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Zune
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lisan al gaib
Underrated
Microshaft thinks it's the cool kid on the block, but that's only head-canon
By the time it came out literally everyone who wanted a good portable music player already had an iPod, and nobody cared about any features except playing music so there was no reason for anyone to switch.
zoomer revisionism
By the time the Zune came out they'd sold something like 150 million iPods anon. Everyone had one, especially after other options for syncing to it besides iTunes came out.
ipods were mostly for rich kids and manchild adults. not only was the ipod expensive but you had to have already spent hundreds on cds to import them or you could pay 99 cents a song on primitive early itunes. a simple mp3 player was infinitely more functional and cheaper.
"le every goy had one" simply isn't true.
The shuffle and mini lines weren’t badly priced. I got a shuffle in ‘05, the 512mb shuffle was 3x the price of the bottom barrel 128mb chinkshit. It wasn’t an outrageous cost.
A lot of people had them, and you're forgetting this was the heyday of Limewire. As far as your average high school kid was concerned, music was free. (It also usually had inaccurate tags in the metadata, but we got what we paid for.)
apple went out of their way to make adding your own mp3s to an ipod ridiculously convoluted and annoying
one frickup and you'd wipe your ipod cause of how sync worked
better zoomoids don't know
I literally do not remember it being hard at all. You just put those songs in your iTunes library and then sync them like you would songs you bought. I never actually bought a single song on iTunes. It was just music I ripped from my CD collection, and songs I downloaded from Limewire.
Hell, you could add songs with Rhythm box on Linux, too.
I know there was a way to syncronize your library with the iPod, rather than just add songs and leave what's on there alone, and that could frick things up, but you just don't do that then.
It was only hard if you didn't understand the concept of folders or how software managed it. The average person at the time would download from limewire or whatever, but not understand where the file was or how to get it into iTunes. Not to mention the concept of syncing your ipod vs manual music management fricked some people up to.
It really wasn't that hard to understand. Your iPod was a copy of a library. If you sync from another library, you remove the previous.
You're right, it wasn't hard to understand. But people would still wipe their entire collections like that through sheer ignorance, then rage because they lost access to their itunes library or some dumb shit.
That's just mind boggling to me. As a 12 year old with other 12 year olds we'd be like
>yeah you can sync my library to get this game but you get stuck with my music too
and we'd just do it
You must have been amongst high iq circles. I was also a 12 year old and this shit would happen more often then you'd think. That said, most people I knew had these lil homies, so the idea that you could just stick your mp3 in someone elses computer and get their music and that had to work on the pod cause it was expensive was probably part of the psychology of it.
I am convinced you never actually used an iPod or downloaded songs. iTunes was piss easy to use and syncing was a literal click. You could also easily change song information. How old are you? BTW, I fricking hate Apple but saying the thing didn't work is silly. That was Apples whole thing, "it just works" (and it's bullshit, but whatever).
By the time the iPod was discontinued they had sold 450 million units. That's more than 3 times as many as the Game Boy. I don't think you understand how popular it was.
The iTunes Store also didn't even exist when it first came out, iTunes was primarily for ripping CDs (or syncing music you pirated).
>I don't think you understand how popular it was.
in north america
You dumb frick
Now I'm convinced you're a zoomer who thinks it was the same as the iPhone. Literally the only first-world countries where the iPod had less than 60% market share were Japan and Korea.
The software was outrageously bad, but once you finally had your music loaded the hardware experience was unmatched.
Actual zoomer revisionism. The zune software for the original Zune was shite but the Zune with the 80/120 and Zune HD had fantastic software.
I was around for the duration and didn't like any of the versions. It was an absolute nightmare getting it to play nice with ID3 tags and album art.
Audiosurf was amazing on the HD. It murdered the battery though.
The racing game was neat, especially how good it looked on such a small device. Another battery killer though.
Actual geezer revisionism. Microsoft is incapable of producing good software.
The HD was so far ahead of everything else out there. The way the menu navigation worked was easy to use. The sync software was ok, would have been nice if you could just manually copy shit over.
I still use the zune software for my music
amir.
they had no interest in selling it outside of north america.
They tried to be like Apple and force software lock in like with iTunes, but they were worse at it
why do you need this anyway
Dedicated media players made sense back when phones could hold about two CDs worth of music and cellular data was too slow and expensive to stream it.
The initial Zune software was based on Windows Media Player and for all intents and purposes it sucked. People were already invested in the iPod and tech journaloids loved to treat MS as a punching bag at the time. Zune was treated as a joke, despite being better than iPods in a number of ways. The initial release just wasn’t that strong, when it absolutely needed to kick ass.
On a sidenote, I’m suprised that no one talks about Zune Pass, perhaps the earlier music streaming service. It’s why I had a Zune even as late as 2012.
t. Someone who had a brown Halo 3 Zune (and still owns one)
too late, not good enough
I still use my 120GB Zune from 2008. Still works well.
Damn, nostalgia is kicking hard. I remember when me and my brother were younger and he would told me about Zune. He used to say it was the greatest next thing and he was planning on getting one for himself. Years go by so fast...
Man even as a kid who didn't know any better I hated using that Zune desktop program. Still have my ZuneHD around and I have a lot of nostalgia for it.
It was made by Microsoft.
smartphones.
zune was top tier though, beautiful onscreen interface. had a rio karma before that, also pretty good.
I had a Zune. It had more storage space, more features, and a better UI. It only failed because of marketing for Apple products being so good.
The Zune launched with 30/80GB same as the iPod, and Apple then introduced a 160GB iPod which the Zune never matched. Outside of that nobody cared about any of the other features on either, people only bought them to play music.
The other underrated feature of the iPod was anti-skip - it would load an hour of upcoming music into RAM then park the hard drive, so if you didn't change playlists it could keep playing flawlessly while you shook it around. A lot of other hard drive based players just didn't work if you were running etc.
the itunes music store was the killer app. as much as people whined about piracy the fact is most people were too tech illiterate to know how to get mp3 music. when apple made it easy (itunes music store was a good, simple, clean product at first) they won.
The iTunes store was also audibly better than anywhere else you could buy digital music, since they used AAC while everyone else used MP3. And when they updated it to DRM-free 256kbps you could just update everything you ever bought to that at no cost.
then they ruined it! and Spotify ate their lunch. Apple seriously needs a leadership change at the top.
How did they ruin it? It still works the same today, you pay for music and get DRM-free downloads. Subscription rental services are a different product, and I think Apple Music is actually better than Spotify in many respects (e.g. you get lossless and Dolby Atmos without paying extra, including on Android).
the interface for itunes music used to actually serve the user. it was efficient, clean, and functional. as they started integrating store functions and nudging it became less usable. now it's entirely pointless to use because it doesn't serve its core user function very well and instead is designed to direct the user into apple services. this started years ago.
You can literally just turn off the store. It's always been like this.
The small zune was frickin awesome. I had one, loved it. Best MP3 player Ive ever had to this day.