i love my zune

i am still working on my music collection. i am still on the g’s. but i just love this device. i finished watching star trek II the wrath of khan over three lunches at my desk. i have listened to so much music i barely knew i had. granted, i am mostly rediscovering how much i really like some of the CDs i own… in other words i am really into classic rock right now.

i have listened to more music in the last few weeks than i had in months. having an entire CD collection on a device that is as easy to browse as this is unbelievable. just today i have listened to my all the don henley & glenn frey song i have and listened to paul mccartney’s all the best album. it’s great.

i have absolutely no regret about getting the zune 80 over the ipod touch or the ipod classic.

have you been zuned?

over 3,000 songs

i just went over 3,000 songs on my zune 80. 3,012 to be exact. i have just finished processing the f’s. i actually deleted an album. i edited 2 songs from foreigner’s inside information CD and changed them to their records CD. then i deleted the inside information CD. i will probably do this more as time goes one.

bryan adams complete

well, i did have to re-rip my bryan adams so far so good CD in the zune software. once i did this it was easy to add the 4 downloaded songs i have to create a super album of 18 songs instead of the original 14 songs. cool!

migrating downloads

with my entire CD collection on my zune 80 i am in the process of migrating downloaded music. i am going alphabetically and just finished the c’s. i had a significant amount of trouble with bryan adams. i have his so far so good CD, but when i try to add 4 downloaded songs to that CD to build a super album, it doesn’t work.

i started using mp3tag to edit the id3 tag information. no matter what i do the zune desktop application sees the songs from the CD as being from various artists. what’s really bizarre is that the 4 additional songs it sees correctly as being from bryan adams. so my zune sees 2 so far so good CDs, one by bryan adams with 4 songs and another with 14 songs by various artists. windows media player combines the songs into one CD with no trouble, but the zune software just sucks. i am going to try re-ripping the CD in the zune application, instead of media player and see if that helps.

CD collection ripped

i have completed re-ripping my entire CD collection. i had just over 200 CDs. now it is time to go though all my downloaded music and add to the CDs. if i have enough songs for an artist i will look them up on zune marketplace. i look for a greatest hits album and edit the ID3 tags for my songs to make them look like they belong to the official greatest hits album. when i have songs that are not on the official greatest hits album i add the extra songs as addition tracks building super albums.

if the artist don’t have a greatest hits album i will make one up myself (this worked great for ac/dc), or i will add the songs to an existing album creating a super album.

i am going alphabetically. i am almost finished with the b’s. it will take me a few weeks to do it all just the way i want, but it will be worth it in the long run.

the ear buds

i love my zune 80. however, the ear buds are a double edged sword. they sound great. they are at least as good as any ear buds costing up to $50 i have tried. but there is a weird sound that you hear whenever you touch the wires. this noise is annoying. and it is in the ear buds themselves. i still hear the noise even when the ear buds are not connect to any device.

my wife got me a pair of “in ear” sony ear buds for $35. these don’t fit as nicely in my ear as the zune ear buds. the rubber ear pieces are not as soft. i can hear a faint bit of noise from the sony ear buds when i touch the wire, but it is not nearly as distracting. the sony ear buds don’t sound quite as good as the zune’s either. unfortunately i will use the sony ear buds more than the zune’s because of this issue. darn!

i wonder if the zune’s ear buds pickup noise because of how well they seal against the inside of my ear. i think it is like putting your ear against a door and you hear every touch on the door.

is anyone else experiencing this? with zune ear buds? with other brands of ear buds? any ideas why?

over 600 free zune wallpaper images

i have downloaded lots of zune wallpaper background images. i have already written a mini review of a series of sites that offer images. i was thinking i could make it easy for the rest of you and provide the images i downloaded in one convenient zip file.

click here to download a 18 mb zip file with over 600 images.

DVD to zune evaluation

i have completed my DVD to zune software evaluation. i will post the full article on january 1st on my main web site. in the mean time i can tell you these are the applications you should be looking at for a solution to getting DVD movies on your zune (or other portable device):

videora ipod converter – free – requires DVD decrypter, free
daniusoft DVD to zune converter – $25 – great for zune
DVDfab platinum – $49 – includes DVD copying functions

i bought daniusoft DVD to zune converter because it was inexpensive and worked very well. it also was the only product that let you crop movies to full screen when it copied it from the DVD. this is fantastic for portable players that have standard 4:3 screens, line the zune and ipod nano. highly recommended.

super albums

while working on the merging of mp3 files into a single file, i proved what i suspected about building a super album. a super album is an album that has more songs on it then when it was recorded. for instance, when i created the three song melody from the songs on the abbey road album, media player added the file to the list of songs for abbey road. i then edited the id3 tag to give the “new” song a title of melody and gave it a track number of 18. abbey road only has 17 tracks, but now i have a super abbey road album with 18 tracks.

while ripping my collection i came across a CD called “greatest hits of the 70’s, vol. 7.” don’t asked where the first 6 volumes are. anyway, i plan to take all my one hit wonders from the seventies and add it to this album. instead of the original 10 tracks, it will probably have 110 tracks by the time i am done. all from songs that i would have had a hard time tracking down and attaching artwork to.

merging mp3 files

i was ripping abbey road in windows media player last night and it came to me i wanted to merge three of the songs into one. i came across some instructions that got me close enough. you can use the copy command to combine multiple files into one using the /b option. here is the command i used for the three abbey road songs i needed to merge:

copy /b “The Beatles-Golden Slumbers.mp3″ + “The Beatles-Carry That Weight.mp3″ + “The Beatles-The End.mp3″ “The Beatles-Golden Slumber Melody.mp3″

Notice the double quotes since the filenames have spaces in them, and notice the plus (+) signs between the songs to be combined

It worked like a charm. I can here a very slight tick as the music transitions between the songs, but it is more than good enough for a FREE solution to merging mp3 files.