Zune Suggestions

Today on my Google Reader, an interesting post popped up from Engadget, I believe. The famous 'Zune Guy' was getting his tattoos covered up and was dropping his support for Microsoft's mp3 player. The concept of being that fanatical about a product strikes me as silly, because Microsoft had very little reason to be loyal to the guy, and he dropped them pretty damn quick.

Anyways, I bring this up because I own a black Zune 80. It's a pretty solid little device (literally, I dropped it while in its case onto concrete, and it was fine. Phew.), but I do have some suggestions for the Zune team. Note that I've only owned this one MP3 player, so I don't have a basis for comparison with the iPod or anything like that. Anyways, here they are:

1) Unicode support on the device would be really awesome. It's difficult to tell the difference between two Japanese songs with the same length of title without listening, for example.

2) The metadata changes made by the Zune software could use some help. Most of the Japanese songs mentioned above had English titles, but now their titles appear as lovely boxes on the Zune player. Perhaps the software could attempt to interpret metadata from the folder structure of the songs or the software could hook into one of the many free metadata databases out there. Just watch out for the Linux trolls trying to go Gandalf on you:

"You shall not pass, spawn of Bill Gates!"

3) This will probably be the most controversial suggestion: how about the ability to send songs to other Wi-Fi enabled players? (with the 3-play restriction, of course) This is because, as the Zune Insider wrote in his blog a while back, the FM receiver and the Social are to accomodate the discovery of new music (to be found on the Marketplace for a nominal fee, of course). The problem with this is that there aren't very many Zunesters out there. If a Zunester could send songs to his friends, then his friends would feel obligated to return the favor. At this stage, techies would probably try to hack the Zune to receive files or something, probably breaking the 3-play restriction at the same time. But what about non-technical users? I suspect that they'll either give up or look more closely at the Zune and the Marketplace. Of course, I don't have any scientific data for that.

4) Speaking of the Marketplace, I'd sure like to be able to access the Marketplace while in Canada. I don't necessarily need to access the music or video, even just the Podcasts would be nice. As Paul Colligan wrote, the Zune platform is more friendly for podcasting than even the mighty iTunes. That's pretty awesome, let me in on that!

5) More codec support is always a good thing (*.avi for video being the biggest I can think of). At the very least, sync up the codecs supported by the players and the codecs supported by the software (and keep them synced up).

Just a few thoughts. Anyways, see my next post on Tuesday!

F1R5T P05T!

So, here's the first post on this thing. The plan is to post on here Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Not necessarily a massive essay each time, but something.

What will be on here?

Stuff about being a 23-year old Computer Science student from Saskatchewan, Canada (luckily, there's enough people who fit that description that people who don't know my nickname won't be able to figure out who I am. Stuff on development, computer science (of course).

Eventually, I want to build a website for the content I put here, and make it more public by revealing who I am, but I want content to have first.

Maybe in 2009.

Anyways, see people on Saturday!