Answering Zune Questions

Date: December 6, 2007
Time: at 9:06 pm
Posted in: in microsoft, mp3 player, technology, zune
Comments: Comments (0)

My last post regarding the Zune 2.2 release gained quite a bit of attention! I’ve gotten several questions through the Ask Me section about various Zune-related issues.

I’ve selected two of the priarmy questions. I’ll try to address these as best as I can.

Here goes…

The first one comes from Gordon:

So… I have music that I want to arrange into an album, but the new Zune interface seems to stubbornly not let me manually manage my files individually. Even though the “album” name is the same, as long as the artist of the files are different, it separates that collection as separate albums. Am I missing something? I really would hate to have to reorganize what I already have on my zune unit.

–Gordon

That’s, unfortunately, from what I’m aware, an issue with most music libraries. Primarily, songs in the library are organized by Artist > Album > Song, so if the album name is the same, but the artist is different, it will separate them. However, in several of my cases, this hasn’t been a problem. For most of my “Various Artists” tracks, the primary Artist is “Various Artists” while the “Contributing Artist” is different. This way, an individual song will split up when viewing songs by a particular artist, but when viewing albums, all of them are together. You might try a setup similar to this and see if it works.

From Larry:

I am having trouble trying to reinstall the firmware on my zune 30. I have the zune to the point where it says to connect to pc but that is as far as it goes because the zune software program says the firmware is up to date. So what next?

Have you tried restoring the software on the Zune? Note that this will delete all contents of the Zune, so be sure everything is in your library first. On the Zune 30, the first step is to hold the back <- button and the UP button on the pad at the same time. Then, press and hold the back <- button, the leftOK button the same time. The device should then begin restoring and will take a few minutes. After this is finished, the device will ask to be connected to your PC at which point will update the Zune firmware and sync if applicable. Hope this helps!

- Adam