One week with the Zune

[Victory1500]

OK, so I've had it for a week now and have had minimal time to play with it and/or figure out certain issues, but here goes:

Been working outside with the Zune running in cold temperatures (like 10 degrees and lower) and it's been working fine without a hitch (not that I've heard of there being any temperature issues). It does everything that all of my friends' iPods do, but I don't think it does it particularly better or worse - about equal IMO. They all like the fact that the video playback is in landscape format so that you get a bigger viewing area and so do I. I had issues with the battery life, but again, from what my iPod buddies say, it seems to be pretty close to what the iPod video gets.

My biggest issue is with the Zune software. It's slow and seems to eat up a whole lot of CPU power on my machine. While I'm running it, the sound gets all sorts of distorted on my computer or won't work at all while viewing some websites. The software also has a tendency to crash on me way more than I think it should - even for a Microsoft product.

I personally think it takes way too long to rip a CD to the Zune - I don't know much about the technology involved, but it just seems to me that it shouldn't take like 10 - 15 minutes to copy a CD to the device. Same thing with video, no built in software from Microsoft to copy DVD's to the Zune. I had to download a converter program and even then, I have to sit through the entire DVD (albeit on a type of fast forward recording type of system that the software uses) which means that it may take up to an hour to copy a movie on to the device - this seems WAY too excessive a time to me.

Lack of aftermarket support - obviously this will come with time since this has only been out a few months, but it still sucks to go to the store and there are aisles full of iPod accessories and I can't even find a car charger for the Zune. Again, an issue that will probably resolve itself with time.

Overall, I'm happy with it so far and hopefully it will get better as time goes on.

My .02

[Mammlouk]

Glad to hear that you are having a good experience overall. I would like to address a couple of your points real quick.

As far as ripping and transferring your CDs, 15 minutes sounds a bit excessive to me also. It usually takes about 5 minutes for a CD to rip for me and a couple more for transferring. You could always try other CD ripping software to find something that may be faster for you and then just add the rip directory to your library in the Zune Software.

Your other comment about DVD ripping/conversion... Well Microsoft is very unlikely to provide any sort of DVD conversion tool due to issues with Movie Studios and copyrights and CSS encryption and whatnot. That's a whole other discussion though. Being dissatisfied with conversion times is something you will just have to put up with. Encoding video is a CPU intensive process and will take a significant amount of time no matter what software you are doing. The only ways to speed it up are upgrading your RAM and CPU and making sure your software is taking advantage of you processor if it is 64bit or multicore. I've been encoding DVDs into various MPEG4 formats for about 5 years now and can definitely say that encoding has become significantly easy for end users lately and that newer Processors have made my old encoding times look like walking across America vs Flying. I used to set a video to encode on my 733 Celeron and come back to it 12 hours later

Hope that helps you feel better about just waiting an hour! Enjoy your Zune and keep us posted.

[Victory1500]

Yeah, I can deal with it

[Zuneologist]

read your testimonial. we're all in same boat and we agree the software is a piece of crap.

[blackops]

agreed