Trying out the Zune Player

I have been using iTunes for a long time, not because it is a great piece of software, but because I had to. If you ask me, it is a piece of crap software just like most that Apple makes.

It is not a complete piece of junk though. There are a few good features which a lot of other software are missing. One is the ability to organize the Music collection according to the Artist, Album and Track Numbers.

That’s pretty much it. The interface is pretty slow, especially as soon as you launch it. It also has the Apple ego built into it. Apple doesn’t know anything about Windows software, how there are standard shortcut keys to do common things, such as Ctrl + E for moving the cursor to Search box in every software that supports that feature. What does iTunes do? Eject the CD tray! Duh!!!

Anyways, I have to use it because I have the iPhone.

Anyways, I wanted to give a shot at Zune software. It has a pretty sleek UI and pretty smooth too. Not even a little pause.

But it too has issues, like everything else.

1. With all those graphics and animation, it requires a lot of RAM. And bigger your media collection is, more RAM it needs.

2. You cannot see the Market Place unless your Locations is set to United States in Regional Settings in Windows. No market place, no way to buy music or more importantly subscribe to Podcasts.

3. It cannot see the MKV files in my video collection. Also, all the video files in My Videos folder is shown under Other, and I don’t know how they get filtered into the predetermined folders: "TV, Music, Movies, Personal. I need to find out how. This is interesting.

edit: LOL you can just right click the video file and specify what kind it is. XD

4. It lacks the Music Organizing Skills of iTunes. Or does it? I haven’t really checked. There isn’t anything that leads me to believe that there is.

Some other screenshots.