Filling a Zune from Linux

Thinking that I was up for a challenge, I decided to spend the day figuring out how to put the music in my Banshee library onto a Microsoft Zune. Since my library contains a good number of FLAC files that I’ve ripped in from my CD collection, my solution called for a caching system that converts the FLAC files to mp3s and stores them so that the playlist can be changed without having to re-convert the FLAC files into something that the Zune can play on every sync. My weapons of choice for the project were a Windows XP instance running inside of Sun Virtual Box, and 126 lines of perl script.

The Steps:

1. Create a WinXP VM that has the Zune software installed and can see two shared folders on my Linux machine:
   1. My normal Music folder, which contain my entire collection
   2. The cache folders, which contain all of the FLAC files in my collection, but converted to mp3 so that the Zune can play them
2. Open the Banshee database, located at ~/.config/banshee-1/banshee.db
3. Select all of the FLAC files in the playlist that we’d like to put on the Zune
4. For each, check if it has been converted and cached
   1. If so, simply add the path to the cached copy of the track to an m3u file in the cache folder
   2. If not, convert the track, and then add the path to the cached copy of the track to an m3u file in the cache folder
5. Select all of the mp3 files in the playlist that we’d like to put on the Zune
6. Put those in a separate m3u file that is located in the Music folder.
7. Boot up the Zune software on the VM. It should autoscan it’s monitored folders, find the m3u playlists, and put them in its library
8. Sync the playlists with the Zune by dragging and dropping them to the device icon in the lower left corner of the screen

As previously mentioned, steps 2 through 6 were accomplished by way of a perl script that I can run as often as I like:

#/usr/local/bin/perl

#Requirements: libdbd-sqlite3-perl, flac, lame

#We need database support
use DBI;

#Database path – change this to reflect your user environment
my $dbpath = “dbi:SQLite:dbname=/home/jon/.config/banshee-1/banshee.db”;

#Playlist name – change this to reflect the playlist that you want to export
my $plistname = “Favorites”;

#Cache Path – the path to the directory where you’ve been caching converted FLAC files
my $cachepath = “/home/jon/Storage/mp3Cache/”;

#Music Path – the path to the folder where your music collection is actually stored
my $musicpath = “/home/jon/Music/”;

#Connect to the database – no username/password
my $dbh = DBI->connect($dbpath,”",”",{RaiseError => 1, AutoCommit => 0});

if(!$dbh) {
print “Could not connect to database $dbpath”,”\n”,”Exiting”;
exit;
}

#Pull the list of FLAC files for conversion and caching
my $flac = $dbh->selectall_arrayref(“SELECT sme.TrackID, ct.Title, car.Name AS ‘Artist’, ca.Title AS ‘Album’, ct.Uri, ct.Duration AS ‘Length’ FROM corealbums AS ca, coreartists AS car, coresmartplaylistentries AS sme INNER JOIN coretracks AS ct ON sme.TrackID = ct.TrackID WHERE sme.SmartPlaylistID = (SELECT `SmartPlaylistID` FROM `coresmartplaylists` WHERE `Name` = ‘$plistname’) AND ca.AlbumID = ct.AlbumID AND car.ArtistID = ct.ArtistID AND ct.MimeType LIKE ‘%flac’”);

#open the m3u file to write the cached items to
open my $m3u, ‘>’, $cachepath.$plistname.’_cached.m3u’ or die “Error trying to open cache m3u playlist for overwrite. Do you have write permissions in $cachepath ?”;
print $m3u “#EXTM3U\r\n\r\n”;    #note windows \r\n here

#add /music to $cachepath so that files are in a subdirectory, away from the m3u file
$cachepath = $cachepath.”music/”;
if( ! -e $cachepath ) {
`mkdir “$cachepath”`;
}

#loop through the files and check if they need to be cached
foreach my $i (@$flac) {
my ($trackid, $title, $artist, $album, $uri, $length) = @$i;

#correct the uri by removing the file:// prefix and reverting the uri escaping
$uri = substr $uri, 7;
$uri =~ s/%([0-9A-Fa-f]{2})/chr(hex($1))/eg;

#fix time into seconds
$length = int($length/1000);

#check if the flac file has already been converted and cached at cachepath
#if not, convert it and put it at cachepath.
my $path = $cachepath . $artist . ‘/’ . $album . ‘/’ . $title . ‘.mp3′;
if( ! -e $path ) {
#file dne, convert it
print “\nTrack: $title by $artist has not yet been cached, converting…”,”\n”;

#make sure that the file actually exists before attempting to convert it
if( ! -e $uri ) {
print “WARNING: Track $title by $artist does not exist at $uri”,”\n”;
} else {

#ensure that cache album/artist directories exist
my $partpath = $cachepath.$artist;
if( ! -d $partpath ) {
`mkdir “$partpath”`;
}
$partpath = $partpath.’/’.$album;
if( ! -d $partpath ) {
`mkdir “$partpath”`;l
}

#do the conversion – we’re chaining flac and lame here, reading in the flac file from $uri, and putting the resulting mp3 at $path
`flac -cd “$uri” | lame -h – “$path”`;
}
}

#add the track to the m3u file – note that these entries are relative to the location of the m3u file in the root of $cachepath
#the paths use a backslash and a \r\n newline so that they work correctly on windows
print $m3u “#EXTINF:$length,$artist – $title\r\n”;
print $m3u ‘\\music\\’.$artist.’\\’.$album.’\\’.$title.’.mp3′,”\r\n\r\n”;
}

#close the m3u file in the cachepath directory
close $m3u;

#TODO: scan the m3u file and delete any files that aren’t in it from the cache directory

#Pull the list of MP3 files and dump them into an m3u file
my $flac = $dbh->selectall_arrayref(“SELECT sme.TrackID, ct.Title, car.Name AS ‘Artist’, ca.Title AS ‘Album’, ct.Uri, ct.Duration AS ‘Length’ FROM corealbums AS ca, coreartists AS car, coresmartplaylistentries AS sme INNER JOIN coretracks AS ct ON sme.TrackID = ct.TrackID WHERE sme.SmartPlaylistID = (SELECT `SmartPlaylistID` FROM `coresmartplaylists` WHERE `Name` = ‘$plistname’) AND ca.AlbumID = ct.AlbumID AND car.ArtistID = ct.ArtistID AND ct.MimeType LIKE ‘%mp3′”);

#open the m3u file to write the cached items to
open my $m3u, ‘>’, $musicpath.$plistname.’.m3u’ or die “Error trying to open music folder m3u playlist for overwrite. Do you have write permissions in $musicpath ?”;
print $m3u “#EXTM3U\r\n\r\n”;    #note windows \r\n here

#loop through the files and check if they need to be cached
foreach my $i (@$flac) {
my ($trackid, $title, $artist, $album, $uri, $length) = @$i;

#correct the uri to become a windows file path
$uri = substr $uri, 7;            #remove file:// prefix
$uri =~ s/%([0-9A-Fa-f]{2})/chr(hex($1))/eg;    #correct uri encoding
$uri =~ s/$musicpath//g;            #remove musicpath prefix
$uri =~ s/\//\\/g;                #change forward slashes to backslashes
$uri = ‘\\’.$uri;                #add the leading backslash

#fix time into seconds
$length = int($length/1000);

#add the track to the m3u file – note that these entries are relative to the location of the m3u file in the root of $cachepath
#the paths use a backslash and a \r\n newline so that they work correctly on windows
print $m3u “#EXTINF:$length,$artist – $title\r\n”;
print $m3u $uri,”\r\n\r\n”;
}

#close the m3u file and the database connection
close $m3u;
$dbh->disconnect;

Sorry for the horrible formatting.

The only snag that I hit during the entire process was really my fault – I have a tendency to overcomplicate things, and did so on this project by initially writing the script to output a *.zpl file instead of a *.m3u file. That didn’t work at all, and I ended up simplifying the script greatly by just outputting an *.m3u file and hoping for the best.

On the off chance that the Zune jukebox software refuses to properly update its playlists after you change the *.m3u files, first try deleting them from the application, and then restarting it. If that doesn’t work, you can write a Windows batch script with code similar to the following:

del /q “C:\Documents and Settings\Jonathan\My Documents\My Music\Zune\Playlists\*”
xcopy “\\Vboxsvr\mp3cache\Favorites_cached.m3u” “C:\Documents and Settings\Jonathan\My Documents\My Music\Zune\Playlists”
xcopy “\\Vboxsvr\music\Favorites.m3u” “C:\Documents and Settings\Jonathan\My Documents\My Music\Zune\Playlists”

This script deletes all files from the Zune playlists directory, and then copies each of the *.m3u files that we created with the above perl script directly into the Zune playlists directory. This should force the application to get it’s act together.

Overall, I’m happy with this patchwork job. It allows me to use the Zune on Linux, which is great because the Zune really is a beautiful piece of hardware. Now if only the libmtp guys could get it working natively, without a WinXP VM…

This piece originally appeared at The Linux Experiment

They Just Don’t Get It

This quote from MPAA & RIAA lawyer Steven J Metalitz is why I get so worked up about DRM systems:

We reject the view, that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so.

To recognize the proposed exemption would surely discourage any content provider from entering the marketplace for online distribution… unless it was committed to do so… forever. This would not be good for consumers, who would find a marketplace with less innovation and fewer choices and options.

The quote is taken from a discussion about whether content providers who coat their wares with DRM should be required by law to ensure that purchased media continues to work for perpetuity. Their argument of course is that no piece of machinery can be expected to work forever, and so bully to the customer who purchased DRM’d music or video. However, with all of the major online music retailers selling DRM-free Mp3s, many honest people (read: people who didn’t say fuck it to DRM and pirate all of their music – the very people that allowed big content to continue to survive in the digital era) are left with a significant amount of media that cannot be unlocked due to anti-circumvention laws, and must now be replaced as the old DRM servers are slowly taken offline.

Even after all of this time, the big content owners still don’t understand the digital age. Back in the era of physical media, when formats changed, customers had to purchase their existing media in the new format if they wanted to be able to continue to use it. Because physical media costs money to research, manufacture, and distribute, this makes sense – the customer was simply paying the cost of the record companies developing and manufacturing a better sounding medium. However, where digital music is concerned, none of these costs exist. There was no research to develop Mp3, because it is ready to be licensed. There were no manufacturing costs, besides the few CPU cycles that it took to re-encode the existing media. Likewise, distribution is essentially free, because in most cases, it is third-party retailers who host and sell the content, not the rights holders themselves, and it costs exactly $0 to make a digital copy of a song file. So what exactly are consumers paying for when re-purchasing their previously DRM’d content? The luxury of not being limited in where and how they can use their purchased content? Oh thank you Mr. Rights Holder, thank you! thank you! thank you!

You know how this issue should be handled? Every song that was sold with DRM is now sold without, right? Then a tool should be written and distributed that allows customers to strip the DRM from every file in their collection. For free.

Edit: Comment from Slashdot:

Ups and Downs of Audio

Lately, all of my technology seems to by systematically failing on me as if a demon sent by some higher being of tech has decided that I am no longer worthy to own and operate any of my toys. It started with a flatscreen monitor, spread to my blackberry, took out my iPod along the way, and stopped in for tea at my parent’s house, where it made enough of a mess to call me away from my own problems for a couple of days trying to fix their computers.

My room mates insist that I have a “midas’ touch” that breaks all the technology that I fool about with. I prefer to consider myself unlucky.

Blackberry Media Player

Since I never leave home without my phone, I have recently tried to reduce the amount of crap that I carry around by using my Blackberry as a media player. It has a 4GB memory card in it, and Media Monkey (my jukebox software of choice) treats it just like a USB device that can be filled up with songs from my library.

Normally, after filling the card with music, I simply launch the media application and tell it to shuffle all songs. While it starts playing, the device scans for audio files in the background and fills up a database file of some sort with information gleaned from ID3 tags.

The problems started with a refurbished device that I picked up on a warranty replacement of my original (which mysteriously started to freeze up whenever I used the camera application) – now when I load the songs onto the device, the scanning process seems to find one or two of them, and just ignore the rest. Imagine my joy after leaving the house this morning for a day at work only to find that I had a grand total of two songs available for listening on my device.

My interim solution has been to tell Media Monkey to export an m3u of the playlist that it puts on the Berry to the device. Then I can just tell the device to shuffle that list instead of waiting for the scan that doesn’t work to complete before listening to some of my media. If that doesn’t work, I’ll likely source a different media player app for the device.

Windows Media Playback

Lately, whenever I play music files on my computer (regardless of format, bitrate, or player), they pop and click as if the volume is up too high and the machine is clipping it to compensate. Increasing the amount of buffer memory that Media Monkey keeps helped, as did turning down my levels to prevent clipping; but the noises are still present in the stream.

This one truly puzzles me, as it seems to have started out of the blue, and affects all audio on the system (but not video for some reason). Nothing at the driver or hardware level has changed in recent memory, and the problem spreads across all players, formats, and bitrates, so I don’t think it’s an issue with specific software or codecs.

I’ll keep banging my head against the wall until I figure it out and get back to head banging.

Last.FM Scrobbling

On a good note, I recently decided to try playing about with Last.fm after an official scrobbling plugin was released for Media Monkey. Wow. I cannot believe that I went for so long without using this incredible website, and as a music lover, suggest that anybody who collects music start using it immediately.

The plugin is seamlessly integrated with my player, and does all the heavy lifting in the background so that I don’t even have to worry about it or run a separate app, and the site itself is pretty much astounding.

Occasionally, my music collection feels stale – even though my standard playlist has about 2500 songs in it (as selected by rating), I sometimes get bored of it and go looking for something new. Previously, I accomplished this primarily by listening to Alan Cross, comparing notes with friends, and trolling amazon.ca and wikipedia pages for information about related bands and albums. Now, last.fm allows me to click the ‘related artists’ link from any artist page, or check out it’s suggestions for stuff that I should listen to.

Consider me a convert for life.

Rethinking the Issue of DRM

This morning I found an excellent article called PC Game Piracy Examined written by Koroush Ghazi over at TweakGuides.com that addresses the current state of PC video game piracy, and the so called “death of PC gaming” theory that has been circulating the internet as of late. Readers will recall my DRM essay uploaded some months ago that concluded among other things that

The basic flaws inherent in every DRM system, the rampant destruction of customers right to first sale and fair use, and the fear of device lock-in and market stagnation lead this author to believe that a better solution need be proposed to protect the intellectual properties of media producers.

Upon reading through Ghazi’s lengthy ten page article, I have to admit that I’ve been forced to take a hesitant step backward and re-evaluate some of the opinions that I’ve long held regarding DRM technologies. While I still agree and stand by many of the points made in my essay, his writing has cleverly challenged some of my conclusions.

The concept of Zero-Day Piracy is one that I did not research when writing my essay, and deals with the idea that hype for any product is at its height on launch day. Many expectant fans will rush to obtain the product by whatever means possible as soon as they can, and if a pirated version of that product is available on or before launch day, the first spike of revenue (often what ensures that the studio breaks even and continues to release subsequent products) is lost. In this regard, producers realize that their products will eventually be pirated, and use DRM to ensure that their products stand available only in legitimately purchased form for at least a week after launch. While it sounds hopeless, this week of legitimate sales is instrumental in ensuring the economic success of the product.

Another part of the article that really resonated with me was the discussion of how game developers and publishers are changing their business models to adapt to the problem of mass piracy. Some are choosing DRM, while others are moving toward MMORPG’s with a subscription model, and some are moving away from the PC entirely. As a portion of this section, the author discussed things that developers and publishers can do to try and reduce the number of pirated copies of their games. One of these suggestions called strongly for more demos. I especially appreciate this, as for some reason graphics-heavy games tend to crash my video card drivers on a regular basis (I blame Vista and/or Ultramon), and I like to try a game out to ensure that it will in fact run stable on my system before putting my money down. I had this problem after purchasing Left 4 Dead the other day ($50 later, it’s almost unplayable), and thought twice about buying Far Cry 2 this morning, realizing that it would probably push my machine too far, even though my video card is listed as supported. A demo of that game would have eased my choice along considerably.

While I still believe that DRM is bad for the system in the long run, Ghazi successfully pounds the point home that publishers turn to DRM systems in an effort to offset the damage done to their business by piracy. To excuse piracy on the basis of clever DRM systems that are hard to bypass is to turn a blind eye to the destruction reaped upon the digital marketplace by that same act of piracy and to in effect lend oneself to the continued downfall of beloved products, including music, movies, and video games.

I would recommend that any person who has in the past participated in the piracy of software, movies, or music take the time to read through this article, lengthy though it may be. Entertainment distribution is in a tough place across the board these days, but PC game development in particular is a sector that many inspired artists are dropping out of all together because they can no longer afford the risks involved. These same risks can make it nearly impossible to break into the business as an independent developer, as evidenced by the piracy rate documented by 2D Boy, developers of the incredible title World of Goo. In effect, by continuing to pirate products that we know and love, gamers are contributing to the downfall of this valued form of entertainment, and whether we agree with DRM or not, I think that it is important that we all take a moment to consider the real entertainment value of these products that we take for granted, and consider the true implications of our actions.

Which Music Jukebox Software is Best for You?

I listen to a whole lot of music. There are really no two ways about it; if I’m at home, music is playing on my computer. If I’m not, it’s playing on one of the myriad of portable devices I own. I maintain a music library with just over ten thousand songs spanning most every genre and year in the last half-century. This of course means that I need to run some mean music organization software.

Like most other iPod owners, my default player is Apple’s iTunes, but lately it just hasn’t been impressing me as much as it used to, as evidenced by this long list of complaints:

• Regular memory usage is around 130MB, and that number balloons to well over 250MB if I dare open that new-fangled glossy cover flow feature.
• To make matters worse, if I close the cover flow, usage drops almost immediately to around 180MB, but refuses to dip lower, making me suspect a memory leak.
• I keep the application running 24 hours a day and after about a week of uptime, its footprint can often climb above 300MB (without coverflow), lending more evidence to the memory leak theory.
• As I type this, iTunes is converting some WMA tracks to MP3 while playing music, and is sipping 78% of my 2GHz dual core processor. That’s inexcusable.
• Smart playlists are dumb at best, allowing only a global AND or a global OR for all playlist conditions. Sometimes this just doesn’t cut it, and I find myself chaining two or more playlists or using De Morgan’s law just to figure out the boolean logic behind a desired set of conditions. Yeah, I’m that much of a nerd.
• The iTunes store peddles DRM-laden garbage. Sure, they sell iTunes Plus tracks now, but those are still m4a files (while the rest of the world sells MP3), and most big-label releases are still protected by FairPlay DRM.
• When importing a folder full of songs, it often creates two copies of each track in my library and on my file system. Except that sometimes I get two copies of only some of the tracks, while the others copy as normal…
• If a friend who runs a Mac brings his iPod over, I can’t plug that iPod in and stream tracks off of it because it’s Mac formatted. Sure, Windows doesn’t know the format of that hard drive, but Apple does; couldn’t they write a driver layer that can read it? I’ll bet that they could.
• iPod cables are expensive. What are all of those damned pins used for? My blackberry is a mobile computer and it syncs just fine with a USB cable. Every device on the market uses the USB standard, while Apple sticks to this ridiculous cable with at least 30 pins on it, forcing third party manufacturers to license the design and jacking up accessory cost as a result (ok, this is really an iPod complaint, sue me).
• Lastly, when editing information for multiple tracks, like for an entire album at once, the application doesn’t save my changes to the id3 tags. Yet if i modify the info on each track separately, it does. What gives, Steve?

Overall, considering the long list of features that iTunes does provide, it’s certainly not the worst program ever written, but I can’t help but think that the Windows versions an after thought in Cupertino and that they just don’t get as much polish as the Mac versions of the program. Long story short, I recently went looking for alternatives. The shortlist of what I require from a jukebox application:

• Easy to navigate interface that lets me search, organize, and find my music with ease
• Track ratings. This is a must when your library has more breadth than the weekly Top 40 list.
• Smart and Static playlists that let me automatically partition my music into logical subsets
• Equalizers are nice, but should come with some presets that i can tweak to my setup.
• Low memory footprint with no leaks – I run this app all day long, so make it efficient
• Automatic file system organization so that I don’t have to worry about it.
• Search by track name, artist, album, etc.
• CD burning and ripping is a nice extra, but I can use a third-party app with no complaints if necessary
• XML file importing so that I can migrate my giant library from my existing solution is a must. Honestly, I’ve written a number of simple apps that parse an exported iTunes library (see the sidebar); This is a dead simple feature to add.

And so with the help of the SomethingAwful SHSC community, I’ve installed and played with a number of media players over the last couple of days.

1. Songbird: Perhaps the most full-featured iTunes clone that I’ve ever seen, this app has some serious promise as an iTunes replacement. Memory usage is similar to that of iTunes, but is a little more stable, and doesn’t seem to leak so bad. The interface is fully customizable and skinnable, and it imported my iTunes library in about 5 minutes. Unfortunately, it lacks an equalizer, CD burning or ripping, and has the same poor smart playlist support that iTunes does. I get the feeling that I haven’t even scratched the surface of this players’ feature set, not to mention the hundreds of plugins that you can add from inside the program. Built on the the same XLU framework as Firefox, it’s generally stable, has a tabbed interface, an in-app web browser, and links to SHOUTcast, lastFM, and a ton of other web services. While it’s not quite there yet, I’ll be keeping a close eye on future releases.
2. Zune: Over the summer, I participated in a Zune marketing program and received a free device in return for reviewing it and the player software. My full reviews can be found over at the Bus Error weblog if you’re interested. The basic story goes like this: Track ratings are either “i like it,” “i hate it,” or “not rated,” which doesn’t provide enough resolution for a large library. The interface is pretty and an interesting departure from iTunes’, but the Zune Marketplace and Social are seriously hampered at best in Canada, which is a shame because I’d probably buy a Zune pass and use this thing to discover new music otherwise. Lastly, when filling the Zune from a smart playlist, there’s no way to limit the number of songs in the playlist by size, so if your library is larger than your Zune capacity, it’s a guessing game. The popular iTunes to Zune playlist converter utility (available in the sidebar) was a project of mine written to address the fact that the Zune is an amazing device with crappy software behind it. Unfortunately iTunes is way ahead of the Zune Jukebox, even though Zune brings some great new ideas to the table.
3. foobar2000: For what it does, this program is simply amazing. It plays music with my entire library loaded in just under 35MB of memory, and has more customizable features than you could reasonably count. Unfortunately, it lacks ratings and smart playlists (at least i think so – there are a bunch of playlist options that I just don’t understand), and is about as easy to use as reading a novel printed in binary is to read. This app does everything, but for anything more than playing specific songs, albums, or artists, it requires a bunch of reading to learn about. I’m sure that if I spent a week or two learning the ins and outs, I could get the hang of it, but this player is most certainly not for the consumer marketplace – it’s for people who don’t mind taking time to configure it properly and don’t want high level abstraction from the file system.
4. Media Monkey: One of the only Media Players that I’ve heard of that still offers a paid option. I suppose when you don’t have a store and you’re not open sourced, you have to make money somehow. The free version has a good feature set, and a lifetime license is worth $20, considering the extra features that are enabled with it. On first launch, it took about 10 minutes to index my music folder, detected that I had iTunes installed, and imported all of the library data from it. Unfortunately, this last step took forever, although I could listen to all of my music in the mean time – it just isn’t all tagged properly. At first glance, this appears to be the best jukebox software ever written. It sorts by just about any criteria you could wish for without making playlists, automatically pulls track information from amazon or wikipedia, has podcast, SHOUTcast, and ICEcast, and a web browser built in, and has a direct link to purchase any track in your library from the Amazon store. As of yet, this is by far the most impressive media player that I’ve ever encountered. I will be purchasing the full license and temporarily adopting it as my main jukebox. Expect to hear more about this app in the future.

So there you have it. As per usual, Apple is shiny and simple but doesn’t necessarily include every feature that one could want. Microsoft brings a strong contender to the table, but fails to pull ahead in the race, likely until they throw a few more billion dollars at it. The open sourced Songbird looks promising, but as with most open sourced projects, will need to hit version two before it’s viable for the mass marketplace, and foobar2000, while an example of impressive programming, is so stripped down and customizable that it would confound the average user. Kind of like Linux. Ok, that wasn’t really a fair jab. For now, I’m going to be playing with Media Monkey, and I’ll share my experiences when I’ve thoroughly explored its feature set.

Which player is best for you? If you’re not a computer enthusiast, and don’t feel like paying $20 for a media player, I’d go with iTunes. It’s simple, intuitive, and provides every feature that the average user expects. If you don’t like rating your music, or have a collection of less than 100 songs, check out the Zune player – it’s a neat twist on iTunes, even if it’s not that great for large collections yet. Songbird is most certainly an app to keep in mind, and will probably become a possible iTunes killer as it approaches maturity. Meanwhile, if you want an eye opening experience that will show you how a media player ought to work, look into Media Monkey. It really is cool.

Cheers,

Jon

Edit: As pointed out by my colleague Jake Billo in the comments of this post, some of what I wrote about iTunes in this post was 100% made up and totally incorrect. Not that I was intending to lie about it, but some of my thoughts regarding iTunes were misconceptions. For the record, if you haven’t yet challenged your membership to the cult of Steve, you should still try to do so – there are alternatives out there. And yes, the grass is greener on the other side.

No, Zune does Not support iTunes Libraries

This post by Matt Rosoff over at the CNet Digital Noise blog was brought to my attention by a colleague today. It is a response to an earlier NY Times article by Saul Hansell that forwards the hypothesis that iPod to Zune converts are scarce because most users have so much data inputted into iTunes that moving to new jukebox software requires a substantial commitment of time and effort.

The CNet article responds to this hypothesis by claiming that the Zune jukebox software can, in fact, support existing iTunes libraries. The author points out that the Zune software plays AAC files (the native ripping format for iTunes), and that it scans the default iTunes music directory for files on startup.

Unfortunately, what he fails to realize is that these actions do not in and of themselves constitute support of the iTunes library format. Real support would be an XML reader that allowed users to actually import their libraries – including all meta data, album art, playlists, and ratings – into the Zune jukebox software.

Songbird (an open source media player that supports plugins, and looks as though it will be very interesting come v1.0) does provide such a feature (as an optional plugin), that works extremely well. It is also rumoured to support Zune players, and will likely be my new media player of choice if they get smart playlists implemented any time soon.

Instead, Rosoff claims that the lack of converts between players is due to a lack of compelling Zune features, and overall customer satisfaction with the iPod product. While these claims may in fact be true, his argument about Zune support for iTunes libraries is downright false. Hansell, on the other hand has it right with this statement:

But now many iPods are replacements by people who already have substantial music collections in iTunes. For those people, the choice is between buying an iPod that will simply work with all their music or investing the time and effort to try to convert everything into Zune’s formats.

Where the term ‘formats’ is not referring only to the physical format of music files on the Users’ machine, but also to the internal database format that their library is kept in within their jukebox software. As a user of both players, I fall into this category – my library contains well over 8K songs, most of which are properly tagged, rated, and organized into playlists. While the Zune jukebox did indeed recognize, import, and find correct meta data for most of my files, it did not retain their ratings, number of plays, number of skips, or any of the other handy errata that iTunes assembles for every file in its library, or any of my playlists.

In my own opinion, the reason that the Zune has yet to dent the iPod monopoly is due mostly to the fact that it is roughly the same price as the iPod, and its two features that could very well kill the iPod require a snowball effect of users to make a dent.

I’m talking about the wireless music and photo sharing, and the much-hyped Zune social. Wireless sharing is basically a non-feature here in Canada, as I can only think of two other people that I know who have Zunes, and have never found one while using the Zune in public. The Zune social suffers from the same lack of users, as well as crippled functionality outside of the Continential USA.

That said, if these features were to gain enough users that it became commonplace for everybody to know at least one friend who owned a Zune, well then Microsoft might have an iPod killer on their hands. Until then, it is just as Hansell says – Microsoft is still waiting for the Zune Generation.

Edit: The latest release candidate of Songbird supports smart playlists (that are almost identical to the feature in iTunes), but has yet to implement Zune support. Being open source however, it’s just a matter of time. Check this page out for more info on new Songbird features.