List of things M$ could do to make Zune not suck.
Yes, I hate my Zune. It would have been completely worth paying double for an ipod or zen or any other MP3 player really. 99.9% of the time I use my $7 512MB Sansa instead because it doesn’t require bloated software, works on any PC and OS, and allows you to organize by folders. If a $7 MP3 player can do it, why can’t a vastly more powerful and expensive Zune?
While the Zune has very capable hardware, the software support is the worst. You can only use the bloated featureless Zune software to do anything, and it does a poor job of it. Below is a list of improvements, many of which a programmer of average skill could add in a weekend.
-Add support for winamp, or at the very least M$’s own Windows Media Player.
-Add support for dragging and dropping files (including music and movies).
-Ability to use as a portable hard drive, even as a boot device.
-Add support for organizing by folders, not just by ID3 tags.
-Add support for organizing playlists.
-Improve performance with the Xbox 360 (it takes more than twice as long to pick a song than over the network).
-Add support for media streaming from a PC over wifi (preferably SMB, the 360’s method would be fine too)
-Do stuff with the internet (radio, media streaming from PC, store, etc.)
-Don’t automatically add DRM to everything that is sent via Wifi. Some of us create/have music that is not copy written or specifically states it is not to be DRMed.
-Add an option to adjust font size. The new firmware which I have not upgraded to looks awful.
-Add support for video codecs besides WMV and add support for lossless audio codecs like FLAC.
-Add support for your own Operating Systems! how about XP64 or Vista64?
And finally:
-Add a bug in the next firmware so that hackers can add the basic functionality that M$ refuses to add but is found in nearly every other MP3 player. Maybe they might actually sell some then aside from when they dumped them on Woot.
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