The Zune Feature Request & Suggestion Thread

I'd use the rating systems to

• Remove songs that I may become tired of listening to but don't want to "Broken Heart" it in order to remove from my Samsung Focus. So let's say I discover a great new song and 5 star, then go to 4 star it, then I'm kinda tired of it so i'd make it three stars. I could review 3 star songs on device or playlist and remove them if i want.
• Reverse of that I could easily make a favorites playlist by Genre or Artist by only including 4-5 star songs.
• Use 4-5 stars songs to put on my Gym Zune (8GB zune) by only selecting Rock and Fitness songs with more stars and it would make it easy to drag and drop onto device when i sort by Genres or Artist.

To play Devil's advocate, I'd say that you're not really using the ratings as ratings in those systems. You're using them to organise music.

Perhaps there is a better way to achieve this rather than putting a ratings system in place that is not going to be used strictly for its intended purpose. For example, if Zune gave you access to all the tags in your music files you could use a tag for 'category' or similar and use that as you currently want to use the ratings.

Of course fixing the ratings system would allow users to rate their music in more detail and allow users such as yourself to use the ratings in more creative ways as well.

• Make it possible to switch the location of our accounts. Two groups of people are being screwed this way: early (European) adopters and people who moved outside of the US since they set up their account.
• Give Europe SmartDJ. Seriously, I can understand there are problems with copyright when selling internationally, but since creating these playlist doesn't involve selling copyright material this shouldn't be that difficult to implement.
• Lose the Microsoft points. I really don't want to buy 400 points to buy something worth 369 points. It's a waste of money. Why not use PayPal, credit cards or online banking?

 

The Zune guys explained on their podcast that the reason you can't switch account locations is that the publishers of music/video don't allow Microsoft to sell some content to non-US customers, and changing the account location would make it appear as though Microsoft has allowed non-US customers to buy music/video. Stupid, but that seems to be the reason. I lost all of my Zune account history (20,000 plays, etc.) because I needed to chagne to another account to use my new Windows Phone.

Smart DJ uses metadata from services that Microsoft are only licenced to use in the US (also discussed on the Zune Insider podcast). This is why you can't use it outside the US even though it doesn't require access to the actual music. Again, this is quite stupid, and part of the anachronistic geographic restrictions that plague all digital media.

Microsoft Points are the most stupid thing ever. It's a pointless, annoying middleman. It's another thing that Apple get right that Microsoft can't seem to understand. In iTunes (which I hate, but need to use because Zune doesn't sell music in my country) I can simply buy a song and the $1.69 (or whatever) is instantly billed to my credit card. Easy, simple, convenient. Everything that Zune points aren't.

First, the essential:

• Make it possible to switch the location of our accounts. Two groups of people are being screwed this way: early (European) adopters and people who moved outside of the US since they set up their account.
• Give Europe SmartDJ. Seriously, I can understand there are problems with copyright when selling internationally, but since creating these playlist doesn't involve selling copyright material this shouldn't be that difficult to implement.
• Lose the Microsoft points. I really don't want to buy 400 points to buy something worth 369 points. It's a waste of money. Why not use PayPal, credit cards or online banking?

Secondly:

• More codec support; flac, avi, mkv
• Give us the ability to organize videos the way iTunes does. I don't mind inputting TV Show info myself if that means I can keep my TV recordings organized and easily searchable.

  I hate apple for sticking to their own inefficient containers for video, but they know how to organize.

• I for one would love to see the Zune Pass here in Europe, with the 10 free downloads a month. A choice of music would be great to. It's funny actually, currently we only have video rentals in Belgium through Zune Marketplace and no music, while in iTunes it's the other way around.

I'd like to see a volume control bar on both the mini player and the preview window (when mousing over the taskbar icon)

*Edit

As the post below me says:  mkv support pleeeeease

I know I maybe a minority here and specially since the Zune marketplace is not yet available in New Zealand. But I would like to see more New Zealand music available for Zune pass in the UK (also in other regions). Like Garageland http://www.7digital.com/artists/garageland-%281%29/last-exit-to-garageland/