Frustrating yet sticking it out...

[sono2351]

First and foremost, I have a Zune 80 and I enjoy my Zune very much, the ubiquitous "however," though is that the experience has been largely frustrating, to the point that I have put my Zune down and not touched it for about 2 weeks, like when you're playing an RPG and you haven't saved for whatever reason or playing Madden or some sport game and you haven't saved in a few games and your game locks up or freezes or something - yeah, it's like that kinda frustrating. This frustration comes from the amount of time and effort it takes to correct the smallest issues, such as having duplicate songs or the zune software unable to get album art because of metadata crap or whatever, it's all VERY FRUSTRATING.
Now, I work in customer support for webhosting and the like, so I can certainly understand my customers' frustrations simply from operating my Zune. The things I think would make the experience a lot more fruitful and that wouldn't be extremely hard to implement:

1. The Software - As I understand it there was a more Itunes-like software as far as song/album/artist editing when Zune first started. Now, I understand that the current interface is more "user friendly" but come on. It is such a pain in the a** to do what should be easy tasks, such as loading up custom and/or various-artist albums or, namely, mix-tapes, so they don't load with an album for each track, or having albums load as various or unknown albums. Now I know most of you will say, "well just get some thrid party software and edit your metadata." Well after the 2 weeks period of frustration I did, and I have been vvery careful in uploading my music, however this also makes me have to be wary of every single album and song that I'm downloading and a few times of having to remove albums, edit the meta data again in mp3tag, then uploading them again. Which brings me to point number -
2. META-DATA EDITING - You Microsoft guys, you can't tell me you can't come up with something along the lines of mp3tag and incorporate it into your software, so we can use it seamlessly with the Zune software. Hell, do some "reverse-engineering" and your infamous "innovation" (of which I am not entirely referring to your innovation in the negative sense as some people do, I can dig the whole 'ahead of the curve thing' and all that) and make it happen, or just give some of us the opportunity to download a slimmed down version of software without all the bells and whistles so it works like point-click-done, instead of point-click-drag-not working-go back-do it again-waaaaiiiiiting-and DONE! At least give us the option to use an easier database-like interface, as I believe it would be much appreciated from everyone down to even the most staunch of Zune supporters, of course, with the hacks to downgrade to the older software, I think said staunch supporters have already spoken their minds.

Those are really my only gripes. I could care less about games. I only wanted an mp3 player, anyways. I wouldn't be interested in a Zune-phone until I'm either given $8000 dollars or they cost 200 dollars, anyways (and don't tell me you don't have a Zune-phone or something along the lines tricked away somewhere). Basically, let me put it like this:

The Zune is great largely because the operation of it is intuitive, the touch-pad case-in-point; make the software the same. That's it.

[judycrunch]

I understand your frustrations, but luckily I have a tech-savvy boyfriend and he helped me avoid head-desk frustrations. I experienced more of the slap-forehead variety.

Secondly, did you get everything worked out with your mix-tapes? I know I had huge issues with mine, until I edited all of the Album Artist tags to be the same. Suddenly, my issues are gone. Glorious day.

[sono2351]

Yeah I know I could edit the artists, but then ya know you have songs that are listed as the wrong artist or whatever, but I've pretty much found ways to handle everything and I've been reading up on a lot of ways people are handilin their mix tapes and such, so yeah.

[Motra110]

I agree with you in that the Zune is "VERY FRUSTRATING." I got so sick of it that I bought a Creative Zen and absolutely love it.

[Jon]

Stick it out man, good job

[stkr]

I think you're in the same boat as the rest of us. Great player, and a joke for software. It's pretty laughable and I honestly don't understand why updates are rolling out like newspapers. It's ridiculous that every time I want to change something like album art for my Zune, that I have to open iTunes and do it from there. I use the Zune software to listen to music only because it opens faster than iTunes. It's completely excusable though, since iTunes has so many more features to load than the Zune software does. In fact, iTunes is a major reason for why my Zune experience has been better than most. It's very easy to use and edit everything. Album art is automatic, and now that music comes without DRM, if I buy it from the iTunes store it loads onto my Zune with everything tagged correctly. BTW, does the Zune software have a name?

[got zune?]

I use MP3tag for my collection and all is well.