new zune HD

i am only slightly excited about the new zune HD. it is great that microsoft has not given up. however, i don’t see any compelling reason to upgrade at this time. i bought a “camcorder” cable to connect my zune 80 to a TV. it works well. however, i almost never use it.

having to buy a special dock to get HD video from the zune HD to a TV seems like a superfluous way to go. let’s break it down. the zune HD can send HD video to a HDTV. but that HDTV will most likely be in your home connected to other HD sources. do they expect you to rip blu-ray movies to your computer, sync to your zune HD, and connect to a TV. why not just put the disc in a blu-ray player.

this HD capabilities seems to only be valid for content that you get from a computer only, meaning the internet. fair enough, let’s look at that. the new HD is supposed to mesh better with the xbox 360. i already use my xbox 360 as a media extender to watch HD content on my TV. oops, no need for the zune HD.

finally, i am disappointed that the zune HD will only be available with flash memory. i love the capacity of my zune 80. i load it with entire shows (yes, entire shows… all seasons at a time) regularly. right now i have the entire star trek voyager series on my zune 80. i would not be able to do this will a smaller capacity player. i have 35 gb of music on my zune 80, and use the rest to hold movies and TV series i am catching up on. with a flash player of 32 gb i will have to pick and choose what to place on my player. that’s not for me.

if the point of the zune HD is to put HD video content on it then doesn’t that have need for more capacity, not less.

10 tracks to keep

a new feature of the zune pass is the ability to pick 10 songs per month to keep. yes, you actually get them as songs you can keep after you let your zune pass expire. this is a real bargain. my wife and son spend 5-15 a month on music from apple’s istore. i think this new 10 song benefit pushes the zune marketplace well past the istore.

keep the improvements coming!

zune games

i supposed this is not news to any zune fans, but the zune games are out. i was syncing my zune monday night and it said that zune 3.0 was available as an update. when I let it install the update to the zune itself it asked if i wanted the games. of course, i said yes. i was attaching my zune because i needed to sync some tv shows, so i had to let it do the sync overnight.

the following morning i saw nothing on the zune marketplace but texas hold em and hexic were on my zune 80. both are reasonably entertaining. texas hold em is too easy. i beat it on my second game, and i was goofing off on my first game. hexic doesn’t look like it will hold my attention for long.

i would love to see zuma on this device. i look forward to seeing what shows up on the zune marketplace.

battery life seemed to be pretty low the day i played. has anyone had issues with battery life with the games yet?

the beatles on zune

i was listening to (or trying to listen to) the beatles on my zune yesterday. my beatles collection is large. i own about 10 albums. the red and blue sets, beatles 1, and at least 5 other regular beatles that i can think of off the top of my head.

when i ripped my entire CD collection on my laptop with media player i ripped all my beatles CDs. this left me with duplicate songs. i didn’t mind. in fact, i decided to recreate all the beatles albums i could with the songs from the 5 collection albums and other songs i had downloaded. all went perfectly. i had almost every beatles album (though many were incomplete) on my zune plus the collections. cool!

our problem started when i copied all my music to my new desktop for syncing with my zune 80. all the music came over just fine, but the zune software does not recognize many of the duplicate files. that’s especially strange because the files are not technically duplicates. i copied all the songs into an album structure and edited their tag information so they would look like different songs that just happen to have the same title, just like the songs i had ripped from the original CDs as well as from the collection CDs.

i tried manually dragging and dropping songs into the zune application but this did not help. what was really weird is that it was not all the duplicates. maybe 60-70%. and weirder still, it would show the song from the collection folder in the album of the original fake album. how strange is that? so the collections only had 3-8 songs per album instead of 13-14.

as an interim fix i create a red and blue playlist for the beatles.

on another beatles note… i listen to music at work with one ear bud only, leaving the other on my desk. i am not good at work with both earphones in. i went through all my beatles songs and built a playlist of songs that are acceptable to listen to with only the left channel. there are a quite a few songs that have serious stereo separation and have the main lyrics are on the right channel. i am listening to this playlist right now. in case your curious the playlist is 75 songs long.

HBO on zune

i was able to successfully record a movie on my PC and watch it on my zune. it was not easy. i noticed by accident that i get the analog HBO channel when searching media center for the hulk. when i recorded a movie in media center it put rights management on the file. i could not play it in any other software but media center, and i could not sync it.

next up was to try the WinTV software that came with my hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250. WinTV records in .mpg format, which the zune and the zune desktop application do not recognize. I used daniusoft zune video converter to convert the .mpg file to a .mp4 file (should also work with iPods).

it worked. i was able to record/convert/sync harry potter and the order of the phoenix from HBO and watch it on my zune 80.

TV on zune… and zune on TV

i recorded some TV shows with my hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 equipped PC. i synced them as well as a bunch of movies i ripped with DVDFab platinum and took my zune 80 to the coast. i bought a generic camcorder cable from radio shack and hooked the zune up to the TV in the condo we rented.

all when really well. i had to plug the red plug on the camcorder cable into the yellow socket on the TV, but other than that it worked perfectly. and it was a lot cheaper than the zune video kits.

i did notice one problem. the volume level on movies was very low, barely at conversation level. i fired up DVDFab and sure enough it had a volume adjustment. i set it to 250% and i am re-ripping my movie collection.

since i won’t be hooking the zune up to a TV often I am not going to purchase the video kit with remote. it is an attractive idea, but i can’t justify the cost.

media center and the zune

i recently finished rebuilding my desktop PC. i added a hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 TV tuner card. i setup vista’s media center to record TV shows. i love it, but… there are two major drawbacks.

1. the file format and size from media center is unique and large.
2. the zune software converts the files before syncing them.

consequentially, it takes a long time to sync media center TV shows with the zune. i may have to use the software that came with the hauppauge WinTV to record shows.

finished…

well… i finished loading all my music on my zune. the total is 4,234 songs. to get started on new music i also purchased my first song from the zune marketplace. of course, that didn’t go perfectly smoothly. don’t get me wrong, it was easy to buy the song and it showed up perfectly on my zune 80. however, i selected matchbox twenty’s latest hit, these hard times. all my previous matchbox music i had already standardized as matchbox 20. since i didn’t want the group listed twice i editing the tag information on all my old songs to coordinate with the new song.

almost full

i am almost finished filling my zune. i hit 4,072 songs. however, i am cheating. i have a large collection of beatles songs. i have a few beatle’s CDs including the red and blue CDs as well as beatles 1. i wanted to “recreate” as many of the original albums as i could. i managed to create 15 albums i did not already have. granted many of these albums are incomplete, but they look cool when scrolling through them on the zune. how does this effect my goal of 4,000 songs on my zune… because to create those albums i was putting songs on my zune twice, once for the CDs i own and again for the original albums i faked. i figure at lest 70 duplicates there.

i still have to do some clean up in other areas then i will start going through my wife’s music to see what i want to put on the zune. i should have no trouble hitting 4,000 unique songs on my zune, but these last few are going to take more time then it did to get my entire collection of classic rock on my zune.

monster FM transmitter

my wife got me a monster FM transmitter for my zune. it had the zune logo on the package, but i can’t find it on their web site. it is closest to this one that is for generic mp3 player, but it has the control/display of this one for the ipod. mine uses the mini headphone jack and allows you to select the FM frequency you want to use. because of this the device cannot power or charge the zune. darn! i would have liked that because i would set the screen on full time while plugged so i could always see the album art.

this unit performs extremely well. i have only heard some strange sound on a couple of songs. it has worked in three cars so far, so i don’t see any compatibility issues.

the price of mine was $29.99 at target. monster’s web site lists the two above at $49.95 and $79.95, respectively. i don’t know why that is. i just got a new car (07 335i) which has an auxiliary jack, so i will be looking for a mini headphone to auxiliary cable to leave in the bimmer, and i will leave the FM transmitter in our acura MDX.

recommended!

btw… i am still going through all my music. i am up to the r’s at the moment. i have been working a lot of overtime the last few weeks and it is hard to get time to play with the music. at least i have over 3,300 songs to listen to. still hoping to hit that magic 4,000 songs on my zune.