Zune Marketplace, RIP

Well, I'm in that club.

I have 2 Zune HD's and Various Older (30GB, 8GB etc)

My Main Zune still played most music, but my others required sync a few weeks ago,

So I Synced, then I used one, and it still said to sync, so I did, nothing, no music played.

Launched Zune App, sure enough all DRM Music reports the DRM Error.

So.

I Rebooted my PC to a Old Partition prior to moving everything to a new SSD.

Launched the Zune App, I had Marketplace Back, and Wow, low and behold, I was able to refresh the Zune Pass DRM'd Content and reset the 30 Days, Synced all my zunes and everything was working again,

Closed the app, opened again, bam, ZuneDRM Sync Functions were removed, and now I have about 28 days left before I will no longer be able to sync any of those tracks.

If there was a way to revert versions, I'd like to know.

the DRM Server is online still as off Wednesday this week.

I dont think it would be too much to ask for the Zune Software to be patched to at least be able to sync DRM Rights again,

or make it so Groove can Sync to Zune Devices.

I've been w/ Zune since the beginning.... I have multiple Zunes from the 30GB Original, to the HD, and now all of them are slowly becoming useless,

I refuse to use my phone, Maybe If Groove actually read the music from my SD Card, I'd use it to stream the DRM music while still being able to play my own MP3s...

read past posts==looks like our  $ 400. devices are almost worthless

I am unable to log into my ZUNE application. I have reset the password and everything. Does anyone know how I can just load music to it from my computer so that I can at least use it as an mp3 player?

I almost forgot. You mentioned the older, DRM purchases that we might have gotten before the Zune Marketplace switched to mp3's. I've already had some issues with that - oddly, just with a few files, but not others. Somewhere on these bulletin boards, you can find my original post about it, from almost a year ago. The short version is this. Microsoft should have records of all your Zune Pass Credits and Purchases. But see if you can document that yourself as well - it couldn't hurt.

Anyway, if those purchased files stop working, contact Microsoft's help desk. Explain the situation to them, that you purchased DRM-WMA's from the early days of Zune, and those files no longer play. If your situation goes anything like mine, they should apologize profusely, and basically offer to compensate you by putting the equivalent monetary amount on your Microsoft account. Then, you can look up all those Black Flag albums in the Groove system, and purchase them all with the money they put into your account. Then you'll have all your old music back, but this time, as DRM-free mp3's.

Also, if these files die, it might help if you look up all these albums on Groove before you contact the Help Desk. Tabulate how much money you'd have to spend to repurchase whatever you lose. If you have a specific dollar amount, then you can make sure that the Help Desk is compensating you with the right amount.

Now, I don't know if this will actually be an issue for you. I still have a lot of old WMA's I purchased that still seem to be okay. But certainly, if the software relies on occasionally verifying the DRM and ownership rights with the Zune Marketplace, and the ZM is now gone, that's a very legitimate worry. The good thing is, you have options if that happens. So as annoyed as I am about Microsoft killing Zune off, I do have to give them credit - they did do the right thing here, at least with me.

So far, the Zune Pass downloads are still working. The only change I've noticed is that they will no longer sync to your Zune device. They still play through the software. So the only question at this point is how long that will last. My guess - it's really just that - is that they will continue to be good for about another month. I'm basing that on the fact that until this all happened, the right click on any giving file would list a date one month into the future as the expiration date of sorts. Now we just have "Unknown," but it's possible that we're just getting that because there's no longer a Zune Marketplace for the software to connect with to verify that date. So it's probably going to countdown 30 days starting from last night. Again, that's just a guess. We'll see. You could argue that as long as we have a Groove Pass, they should be good indefinitely, since we're just listening to the same content in a different platform. But I don't have any confidence that Microsoft sees it that way.

I think you head the nail on the head with this idea of exploring new music with the Zune Marketplace. That's largely what I used it for. I had the Zune Pass, with its 10 free monthly credits, and a subscription to eMusic. If there was something that I heard about, or thought I might be interested in, I could always just download it from the Zune Marketplace, and let it sit with me for a few weeks before deciding whether to redeem my Zune credits or eMusic credit. (For good or for ill, eMusic is back to carrying only indie labels now. Most of what I listen to is indie, so that's generally not a problem, but when I wanted something on a major label, I'd save that for the Zune credits.) All in all, a great system, which allowed me to discover a ton of new music and buy with a lot more confidence. I remember the bad old days when you might hear a song you liked on the radio, shell out $15 for a full CD, only to discover that the song was unrepresentative and the album mediocre as a whole. This was so much better.

And just like that episode of South Park, "And... it's gone."

I agree that Groove is kind of messy. I've not played around with Pandora or other streaming services to have a good enough sense as to whether it's superior or inferior. It generally seemed on par, on the whole. But as you suggested, it may not be aimed at music lovers like you and me. Like you, I have a massive music collection. Not quite 30 years worth of collecting, but close. I think my first CD was purchased in 1993 (Pearl Jam's "Vs."), so although there might be cassettes in some long forgotten box hiding somewhere, I'll just peg that as the beginning of my collection, since that the first music that I still have in its original form and is easily convertible to a digital format. I'm looking at my Zune software's library right now, and I see that I have 2249 artists listed, 6998 albums, and 37,358 songs. Some of that is Zune Pass content, but I'd estimate that 90-95% are mp3's I own free and clear. With the recent announcement that the OneDrive will now only come with 5 GB for free, how on earth is Groove supposed to work for someone like me? Particularly considering that a lot of this is out-of-print and rare music that can't be found on any digital provider, whether Groove or anyone else?

I don't mean to bash Groove here. It does have some nifty features here and there. The one I liked the most was having a customized radio station of sorts generated for music related to any given artist. I did manage to discover a few new artists here and there that way. So that's cool. But at the end of the day, for someone like me, the Zune platform made the most sense. Music stored locally, so I'm not having to pay some crazy amount of money for a cell phone dataplan (or drain its battery), or be limited to working only where I can get a good wifi signal. The shuffle function, so I can just let my player or the software go for hours without any hiccups. Or, where I can just randomly throw in a full album or song into the already playing shuffle when it strikes me that I'd like to hear something specific.

My guess is, for the moment, I will probably play around a bit more with Groove to see I can make it into something more useful. But more than likely, I'll simply end my subscription on May 14th, when it's set to renew. I'll look into other streaming services and their ability to take uploaded content. If Pandora or someone like that can take something more like 100 GB or more of uploads, for the same price, it might be worth it just as a form of cloud-based backup. I think that's unlikely so instead, I'll probably just take the monthly subscription fee I would have spent on Zune Marketplace and increase my subscription to eMusic, so I can buy more mp3's I can keep every month.