Trixter of the Moon CouncilFinally found my old Zune HD last night but now I can’t find where the charging cable ended up during the move. 😭
Aw shit y’all it’s ON
I don’t actually run Windows on anything anymore — I picked up an iPod as my retro player last year because I’ve fully moved to Mac with some Linux on the side — so this is going to be an *adventure*.
Huh, it looks like it has pretty much my entire music collection circa 2010 on it, I might not even need to bother syncing it with anything.
Apparently the best music transfer application to get mp3s from MacOS to the Zune right now is called "Android File Transfer for Linux" and you know what, that's it, I'm going home
So now I'm torn between using my old Zune HD or the iPod Nano 2nd Gen I picked up last year as my EDC retro player. The Zune is the superior device in every way except actually getting music onto it now that I've completely migrated away from Windows. Is it worth maintaining a Windows 7 VM and manually converting anything I want to transfer from ALAC to MP3? ...Maybe it is?
yequari@trixter I actually tried this and it's kind of a pain in the ass lol. I couldn't get windows 7 to work with a shared drive between my host and the VM (I was using qemu, you might have better results with something else). Getting the Zune software was actually easier than I expected, someone is maintaining an update server at http://www.zuneupdate.com. Also, It only supports ID3v2.3 for music tag metadata. So, if your files are tagged with ID3v2.4 you'll have to convert them first.
@yequari I’m using UTM and yeah, it can see the drive but doesn’t seem to want to transfer anything over. Worst case, I have an old desktop with a Windows drive I haven’t booted in years (it’s dual-boot with Linux) and I kind of wanted that to be a media archive server anyway. I’ve been really glad to see that the community has stepped in to keep all the software available and host firmware updates! Because Microsoft sure hasn’t.
@trixter for real, it's wild how Microsoft has tried so hard to scrub itself clean of any acknowledgement of the Zune's existence, but you can still plug in an iPod to any machine with iTunes, which you can still download from Apple, and it just works.