re: Managing 2 Zunes with 1 Media Collection

Wife and I each have a Zune.  Mine is 120 GB, hers is 30 GB.

Wife started experiencing "dead spots".  She can play music on her Zune, but it seems to stop when it looks for the next song and can't find it.

Is there a way to get her Zune to skip missing tracks and just move on to the next one that is found?

I thought this might be caused by the media library exceding the 30 GB her Zune can handle so I suggested that she manage the songs on her Zune manually.

The media is all on our desktop workstation.  She has an account and I have an account.

For some reason, even though her software is pointed at the same media storage folder, she doesn't seem to have ANYTHING I've downloaded from the Marketplace.  Things I've downloaded, it has a "download" button for - seeming to suggest she needs to download it again.

I'd imagine this might be a failure of the DRM implementation - perhaps tying the music to one Windows user account?

The idea of storing two copies of each song seems unappealing for diskspace reasons.

Any other couples out there who have two Zunes, one ZunePass, and one media collection on a shared machine?  How do you manage this?

It has occurred to me that we could manage everything through my account - since I'm the one who downloaded 99% of the music from ZunePass.  The Zune software seems to accomodate multiple Zunes on multiple machines (allowing you to change which machines and Zunes once per month) but it doesn't seem to work the way I'd expect it to.

 

Not sure what you are experiencing... but content is authorized per PC/Windows installation (and per device).  So, once you've downloaded, say, tracks via Zune Pass.... anyone on the PC can use/play it.  You might want to check your actual file security.

If you point her Zune software/collection in her Windows account to the same content as you use (and she has access to it), it should all be added to the collection and play.

In the zune software, settings-> check that both zunes are enabled for your zune pass.  You can put up to 3 zunes on one pass. 
The 'can't find it' problem is something else...it could be that the DRM license has expired.  To avoid this, both zunes have to sync while logged in at least once per month.  I think the logged in requirement may be your issue.  Both zunes have to sync while the software is logged into the account which has the pass.
As far as managing 2 zunes with one media collection-  piece of cake.  You can do it manually...but 'all' for the 120 (assuming it all fits) is a good choice, and 'let me choose' is a good choice for the 30 (if the collection is too big.)  Manual is -or can be- a lot of work...
Read about sync groups here:  http://zuneinsider.com/search.aspx?q=sync+groups
to decide on 'let me choose.'

 NSILMike wrote:

In the zune software, settings-> check that both zunes are enabled for your zune pass.  You can put up to 3 zunes on one pass. 

Both Zunes are enabled for the ZunePass.

 NSILMike wrote:

The 'can't find it' problem is something else...it could be that the DRM license has expired.  To avoid this, both zunes have to sync while logged in at least once per month.  I think the logged in requirement may be your issue.  Both zunes have to sync while the software is logged into the account which has the pass.

We verified that the ZunePass account was signed-in, did a sync, and she tried to play a song that hadn't played properly before.  Message popped up that the song couldn't be played.  It did seem to skip to another song.  I'll have to mess with it more over the weekend.

 Bleak Morn wrote:

[snipped]

We verified that the ZunePass account was signed-in, did a sync, and she tried to play a song that hadn't played properly before.  Message popped up that the song couldn't be played.  It did seem to skip to another song.  I'll have to mess with it more over the weekend.

Are both zunes also linked to the account?  (zune software->settings->device->linking)  When it finally plays a song, is it a zune pass song?