Trixter of the Moon CouncilTonight I've been messing around with this new open-source cross-platform rebuild of the Zune app, and it's working great on my MacBook! It's got built-in encoding to WMA Lossless (a format literally nobody but Zune freaks care about) and it's tackled my FLAC and ALAC files with no complaints.
I've noticed in the Zune subreddit that there are, like, *a lot* of people who were all-in on the Zune back in the day but have since moved to Linux or Mac, but the desktop client doesn't run well in Wine or a VM. I've been running a Windows 10 install on a backwater partition of my home media server just to sync music to my beloved Zune HD. Being able to buy an album off Bandcamp, download it to my laptop, and then pop it onto my Zune without having to deal with booting to that Windows install and moving the files over is huge for me.
Isaac Ji Kuo@trixter I was slightly confused by this. Every MP3 player I've ever had was just ... I copy mp3s onto the media (or burn it, in the case of mp3 CD players). And ... that's it.
But then I remembered proprietary stuff oh well.
Sigh ... for a while, Google Music or whatever it was called was a thing, and I could just buy music and download the mp3s.
I'd like to say I'm an ideological hipster, but no I'm just too lazy to learn new ways to do stuff when what I've got works okay.
@isaackuo Yeah, the Zune is otherwise a great little device, but the proprietary stuff has been a pain for ages. For the longest time, you had to just maintain a Windows 8 install somewhere to sync to it. You can add files to it from a Mac using a program called Android to Linux, despite nothing involved being either an Android device or a Linux device, but it's a little messy and hard to manage.
@trixter For my specific situation, that wouldn't be a hard ask. I have a Windows 10 laptop that I need to remote into work anyway. And since I need it for work, it's on 100% of the time anyway.
It has Cisco VPN on it, tax software on it, and that's it. If I HAD to install Zune on it, no big deal.
For me, it's all about keeping my computing headaches to a minimum. And since I need this Windows machine up and running anyway ... shrug.