Zune Player

At first I was a little skeptical at the quality of the Zune Player, as it’s basically in direct competition with Windows Media Player.  In retrospect, that’s probably what made it what is today.  It’s designed to sync the Zune media player, and it works very well as an alternative to Media Player.  There are a couple problems that I have with it though:

  • It’s a resource hog
  • It requires a good video card to show effects
  • It sorts things in weird ways when meta data is missing

The Zune Player is built on .NET.  It has a very big initial memory footprint.  It gets better as it settles into place.  My assumption is that it’s using WPF to make itself look pretty, and that’s where all the effects come from.  As a result some video cards aren’t capable of handling the effects renderings.  For instance, my laptop’s video card just dies when the effects are on.  Zune will turn them off if need be.  If the Album Artist meta tag is empty, Zune sticks “Various Artists” in place thereof.  Zune sorts based on Album Artist in the default view, so when I loaded my library into it, a whole whack of songs where under Various Artists, which isn’t all that useful.  With that being said, all the (legally) downloaded content had proper meta tags and were sorted perfectly.

However, with all the negatives, comes a few gems.  Sorting is a breeze.  Playlists are extremely easy to build.  Filtering works.  And it’s a really slick UI.

zune

I’m a little miffed the band image is pixilated, but all the extra info brought with it makes up completely.  Talk about slick.

zune2

It also makes decent random playlist decisions.  On the UI and UX side of things it gets the job done.  It’s pretty stable.  It hasn’t blown up on me yet.  I give it my approval.  Check it out: www.microsoft.com/zune.