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.
I realize “Someone open-sourced a Zune client!” is one of those “Heartwarming: Kids Raise Thousands of Dollars to Help with Friend’s Chemo” things, being excited for a fix for a problem that never should have existed in the first place, but it’s still pretty great considering how objectively good the hardware was and how objectively toxic Windows is.
Oooo, the Xune app for Zune actually fixes some functionality that's been broken in the original for ages, like the artist background images.
Honestly the game-changer about the new Xune app for me is the on-the-fly conversion to WMA Lossless. My library of recent purchases and rips are almost all ALAC with a little FLAC and being able to have lossless files on the Zune without maintaining a second set of files -- especially as storage space is becoming more of a problem -- is a tremendous help.