Music Collection Issues

If the Zune team is watching this forum (which happens to be the most popular right now), would you please post some guidance?

Are these issues 'patch-justified' that I should just wait for an update before trying the assorted band-aid solutions I'm seeing from unknown users?  

Also, if someone from the Zune team does, indeed, post to this message board, is there a way for a common person like me to know that you truly do work for Microsoft?   At the risk of sounding paranoid, I don't want to follow guidance from an anonymous user with malicious intent and risk damaging my system. 

Didn't work for me.  I'm glad I did the update first at work and not at home. My wife is NOT going to be happy with this if we update at home. What a joke.

XP Pro-zune 30-1.0 to v2 dissapointed so far...let's pray for a fix soon

Scott Zune Product Team .: This posting is provided "as-is" with no warranties, and confers no rights :.

 Skinnylittleman wrote:

Didn't work for me.  I'm glad I did the update first at work and not at home. My wife is NOT going to be happy with this if we update at home. What a joke.

XP Pro-zune 30-1.0 to v2 dissapointed so far...let's pray for a fix soon

WWW.MICHIGANDNB.COM

That fix worked pretty good. However, for the album art I had to delete the album art picture that the zune software created for the correct one to show.

Also, when will the zune software have the ability to edit metadata? I had to go into explorer and edit it, very time consuming.

Thanks,

Don

 computersarethe wrote:

People who work on the zune team will have a tag under their name which indicates staff. 

Thanks, that's helpful. 

Any insights on the other part of my post?

Zune Product Team .: This posting is provided "as-is" with no warranties, and confers no rights :.

Thank you for posting these details, I went through a frustrating session with the Help Desk attempting to do the same thing.

However, creating new a new library file, or even removing and reinstalling the Zune software entirely, does not resolve the complete issue.  It removes the duplicates and gets the right album information against the titles, but the art is still wrong on 5-10% of my tracks. WMP has the correct art.  I tried right clicking and correcting the art on one albumn and it did not stick.

I have not tried syncing my device because I don't want the wrong art to get on there too.

Any help for this last portion of the library/collection issue?

I'm having better luck now, but it's not been easy. Here's the steps I've taken to get things back in shape -

I should point out that I did select "replace all media information" on the install. This was probably a bad idea, but now it seems to have helped correct the info. If you selected this as well and have seen your meta data get hosed, try these step and leave the option checked.

1) Do the database delete thing on the first page of comments in this thread

2) Luanch Zune 2.0 let it bake for a long time (15-20 minutes for me)

3) Closed Zune, deleted ZuneStore.sdf, and re-opened

4) Let Zune bake for a long time

(3&4 are optional if after step 2 things are looking good in your meta data)

In my case, at this point most (not all) of the problems were in the db, not my meta data. The meta data had managed to get updated and fixed for the most part after step 4. (I actually watched it update a few mp3's in explorer so I know it was working on it.

To fix miss tagged mp3s and miss categorized artists:

1) Find mixed blocks of albums/artists in Zune 2.0 (All the J's for example, or two artists that are mixed up)

2) drag those artist folders out someplace where they are not watched by Zune 2.0 and let the db update

3) Mass-fix album or artist problems by selecting the effected mp3s (right click -> properties - > details) or mass-delete incorrect meta data by clearing fields if needed

4) drag and drop each artist or album folder back into your library one at a time and let 2.0 update it's db

That's got me back to about 98% correct. I'm sure I'll find a few mistakes here and there as I go but I'm back on track for the most part using these mothods.

Overall - WHEW! MS, guys, come on, this is going to get ugly if you don't track it down. For what it's worth, I love the new software, it's really nice. But damn. That was not the way I was expecting things to start off.

Nearly half of my library was misplaced/replicated/deleted from the Zune DB. The actual music is still there (and seems unaffected when viewed in explorer) but the zune software does not recognize half of it. It's either in a folder completely unrelated, or half the time, the file is listed, but when I go to play it it says the "this file has been moved, etc". I would suggest to the development team that if they would return to us an easier method of altering the tags (such as was present in the 1.X software) the outcry would be a lot more managable. As it is set up right now, the interface has gone from only slightly user-friendly (Ver. 1.X) to well neigh broken (Ver. 2.0)

I'm not very computer saavy, and I shouldn't have to go in and alter a great many things just to make this work right... especially when 90% of my media content exists in WMA format... something any microsoft product should be reading (properly) in it's sleep.

As near as I can tell, the music already on my zune is unaffected which leads me to wonder... if it's firmware can be updated without adjusting any of my music tags, why can't the software be the same way?

Understand that I know the zune development team is probably burning the midnight oil working on this (at least, I sincerely hope so), but it's hard to lay down $250.00 on a product (which I've owned since the week of the first release) and not expect things to work proper :). I waited for the zune because I cannot stand Macintosh/Apple and I hate itunes even more... please don't make me regret this decision!

Hmmm...