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I bought a Zune portable music player. I am currently using it with Windows Vista. I am impressed, really. The sound quality is excellent on the Grado SR60 headphones I have. The interface is easy to use. I'm currently synching about 1.5 gigs of lossless WMA files using a slow NAS so it's going to take awhile to get into the full experience. However I like it so far. Some pictures are at a blog post I have setup at blogger if you are interested. By far with the firmware update, and net install of the software (most up to date, I didn't even stick in the cd that came with it) this is a really impressive device. This is about my 7th "mp3" player I went through since 1997 (yes including recent iPods) and it is a nice smooth uphill experience that I found myself on.Cheers
Follow Ups:
Was there a new firmware update to allow WMA lossless support? Even until recently, it didn't support lossless, which is why haven't bought it yet. What version of firmware does yours have?
I am using version 1.2 of the Zune firmware. I know it wraps the lossless file into a Zune hardware compatible audio archive package to encrypt the track with digital rights management just in case you want to share the track. I am not aware of it not supporting lossless files however. I believe the Zune uses its own file type on the hardware itself. It definitely is not something that you can pull off the player and use elsewhere. Think of it as an encryption of some sort.And I meant I have 15 gigs of lossless files streaming from the NAS into the Zune. I stopped the sync to enjoy this device. It's really a nice product. I have noticed no artificats in the playback with the Grados. I am also using release 1.2.5 of the Zune interface for Windows Vista.
The Zune software will transcode your WMA lossless files "on the fly" to WMA 192kbps lossy files as they get put into Zune.It's a crying shame b/c the sound quality of Zune's headphone output is being reported to be one of the best available out there, often cited to be superior to the likes of iPods.
You are right, I read up on this after the fact. Zune does NOT support WMA lossless on the device. It is a shame. I was confused a bit because the Zune software supports "ripping" to lossless, but the conversion does take place when synching.I would wait for the next generation to see if this is going to change. If it does, I'll just get the 2nd gen one too :)
I bought a Zune the day it came out. I returned it 5 days later. The software sucked ( I have Windows XP) and it kept losing stuff I had put in the library, among other issues. The sound was great, that is better than I Pod, but the grief was just too much for me to deal with.
That platform was definitely not ready the first day it came out. There's another update on March 20th to the firmware and interface. I have recently read this and no the Zune isn't finished. I believe their second generation hardware is coming out this summer along with it a lot of hardware/software improvements (Microsoft always uses the 1st generation as a testbed).You might want to consider the Toshiba Gigabeat, since the Zune is really nothing more than a nice looking polished Toshiba Gigabeat. A coworker of mine has one and claims the sound quality is excellent as well. Toshiba is doing the OEM for Zune and fabricating out everything in China.
I looked at the Toshiba-nice unit, but opted for Zune as I thought the MS conection would have it perks. I was wrong
Rumours are that the Zune is a modified Toshiba Gigabeat S.However, Toshiba has earlier models, namely the F and X series, that will run Rockbox, an alternative operating system for mp3 players.
All the Toshiba players have nice audio quality - they use Wolfson DACs and have high headphone output (40mA) which enables them to drive high impedance phones more easily. They also have very fast CPUs (2-3x faster than iPods), good battery life, and a nice screen 240x320 screen with 18-bit colour. Don't really like their buttons though.
I bought an old Toshiba Gigabeat F40 at a clearance price earlier this year, and converted it to run Rockbox. Rockbox has some really nice features, such as gapless playback, support for lossless formats, and lots of plugins (there's even one to play Doom!).
So now I have the best combination: good hardware, *and* good software.
Christine, have you tried the iAudio X5? Do you have a sound quality comparison betwen that and you Toshiba?
I have an iAudio X5 as well as the Zune and am thinking about install Rockbox. Does it indeed support FLAC and Ogg? I can't seem to find this information anywhere on their web site.
Yes, it supports AAC, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Wavpack, and tons of other formats. The only format it doesn't seem to support is Microsoft WMA :-) (mainly due to the lack of a decent open source fixed point decoder implementation)I've discovered it will even play back losslessly compressed high resolution files (96/24) provided your hardware can support it (the Toshiba's Wolfson DAC supports sampling rates up to 96kHz).
I've been listening to some of my DVD-Audios ripped and converted to FLAC. Lossless hi-rez on a portable mp3 player! Way to go!
Warning though: decoding lossless hi-rez takes a lot of CPU power, and even on the Toshiba (which has one of the fastest CPUs amongst mp3 players) the response time to button presses become really sluggish when playing back 96/24 FLAC files. The iAudio uses the ColdFire CPU which is approximate half the speed of the ARM used in the Gigabeat, so I suspect it may not be fast enough.
Zune would be a great player if Rockbox was available for it. Unfortunately, the developers are having a hard time cracking the CPU security features (which locks out third party firmware). Same issue with the Gigabeat S.
The latest release also supports a few more codecs not mentioned here (for example, "speex")
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