Ardent Meridian

After missing having access to a subscription music service, I decided to re-subscribe to the Zune service with a ZunePass and start using my original 30GB Zune device.  I actually quite liked the service (though I have never been a fan of the hardware), but I was driven away by the lack of support for 64-bit Vista.

The x64 build of Zune 3.0 installed seemingly without incident.  Initial configuration and re-activation of my ZunePass subscription was smooth and simple, even if it flipping you over to Internet Explorer for any account management operation is rather silly and disjointed.

The Zune 3.0 software is generally slick and fast in local operation.  At least as long as it is not talking to the Zune servers.  Getting it to display a simple list of the top 100 rock tracks took over a minute.  Other, similar, operations were also unfathomably slow.  iTunes on Windows gets a, deservedly, bad rap for being slow, but it moves like a whippet with a bum full of dynamite compared to browsing the Zune marketplace.

I though perhaps I was experiencing some sort of network contention or ISP slow-down, but a quick check of that showed I was getting a consistent 12 Mb/s downstream.  It certainly is not a PC performance issue, as the Zune software was the only foreground application running on an 8-core PC with 16 GB of RAM.

This is irritating and not the end of the world, although there is no good reason for it that I can see and waiting on software due to inefficiencies in its implementation of lack of proper capacity on the back-end is not something I am ever going to say I am happy about.

So, then I plugged in my original 30 GB Zune device.  Things here took a serious down turn.

First Windows decides it is going to search my pre-configured driver folders for the requisite drivers.  It spends the better part of 20 minutes at this, which is ridiculous.  I could copy my entire system volume to another drive in less time.  And at the end of this it does not even find a driver for the device!

I tried installing the driver manually, and that failed.  So I figure I will reboot the machine in case there is some pending setting or file operation that the installer has neglected to inform me about.  The next joy I encounter is my machine taking almost 10 minutes to shutdown.  My normal shutdown town is right around a minute … and has been that way for the better part of a year.  The Zune software was the only thing that had been installed since my last shutdown – so no prizes for guessing where the issue is.

Which is an aside, but Windows has to be the only O.S. I know of that pleads with errant processes to terminate, instead of yanking the rug out from then and stomping them into oblivion.

I am sorry, but I said SHUTDOWN not “power down whenever you can be bothered to get around to it”.  At a minimum, if shutdown operations run over a minute either give me a list of tasks that are still running so I can choose the ones to kill or offer me the option to just kill everything NOW.

Yes, I know, you can wind up with corrupt files that way.  Though that is far less likely than when the user gets impatient and pulls the plug on the entire machine when ONE errant non-I/O bound process refuses to close ahead of others that would happily exit.  This is just stupid and unnecessary.

But I digress …

Upon rebooting the machine, and reconnecting my Zune device, it is immediately recognized, the Zune software loads and I am prompted to upgrade my Zune to the latest firmware.  This goes quickly and without incident.  In fact compared to the same process on an iPod or an iPhone, if you blinked you would miss it.

I erase the device to remove old content (some of which seems to have disappeared from the Zune marketplace entirely … I guess that subscription feature is more conditional than it first seems …), and there is no content present in my Zune collection on the PC.

And then the fun begins …

I try to synchronize the device, over USB 2.0 (I have not tried wireless syncing yet), and it is now going on 1 hour and 46 minutes and the sync is 23% complete.  There is no bloody content to synchronize!  What on earth is the damn thing doing?

This is utterly ridiculous.  If this was a new Zune device this would be enough to have me immediately driving back to the store to return the damn thing, followed by an angry call to Microsoft to get my $14.95 refunded for a patently pointless ZunePass subscription.

This is a Microsoft device on a Microsoft operating system, how the hell do you screw that up?  Especially when iTunes and the iPod or iPhone is nothing like this much hassle.

Now, obviously this is not typical.  I never had issues like this on 32-bit Vista and before Zune 3.0 – the behavior was always smooth and reliable.  However in trying to resolve these issues all I can find is other people with similar problems, all of whom are bandying about conjecture as to the issue with no one seeming to have a real fix.

The reality, for me, here is this: subscription music is awesome (as long as I have the option to purchase).  I wish Apple would implement such a service, and in fact if they did I would not have bothered re-investigating the Zune world in the first place.  And I am sorely regretting bothering to do so as it is.

If after this first sync completes, assuming it ever actually does, the next sync takes longer than an equivalent sync on an iPod then this particular Zune will come to a very public meeting with a large mallet and I will be writing off Microsoft’s music hardware and software permanently.

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