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First Look: Microsoft Zune: Page 3 of 4

Overall, the Zune player software offers fewer features than the iPod -- not only the things nobody uses in the iPod anyway, like the Contacts and Calendar, but the iPod niceties like the ability to adjust the speed of playback for audio book files, or an equalizer with a wider variety of settings.

The Zune desktop software is one area where the Zune definitely doesn't take a back seat to the iPod. I find setting up iTunes and using it to get music onto an iPod . . . challenging. There are no challenges at all with the Zune application. Put the CD in your PC, and it installs the software, searches your hard disk for music files (it reads MP3, WMA, and AAC formats -- that's right, the same AAC files that are the iPod default), and tees them up for you to load, or "sync," into your Zune player.

(The Zune application requires a PC running Windows. I tried, but I couldn't install it on OS X or Linux machines. I can't say I was shocked by that. But I was extremely disappointed to find that I couldn't install Zune on a Windows 2000 machine, either. Currently Windows XP is the only OS you can use if you want a Zune.)

Driving In Automatic

Some of the automatic features don't work quite as well as they could -- the Zune displays a placeholder cover for every album and says it's searching for album art, for example, but it doesn't say where it's searching and it doesn't seem to find much. The automatic function that needs the most help is the import function. I'll admit not all my MP3 files were properly ID3 tagged with album/artist/track information, but the tracks are stored neatly in individual folders on my PC. The Zune import operation resulted in about half my albums being lumped into a single album titled "Unknown" -- a useless mess. (To be fair, the iTunes software for the iPod is just as bad, if not worse.)

The desktop application lacks in some other areas, too. Most notably, there is no support for acquiring media files via RSS subscription. I wouldn't expect Microsoft to call them "podcasts," but I would expect the Zune to handle them.