DO IT JUST LIKE ITUNES!!! I have been thinking about going back to an ipod because the Zune software really sucks compared to iTunes. There are no features in it that we use
***ADD AUTO VOLUME LEVELING*** This is a real pain the a** when you are playing music at a party or just for the day and you constantly have to keep adjusting volume up and down...up and down all day long
**When switching from my music collection to marketplace (or any other window) Make it go back to the song playing, not at the top of the list
**Change the way the edit works when changing songs titles, artist, genre, etc. Make it so it actually changes the information in the MP3 file!!
**Album art does not work well
**Shuffle does not work well either....the other day it played two exact songs right in a row...just different artist...but same exact title....does not switch between artists enough either....just make it more random
**Allow to search for duplicate songs
HOW ABOUT THIS...MAKE IT AT LEAST AS GOOD AS ITUNES BECAUSE YOU'RE GOING TO LOSE A LOT OF PEOPLE!! NEVER COULD UNDERSTAND WHY YOU REMOVE FEATURES THAT EVERYONE LOVED??! ARE YOU TRYING TO PUT YOURSELF OUT OF BUSINESS.....OR JUST TOO BUSY WORRYING ABOUT BUYING YAHOO!
Thank you everyone for your feedback. We included the initial pass of this thread as the validation of the initial specifications for the feature design back in December. I have since reviewed around 200 of the posts to this thread and compiled the typical uses of autoplaylists described in the thread.
I can't commit to when features will be released or if they will ever be released, as product release schedules change over time. Though you should realize that the user community feedback plays heavily into our designs for upcoming releases.
From the review of this thread the compiled usage looks like this.
User were using these criteria, and they were typically “AND”ed together:
1. Rating: Top Rated/Unrated/Rated 1,2,3,4,5 stars( Love/Hate)
2. Date Added: Relative to now, Recently Added, Date Added in last X/7/30 days/Weeks/Months
3. Play count: Not Played/Least Played/Most Played/Play count of X
4. Genre(s): In some cases ORed (Ex: Rock or Rock\Alternative), NOTE: A lot of people were using Genre\Subgenre as a custom Tag
5. Artist: AlbumArtist, TrackArtist/ContributingArtists. In some cases ORed (Ex: Police or Sting)
6. Last played date: typically relative to today and looking for old tracks
7. Release year: of album, mostly for use in decade(60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc)
8. Tags: mp3 tag/subgenre/keyword/custom, a word uses to tag track in one of many fields
9. IsProtected/Purchased: typically used interchangeably by users …but these are different as users can purchase mp3s which aren’t protected
10. File Location: typically under path
These were mentioned but only by very few responses:
11. AlbumTitle/TrackTitle: user examples were used for cleanup, novelty, or a single favorite…mostly for sync to device
12. Flag: from Z 06 device, mostly used to cleanup metadata or bad track, Tags might be able to serve this roll as well (Ex: FixMetadata, BadRip, etc)
13. Mood: mostly novelty use, another possible Tag
14. Tempo/BPM: mostly for workouts
15. Rated date
16. Play count on weekends/weekdays
17. File type: MP3/WMA/WMV/etc
18. Bit rate
19. File size
20. Parental Rating
21. On Device
Very few video or photo scenarios mentioned…but I didn’t explicitly ask for them
22. (VIDEO) Date Added/Unwatched X Episodes from Y TV Series
23. (PHOTO) Date Added/Tag
Zach Johnson Zune Client Development Lead .: This posting is provided as-is with no warranties, no rights :.
Users exclude/filter using:
1. Filter out Genre: comedy, audio book, and chrismas, children, classical, etc
2. Filter out Rating X/Hated
3. Filter out Tags/Keyword/Custom/SubGenre
4. Filter out Explicit
5. Filter out Artist
User limited results using:
1. Song Count
2. Total Size(actual filesize not including transcode file size or if their are multiple files backing a single track)
3. Total Duration
Users ordered result using:
1. Sort by random
2. Sort by release year
3. Sort by rating
4. Sort by genre
5. Sort by play count
6. Sort by last played date
7. Sort by date added
8. Sort by file type
Users referred to only a couple groupings:
1. AlbumTitle
2. Artist
The interesting part here is the top ten criteria were heavily used and then there was a big gap to the 11th criterion. Also it was quite clear users were using several different fields to mark content with a concept that then was used for inclusion or filtering. In almost all those cases it could easily be done with a concept similar to Tags. Additionally many people were using ratings like Tags.
Feel free to review this list and make sure your use is represented and respond accordingly.
_Z
Zune 30gb? - Waste! iPod Classic, 160gb - Dusty. iPhone wife has it. iPhone 3g, posting from it. :) Suck it Zune!
If you make it just like iTunes....then you will be on the right track! Genre, artist, blah blah blah. On Zune device make another category called recently added so I can just click on that and start playing in addition to artist, genre, etc. so I just
Also when switching from marketplace to collection it never takes you back to the song you were playing.....always takes you back to top of list which is very annoying.
Also make song searching easy by adding a search box to the collection screen allowing you to search songs with having to sort them by song
I dont deal with stupidity. Take your problems elsewhere.
I thought my auto playlists were not working at all until I realized what they are doing. If I create a playlist that says to include genre and then pick on in the drop down list, it will include anything with that word in it. An example is a playlist that I created to include Rock for certain years and find that it includes "rock" "surf rock" "rockabilly", etc. Is there a way to have it include on the exact genre and not anything that contains any part of that word?
(I figured it out. FYI, you can edit the genre in the auto playlist to include the quotes so if I want Rock I change it to "rock" and that's exactly what I get. I wasn't aware that I could edit the drop down list contents.)
The fix, if there is one created in the future would be to add Equals in the qualifier drop down list instead of just Include and Exclude.
Carl of San Francisco (The one and only!)
www.tigermendoza.co.uk