Ever since I adopted the nomadic lifestyle of the beduin... call it seven years now... I have been a heavy user of digital music. Not quite the forefront of the MP3 wave, but close too it I suppose.   In those early days I used massive paperback monsters that held 90% of my collection and tiny thumbdrives that could barely hold an album...

... these days I store the bulk of the library on the laptop or on an external hard drive and stick to small but useful portable devices.  For the last three years that's been an 8 Gig IPod, and it inspired me to expirement with a Mac laptop... with mixed results.

In January I picked up, as an alternative, the 8 Gig Zune, which has been my go-to device ever since.  Since the Mac was getting a bit old and I was sticking to my slightly newer desktop, it was a reasonable excuse to expirement.


I won't bother with price checks, if the meagre difference in money matters you'll buy what's cheapest regardless. I'm all about the actual functionality here, and this is what I've learned:

Interface: Maybe its the years of practice, but I actually like the scroll wheel on the IPod more. After a day of playing it becomes almost second nature to use. The Zune uses a 'big button' version that, if you aren't an IPOD user is fairly natural feeling, but if you ARE then seems clunky. I have noticed that the raised button is a bit sensitive.  The IPod wheel wins out here by a comfortable, but not outstanding, margin.  

However, the actual interface, in menus, of the Zune is somewhat easier and more attractive. I will note, however, that there is one deficency in that you get slightly less information about the music playing than you do with the IPod.  


Utility: The Zune is a huge winner here. While my IPod has the ability to store video and pictures, I've never been able to really use that due to problems importing them. The Zune had a cool desktop pic set up on it right out of the box... and I don't mean the default that came preloaded.  The Zune comes complete with a wireless antenna and radio reception, which the IPod simply does not do. I can change the songs on my Zune from anywhere in my house, at the Starbucks, where ever. Ok, so I've never actually USED that function but damnnit its cool as shit to have!  

There is one area where the Zune has come up short vs. its competion, its the battery.  I don't know if the Zune simply has a shorter battery life, or if the IPod has much better energy management, but when I use the Zune in the car or at the office I have to take it home to recharge every other day or so, where the IPod can, and has, lasted up to a week or two of irregular use.  Part of it seems to be that the Zune is less inclined to turn itself off, going instead to a standby mode.  Another related issue is that the battery indicator seems less informative.  It goes from fully charged to half full to empty with very little notice, vs the IPod, where I know I'm getting low long before it quits.  

Notably, however, the Zune simply shuts off when its out of juice, with no loss of music quality where the IPod sorts of does this 'slow fade/staticky' thing for half a dozen songs before it finally quits. I rate this a mixed bag, as the abrupt thing the Zune does means you have less warning that you need a charge, aggrivating the problem, while some may hate the crap quality you get out of the IPod for potentially an hour or more of music before it finally dies.

Base station support: The IPod has a LOT of good points going for it here, but it still loses for me.  It is possible, even easy, to get a home radio (such as I have) that directly docks any model IPod you have, charging it while letting you listen to music.  An entire industry of third party products for the IPod exists.  I even have some, obviously. The Zune doesn't have that level of support that I can tell.  I haven't experimented yet, but I am 99% certain that the Zune will not dock to an IPod device.

However the reason the Zune wins is, ironically enough, ITunes. I've been using ITunes now for four+ years on two seperate platforms and... simply... it sucks.  Sure, you can easily download new music from ITunes store, and it is a fully serviceable 'jukebox', and that is about the extent of it.  Importing existing MP3 files was a nightmare, depending on the size of your library it may even be easier just to re-rip every fucking CD into ITunes itself. Supporting your library (if you are like me) from an external drive is essentially impossible. Sure, you can do it, but if you ever unhook the external drive from the computer you basically lost it.  ITunes doesn't use MP3's, and converts the entire library into a specially formated file as copy protection, and supporting your Ipod from multiple computers is impossible, as I learned to my dismay when I wound up losing half my collection to my older, mostly broken, laptop when I started using the newer Mac.   If you try to plug your IPod into another Itunes than the main one you are using it threatens to wipe everying on the IPod.  Bogus.  

I haven't tested this yet, but from all reports hooking a Zune up to another computer does not do this, instead it builds a second list of synced music. You can't use the Zune to move files but you can load files from multiple sources.

From my perspective the worst aspect however is the process of ripping CD's. I am a trained musician, though out of practice I never lost the ear for music. The default quality of MP3s, and by extension the ITunes format, is too low for me to properly enjoy. Yeah, I'm a fucking quality snob, get over it.  You can not change the quality of the rip, or if you can its so well hidden that in four years of looking I've never found it.  

Lets contrast this to the Zune software.  I'll admit I was a bit sceptical, when I plugged the Zune in I had to update my Microsoft OS, and there were other minor, but show stopping hitches, but once I had it running (say an hour later) it was a huge upgrade!

To be honest, the Zune interface is somewhat lackidasical. I've had various buggy problems with it, to be sure.  Then again, it doesn't seem to be designed as a primary interface, the device is the interface, the software is just how you load it. I'd still rather just treat the player as an external drive but those days are long past.  Once you've got it up it immedeatly looks at your hard drive for music, pictures and videos and it fucking ASKS if you want to import them!!! When I compare that to the four hour nightmare of importing my MP3 library to ITunes.... well, needless to say I was loading up the Player in seconds after getting the software up and running. Holy batshit, batman!  

When it came time to expand the admittedly anemic collection of MP3s (as I had been using ITunes, recall...) I was pleasantly surprised to discover I could set the Zune software to a variety of formats, and qualities with relative ease. Its not super-geektastic like my earlies uses of Winamp, but I was still able to up the quality of the MP3 files, by default, to a bit rate to my liking, and in playing around found its easy to adjust after the fact in case you change your mind later... though obviously this won't affect already ripped files.    Setting files to sync with the player was a right click away, not the most convinent method but no worse than the ITunes method, and if you like it automatically syncs new rips (I didn't, but I have space issues making that impractical).  Synced songs in the library have a little icon.

The Zune however does not allow a 'five star rating' like ITunes. You have a Good Heart and a Bad Heart symbol, and of course, unrated, and while the Zune does apparently track times played, it doesn't show this to the user.

Minor issue: the default display of ripped albums/music is for 'by date ripped', which is just silly.  Another minor issue is that soundtracks do not properly apply the Artist for given songs, defaulting to 'Soundtrack' in the artist feild.  However, since good soundtracks are fairly rare on the ground its a minor quibble.

One of the last updates to Itunes included this thing called 'Genius' to the ITunes player, supposedly a means of automatically generating playlists and suggesting music you might like. It sucked balls and wound up being an ignored, unremovable clutter to the interface. On the Zune software I can call up 'more information' on a selected album and it will actually give me related artists (clicking Chevelle gave me among others Unloco and Earshot (both of which I already had, so it wasn't selling me shit), and clicking Unloco gave me a brief synopsis of the band, and even the biggest fan (14k plays) in the Zune Social network, which I haven't signed into.  

In other words, the Zune software, while far from perfect, is far superior to the arguably prettier ITunes.  Note that pretty here doesn't speak to asthetic beauty (the Zune software is attractive enough, and ITunes is pretty drab colored now that I think about it...), but the 'beauty' of the interface design.  ITunes seems meant to be used in and of itself as a Player, while the Zune, while functional, seems primarily focused around putting shit into, and out of the player.  And yes, if you have the Zune Social network membership (monthly fees? Dunno, not my cuppa.. but it will sell you music like the Itunes store), you can access it easily enough from the Player... or at least that's how it seems.... if you have a wireless connection.

A last note on the physical devices: I haven't made scientific measurements but while the two devices are similarly sized the Zune does seem thicker and marginally heavier.  The lock button seems a bit sturdier, but that's purely my opinion.

Obviously I give the Zune a solid win here.  The key points are more features, easier loading of media and a serious lack of bullshit copy protection (not to say it lacks it, just not as offensively restrictive), with secondary but important points in the adjustability of quality and ability to support external libraries.  There's nothing wrong with the IPod as a platform to listen to music, and it certainly has points for style, but seriously... the Zune's got an unfair 'bad rap' in geekdom for some reason, I wish I'd given it a shot a couple years back.

Interesting, thanks for the comparison.

I still cling to my CD collection (I worked 10 years in music retail so it's huge, and I'm just not looking forward to ripping it all), but have been considering picking up an iPod or Zune.  I've heard sentiments similar to yours about the Zune, but never with any concrete info to back it up.  This is very helpful.

I have a 500 CD wallet at my house with two smaller spillover wallets, several travel sized wallets and dozens of CDs still in their cases floating around my house...

... I understand the grief of trying to rip all of that, which is much like the grief of trying to actually carry that shit with you when you find yourself travelling extensively, as I occasionally do.

I didn't want to come across as a shill for the Zune, though as I obviously feel it is a much more useful device for me I couldn't avoid geeking out on it a bit.  One area I can't properly cover is shelf life. I know my IPods universally seem to die between 18-24 months after purchase, and I've never heard of a 'battery replacement' service, so you wind up buying new ones. The Zune? Ask me in 18-24 months....

I was given an iPod Classic (20G) and it has been pretty good so far. I haven't had any issues with the software,  but I haven't anything to compare it to. The battery lasts about as well as Spike said.

I don't handle bits of plastic no more (somewhere in my mother's house is a stack of vinyl LPs I'll never use again).

Oh, by the way, my iPod loaded up just fine from Windows Media Player. I later reconfigured it for the Mac, but that was also no problem.

Quote from: Spike;292676ITunes doesn't use MP3's[...]

You can not change the quality of the rip, or if you can its so well hidden that in four years of looking I've never found it.

Changing iTunes CD Import Settings

That's a bit out of date, but in iTunes 8.1 you go to Preferences:General, and in the middle of the window is a button called "Import Settings...".

Encodings allowed include AIFF, WAV, MP3, AAC, and Apple Lossless. Within each option there's a Setting submenu with a few presets and a custom option. MP3 and AAC both support variable bitrate.

This is all great info, guys!

Thanks for the Tip Eliot. I'll give it a look later. I recall that menu option doing nothing, but that may have been a half a dozen updates ago...  These things change, I hear....

In all fairness a lot of my difficulty in importing music may have originally come from the use of the backpack hard drive.  How it worked was like this: I'd plug the drive into the laptop, run ITunes and drag and drop a massive library onto ITunes.

ITunes then generates the ITunes library from the music and creates a specific library file on the external hard drive where the music actually is. I'd then take the laptop to work or where ever, unplugging it, and when I next plugged in the hard drive the Itunes software would not recognize that the drive and its existing 'library file' were the import and would see them as a foreign Itunes, apparently tripping the copy protection software.  

The only solution then was to delete the Itunes files on the hard drive and re-import all the MP3s... every time the external drive was turned off or unplugged...

This may have changed since then with an update, but I've regularly tripped on the ITunes copy protection, and its irritating (one example: I bought Rob Zombie's 'White Horse' on ITunes about a week before I switched over to the Mac and a new player. Its been almost three years and I still haven't heard the album, as I can't seem to get it on my new ITunes without repurchasing it, and the old laptop has a new OS on it, and no more old Itunes...).

Now, for all I know, purchased music in Zune may have similar issues with transportability, but the method of utilizing existing files is much less problematic.

Apple just recently went DRM free on iTunes at the request of the record companies, you can also pick your format (AAC or MP3 I believe) They also now have "competitive" pricing, so artists/record companies can set their own prices.

Because of this, I bought my first album on iTunes about 3 weeks ago (The Prodigy - Invaders Must Die). It's been working great, although I don't use a Zune or a iPod. I use my cell-phone (Which can read AAC files).

Btw, I'm not entirely sure about the drm issue you're talking about, Spike, even aside from new developments at the iTunes store. My understanding was that there was no drm at all for files ripped from CDs or gotten elsewhere than the store. Haven't played around with that stuff much, though. I do know there's a way to authorize/deauthorize devices that can use your iTunes acct and purchased media. Iirc you can have five devices, can deauthorize/authorize one at a time directly from the device in question, and can deauthorize all of them a limited # of times per year without accessing the device(s). Last option is for when you lose/sell a device and want to recover its "slot".

I haven't had any drm issues at all, and I know very little. I just plugged the thing in and followed prompts. Over half is ripped CDs, so there you go.

Windows Media Player used to have some sort of registration but they seem to have ditched that.

I bought an ipod nano 8gb and do regret it. Though the device itself is not bad. Itunes sucks even after spending hours on the import and tag everything properly. Not to mention xna3 support on the zune.

Then again i could get my hands on a zune and end up hating it.

Quote from: Abrojo;293250I bought an ipod nano 8gb and do regret it. Though the device itself is not bad. Itunes sucks even after spending hours on the import and tag everything properly. Not to mention xna3 support on the zune.

Then again i could get my hands on a zune and end up hating it.

It should automatically download the id3 tags...

And Elliot is right. There has never been DRM on ripped CD's, although iTunes does default to AAC rather than MP3.

All I know is that for a long time (so long I stopped trying) I was unable to even locate the actual music files out of Itunes or even export ripped music from the player. Maybe this is old news, in which case I'm sorry to put out old data.

In the case of my old existing library, I was able to keep using those files as is, though I had to constantly re-import them.  For the last couple of years I've been using the Mac for ITunes which is doubly limiting: I am not an expert on Macs and I never really tested the compatability of the Mac with non-IPod players... I know my phone was incompatable, but thats about it.