Zune sucks
Technical ·Thursday January 10, 2008 @ 13:49 EST (link)
Prepared UW transcript request forms. Fixed/punted/duped a few of bugs. Tried installing Zune software (Office got a free 8Gb black Zune as a late Christmas gift), it's buggy and slow as expected from (the rest of, heh heh) Microsoft. Seriously, the download is slow, the "preparing your computer" crap makes me think I'm installing from a stack of 25 3.5" floppies, it got to the end the first time and spontaneously aborted itself with a random error and a link that looked like it might be useful but redirected itself to the generally useless Zune troubleshooting front page.... Woo hoo, this time it got past preparing and into installing. I suppose I should be happy. The packing leaves a fair bit to be desired too: it's awkward (e.g. the earphones are rolled up into a little cardboard tube-box), and they provide these fiddly little earphone covers; I swear my eyesight was about half a diopter worse after putting them on. Also, by default it doesn't show up as a drive, although someone's found a registry hack to make that work (sort of). Nobody wants to fight your idiot Zune software, just give us a drive interface. Anyway, not bad for free, wouldn't pay (very much) for it: at 8Gb, it's smaller than my clunky old (as in 5+ years old) 10Gb Archos Jukebox (Studio 10)—granted, the Archos is much heavier and bulkier.
I plugged the Zune into my Linux box (minas-tirith); it found a USB device, but nothing mountable. Further reading suggests it uses MTP (Microsoft's Media Transfer Protocol), and may be mountable via FUSE (the same wonderful userspace filesystem library that made mounting via FTP possible for me not so long ago) and libmtp. Unfortunately, that doesn't actually work: mounting appeared to work, but ls was really slow and only showed an empty Playlists folder. Probably some sort of security, and you can bet that someone in Linuxland will make the Zune mount properly on Linux, to the approbation of Linux users everywhere. For now, the title says it all.
