The Zune HD is picky about software.
(Credit: Microsoft)Q: I received the Sony Walkman X-Series last month as a birthday gift and absolutely love it. I did, however, see you on CNET Live with Donald Bell featuring the Microsoft Zune HD, which I was very impressed with. I also saw the price on Amazon, which I was also very impressed with. My question is does the new Zune work with Windows Media Player 11? Someone told me it doesn't and that all your downloads are through Zune Pass, which I believe is a music store like iTunes.--Ben, via e-mail
A: The Zune operates in a closed environment, much like the iPod. So yes, it is only meant to be used with the Zune Software, and it will not operate correctly with WMP11 (though I have heard rumors of people getting previous Zunes to work outside of the "environment"). The one major difference between the Zune and the iPod, however, is the Zune Pass, which is a subscription music service that lets you download and transfer all the music you want for $14.99 per month. (This plan also includes 10 songs per month in MP3 format, which you get to download and own outright.) You may also choose to pay per song through the Zune Marketplace, which operates like iTunes.
So with the Zune, you have three levels of music management and ownership to consider. At a minimum, you must use the Zune Software to transfer any media to the device, though this can be limited to content you already own. Next, there's the Zune Marketplace, which lives inside the Software and provides content (music and video) for purchase, as well as access to things like podcasts, which are generally free. For the most comprehensive experience, you might choose the Zune Pass, which provides fairly unlimited access for a monthly fee.
... Read MoreTuneWiki is one of the most ambitious social music projects we've seen. It is part licensed lyrics spooler for your own songs and for streaming YouTube videos, and part network--you can see where else in the world other TuneWiki users are playing your track. What began as an Android app created for Google's Android Developer Challenge (and finished as one of 10 winners) grew into a Web site and is, as of Monday, a Windows Media Player plug-in.
TuneWiki for Windows Media Player has a few flubs and flaws, but on average, the lyrics and music maps add the utility and interest to make the free application a helpful addition to Windows Media Player.
Those familiar with TuneWiki's Web site will see the similarities right away. TuneWiki's interface reskins Windows Media Player's 'Now Playing' window. The top half of the screen displays either a music map of where else in the world songs are playing, a YouTube video, album art, or top songs nearby, depending on if you're playing a song from your library, watching a YouTube video through TuneWiki, or browsing the map.
The bottom half of the screen, below the ad space, is where you'll see the available lyrics stream, plus commands to translate into other languages, help TuneWiki resync the song, and expose the scroll bar for manual lyrics perusal.
The unskinned Windows Media Player playlist forms the right side bar unless you banish it. We suggest you don't--you may have a harder time queuing songs if you do.
(Credit:
CNET/Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt)
TuneWiki has its share of rough edges. Some tools aren't immediately intuitive, like the resyncing button. Instead of clicking it to have the song resync itself, you click it, then click each line of the song as it plays to help TuneWiki time the lyrics more accurately. Unless you're an approved editor, your version of the time-synced lyrics will be stored locally, but may not make it into TuneWiki's larger database.
Also not obvious is the fact that only approved editors can edit existing lyrics. A text notice on the editor-only area would wipe away potential confusion and frustration. Anyone, however, can add lyrics to TuneWiki's wiki if there aren't any to begin with. (You can apply to be an editor at forums.tunewiki.com. TuneWiki currently tallies abut 1,500 editors.)
Some other issues we encountered were performance-based or preference-related. We'd like the size of the YouTube video to be adjustable, for instance. If the YouTube video stops, as it did once during testing, we want to refresh it without closing and reopening the app. When searching for songs, we'd like a more elegant display of the artist and album information returned in the results. TuneWiki's plug-in is good enough to use on its own, but in a few iterations from now, after a scrub-up, it should be even more promising.
Is every iPod in your home associated with a different user profile on your family computer? Merging iTunes libraries between users may make life easier for everyone.
(Credit: Donald Bell/CNET Networks)Last week, I showed you a technique for keeping your music collections separate from one another in a communal iTunes library. This week, I'll try and help out those of you with the opposite problem--people with fractured iTunes libraries across multiple user profiles who want to pool their family's media together.
The root of the problem is that unlike Windows Media Player, Winamp, or nearly any other multimedia jukebox application, there's no way to get iTunes to actively monitor multiple folders on your computer and add new content automatically. In a perfect world, you could tell iTunes to create its library based on the music stored in all the "My Music" folders of every user on your computer. Unfortunately, iTunes doesn't work that way.
You can, however, make it so that any media added to any instance of iTunes on your PC is copied to a single, central location that all users can access. Pointing every installation of iTunes on your computer to a common library is as easy as holding down the shift button when you launch the application. The hardest part, often, is archiving and merging all the separate media collections each user has been amassing up until this point.
Click to see our step-by-step tutorial on merging iTunes libraries across multiple user accounts.
We've made another step-by-step guide that walks you through the back-up, redirecting, and restoring of a single iTunes library that pulls content from every user account on your computer. For extra inspiration, you can also take a look at the Insider Secrets video I shot, that outlines the steps for this iTunes tip and last week's. With any luck, you can use both these tips together to pool all your family's media and iTunes purchases together, and still maintain some sanity-saving restrictions on what content is copied to your individual iPod or iPhone.
If you have any other tips to share, please include them in the comments section.
Managing two or more people's music in a single iTunes library can get messy. In the distance, you can see the CD rack that once made things so simple.
(Credit: Donald Bell/CNET Networks)
Back in the CD era, it was easy to keep my wife's music collection separated from my own. We kept my CDs on one side of the shelf and her CDs on the other side, and the few CDs we both enjoyed would sit somewhere in the middle. The territorial lines were easy to maintain, and for the most part, music was never an issue in our house.
In the MP3 era, however, everything's become more complicated. We have a central home computer that hosts our collective iTunes music library. Unfortunately, the CD shelf system we've relied on for years doesn't translate on the computer. Her Tori Amos and Fiona Apple are right up next to my Squarepusher and Black Keys, and our iPods don't include a "his and her" music feature.
Need a way to filter your family's egregious music taste from your iPod? Click here for a step-by-step tutorial.
Granted, we could have made separate user profiles on our PC with individual iTunes music libraries, but that would make it hard to share the music we have in common. (Editor's note: stay tuned for more on this approach, next week.) We also considered setting up our iPods to manually sync music instead of syncing automatically, but neither of us have the time to carefully groom our iPod's music collection and the extra step of manually ejecting our iPods each day can be a pain. We just want our shelf back.
Fortunately, I found a solution that worked for us. By setting up a couple Smart playlists, we made iTunes intelligent enough to reliably keep the worst parts of her music collection off my iPod, and vice-versa. Unlike typical playlist techniques, which create lists of music you enjoy, the beauty of this system is that it works off the music you hate--which is much more fun. If you're interested, I've put together a step-by-step slideshow on how it's all done.
If you've got your own method of maintaining peace with multiple iPods and a communal iTunes music library, help us all out by sharing it in the comments section.
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Donald Bell is an electronic musician, a veteran record store employee, and a fearless hardware hacker. He's also CNET's Senior Editor for MP3 and digital audio.
Jasmine France is CNET's resident digital audio doyenne, writing and editing product reviews, crave blogs, and feature stories on all things MP3. And if you need advice on headphones, she's your girl.
