it was too expensive for unemployed me looking for a player with a big capacity, but by the time I had a job the Zune was close to dead and in danger of being superseded by players with similar capacities but way smaller (hello Creative Zen, the 2007 player that was about the size of a stack of credit cards and still had a then-whopping 32GB). Also, if I remember correctly, the Zune ALSO required proprietary software to put music on it, which was a significant barrier.
That Creative Zen ended up being the last standalone MP3 player I bought, but not before I stuck a crapton of podcasts on it and took it on a cross-country roadtrip a decade ago. It probably still works, and though I can't think of a ton of uses for it anymore, a standalone, non-networked audio player might still come in useful someday.
posted by chrominance at 2:26 PM on January 24, 2021
I wonder how many of us with Zunes were Microsoft employees/adjacent to some.
posted by taterpie at 2:31 PM on January 24, 2021
posted by taterpie at 2:31 PM on January 24, 2021
Zune was better than iPod, full stop. The problem wasn't the product (especially the Zune HD, which was and remains an excellent piece of hardware), it was that Microsoft is so unbelievably bad at explaining why anyone should use their products.
Microsoft had been flogging PlaysForSure as a way of selling music via MSN Marketplace and then, at least initially ... didn't support MSN music or PlaysForSure on Zune which had it's own marketplace. Which at the time damped the enthusiasm of even pretty serious MS fanbois. The brilliance of the iPod, IMO, wasn't the device - lots of companies had better hardware - it was the ability to get legal music easily on the device.
posted by Mitheral at 4:23 PM on January 24, 2021
Microsoft had been flogging PlaysForSure as a way of selling music via MSN Marketplace and then, at least initially ... didn't support MSN music or PlaysForSure on Zune which had it's own marketplace. Which at the time damped the enthusiasm of even pretty serious MS fanbois. The brilliance of the iPod, IMO, wasn't the device - lots of companies had better hardware - it was the ability to get legal music easily on the device.
posted by Mitheral at 4:23 PM on January 24, 2021
> The brilliance of the iPod, IMO, wasn't the device - lots of companies had better hardware - it was the ability to get legal music easily on the device.
That too.
posted by ardgedee at 4:46 PM on January 24, 2021
That too.
posted by ardgedee at 4:46 PM on January 24, 2021
Apple made (legal and not ripped from your own CDs) DRM free music happen, and for that I will always be thankful to them. It was still locked up in iTunes, though, which is why I'm also thankful to Amazon quickly taking advantage and offering DRM-free MP3 direct downloads from their website, finally making legal copies as easy as violating copyright.
It's really kinda crazy how the state of the art in the entire MP3 and music ecosystem evolved between 1996/7 and 2000. Inside of a year the decoders went from barely running in real time on a state of the art Pentium or 6x86 to using "only" about half of a fast 486. Digital CD ripping tools went from working only on nearly pristine discs to being able to (slowly) work through nearly anything that wasn't physically broken. Within another year, there was software to make an MP3 jukebox and GUI tools to wrap it all up in a reasonably simple interface and encode the audio as it came off the disc so you didn't have to have a mountain of free space to temporarily store the raw data from the CD.
It all took off faster than the web itself did. It really was inspiring to watch. It was more mind blowing than modems that could be upgraded with new firmware from 33.6k to 56k and damn near as awesome as having a whole 128k connection to the Internet. (ISDN FTW!)
posted by wierdo at 12:42 AM on January 25, 2021 [3 favorites]
It's really kinda crazy how the state of the art in the entire MP3 and music ecosystem evolved between 1996/7 and 2000. Inside of a year the decoders went from barely running in real time on a state of the art Pentium or 6x86 to using "only" about half of a fast 486. Digital CD ripping tools went from working only on nearly pristine discs to being able to (slowly) work through nearly anything that wasn't physically broken. Within another year, there was software to make an MP3 jukebox and GUI tools to wrap it all up in a reasonably simple interface and encode the audio as it came off the disc so you didn't have to have a mountain of free space to temporarily store the raw data from the CD.
It all took off faster than the web itself did. It really was inspiring to watch. It was more mind blowing than modems that could be upgraded with new firmware from 33.6k to 56k and damn near as awesome as having a whole 128k connection to the Internet. (ISDN FTW!)
posted by wierdo at 12:42 AM on January 25, 2021 [3 favorites]
I bought a Zune from Goodwill a few years back and it's still my go-to device. I wish they had caught on!
posted by orrnyereg at 9:47 AM on January 25, 2021
posted by orrnyereg at 9:47 AM on January 25, 2021
Inspired by this post, I have learned that the 5.5 gen iPod is the preferred audiophile model, due to the Wolfson DAC, and that plenty of people on eBay want to sell you one that’s been updated with SD storage (you can get up to a terabyte) and new 3000 mah batteries that last for days of playback. They can run Rockbox, too. There’s no good reason for me to want one, but I kinda do. The biggest thing holding me back might be the 30-pin connector, or it might be a general sense that you can’t go home again.
posted by box at 6:08 PM on February 5, 2021
posted by box at 6:08 PM on February 5, 2021
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posted by sammyo at 4:10 AM on January 23, 2021 [4 favorites]