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A Hands-On Zune Review
jayintune writes "2old2play.com got the chance to sit down with Microsoft's new media player, the Zune, to give some comments and insight into the players User Interface, Video Playback, Music Sharing, as well as software and setup." From the article: "I had expected the player to be fairly heavy, but after holding the Zune in my hand it was clear that I was wrong. It is not as light as the latest video iPod, but compared to my fourth-generation iPod, the Zune was lighter. The top of the Zune had a clear glass layer while the exterior had a tactile feel to it, nothing like the hard metal and plastic of the iPod devices. The 'skin' of the Zune was a 'rubberized' material that had a smooth seductive feel to it. I found myself unable to stop stroking the device, so much that the demo assistant asked me to put it down."
I think he did answer that in the review: "Upon a successful transfer, the music is wrapped with a digital rights management (DRM) layer which will give the user a three day or three-listen license." I would imagine that this is as simple as Microsoft somehow tagging the file within the Zune's filesystem (nobody ever said its file management would follow a standard) to prohibit redistribution of the music to other devices, playing more than three times, or playing after three days. Microsoft has complete control over the platform, after all, so I would assume they went about this the "easy way" by doing something like this. It's similar to what Sony did with Minidisc recorders back in the day. Music recorded through an optical or digital source was not encoded differently on a Minidisc, but was "tagged" in the file system to prevent playback of that track through a digital output connection (to prevent redistribution of nearly-perfect digital copies from player to player to player...)
Like I said, I'm not a Microsoft schill or anything, and don't care either way about the Zune or whether or not people will use it / like it / stroke it. I'm just interested in the technology and getting the biggest bang for my buck when I eventually purchase a music player. Competition with Apple's iPod from the Microsoft camp can only mean good things for the consumer, regardless which player they choose to purchase.
Not to mention the fact that 4th gen iPod weighed 5.6 oz. and Zune weighs 5.6 oz. Miraculously, Zune is lighter.
When I meet a girl in a bar, unless it was the starting subject, talk about music is usually scraping near the bottom of the conversation barrel. Even if music is an important subject, what are the odds that said girl will have dumped her $300 Ipod for a Zune and will be able to recieve your music?
Right on, but it's worse than that. If you do ever meet some kind of rare recorded music groupie, is there any chance in hell they would be impressed by "sharing" a song three times? Like Jobs said, it's much more fun to stick your headphone in her ear.
Where do you meet people who want to trade music anyway!?
Class, work, family reunions, anywhere people meet regularly. In that case, anyone who really cares to share or trade is going to haul their laptop, USB disk or non crippled music player. These people are the music industry's best customers, because having something to share brings prestige and CDs are good hard copy backups.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Here is a blurb from the frontpage of their website:
Yep, and they seem to be pretty good at it too
Toshiba is also giving away Free Ear Buds and Covers along with the Zune. Car Charger and Sync Cable are expected to be provided by Taiwanese giant, FoxConn. Flextronics expected to provide AV Cable. AsKey will provide all the IR and FM parts.
Yes, but it's only $150 for a 20gig Zen Photo Sleek. Which is large enough for most people. I hate that Apple keeps dropping their lowest model in order to keep the price above $250. In 3 months, the 30 gig ipod will be history.
There are already YouTube downloader-converters and standalone .flv converters for the iPod.
Windows users can already paste a url into iTube, and it will download YouTube's .flv files, convert them to .mp4 format, and add them to iTunes, which will then sync those movies to your iPod.
Mac users can already paste a url into PodTube, and it will download YouTube's .flv files, convert them to .mp4 format, and add them to iTunes, which will then sync those movies to your iPod.
SUPER is another Windows program that converts .flv files to .mp4 for iPod.
iSquint is another Mac program that converts .flv files to .mp4 for iPod.
Every one of the programs I mentioned are freeware.
Albuquerque PC
>PlaysForSure still exists, and those that bought PFS music can still buy many PFS players. They
>won't buy Zunes, but how does that mean that they were "FUCKED by Microsoft"? They can buy still
>buy PFS players, just as they could before Zune.
Yes you can still buy PFS player... BUT FOR HOW LONG?? Analysts are predicting that Zune won't take iPod market share but it will take the share of non-iPod players. So MS is aiming to sink the PFS community with a new entrant.
Looks like MS have thought of that whole can of worms... They don't apply DRM
We don't actually "wrap all songs up in DRM:" Zune to Zune Sharing doesn't change the DRM on a song, and it doesn't impose DRM restrictions on any files that are unprotected. If you have a song - say that you got "free and clear" - Zune to Zune Sharing won't apply any DRM to that song. The 3-day/3-play limitation is built into the device, and it only applies on the Zune device: when you receive a song in your Inbox, the file remains unchanged. After 3 plays or 3 days, you can no longer play the song; however, you can still see a listing of the songs with the associated metadata.
So they don't DRM stuff, but there is a 'hard limit' built into the device itself. Apparently.
The best is the enemy of the good
I was originally going to post a Windows-only method that involved GraphEdit and some non-standard DirectShow filters, but then a brainfart revealed this cross-platform solution:
mplayer -vo null -dumpaudio foo.flv && mv stream.dump foo.mp3
The audio in an .flv file is already MP3 (in every file I've run across, anyway). All you need to do is demux the file and save the audio; MPlayer can do that, and it's available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux (maybe others, too).
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.