Thursday, January 24, 2008

The Inner Squircle*

I have recently become a member of the inner squircle or, as Microsoft likes to call it, The Social (tm or something, I'm sure). I am the proud owner of a new 4GB Microsoft Zune. The device was a gift from Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central for helping him with his podcast intro. I am eternally grateful to Todd for this gift because he exponentially improved my podcast listening experience.

Prior to the arrival of the Zune, I had two media devices. My first device was an RCA Lyra 1070. It has 512MB of internal storage and can be expanded through an SD card. The biggest problem is that the 1070 is an MP3 player that won't play MP3s. The only native format the 1070 will play is WMA. So, in order to use the 1070, I would have to either use the supplied version of MusicMatch Jukebox (long since lost) or convert the files to WMA for direct transfer. Too much time and effort involved to use that solution.

My other option involved my Lyra 2780 media player. This is a large unit that encases a 20GB laptop hard drive. It is easier to get files onto this unit since it shows up as a drive in Windows Explorer and can take MP3 files as drag-and-drop. The shortfall with this unit is the interface. First, it doesn't have a specific podcast "section" so I have to navigate to the podcast folder I created and select the show I want to play. The workaround was to create a playlist but, again, extra time, extra effort. The biggest problem, however, was with my car. I don't have a cassette deck or any sort of auxiliary input so I have to rely on an FM transmitter to get music from my device to my speakers. Since the 2780 houses a laptop hard drive, the mechanical movements create a headache-inducing electrical whine behind the audio.

Since I didn't have a long commute, I often got behind on my podcast listening. What I would do if I were going for any sort of long drive was to load up the Lyra with the podcasts, then create a playlist to play them in a desired order with minimal user intervention. It was workable but not terribly practical for a process to be performed daily.

When I started my long daily commutes, I eventually came up with the idea of burning the shows to CDs. The sound quality was wonderful (no electrical whine) but after my first proof-of-concept run I determined that this could become an expensive proposition burning a couple of CDs per day for one-off listening.

I decided to do an experiment. I went to the local mega-mart and purchased a 5-pack of CD-RW (rewriteable) discs. When I got home, I burned a couple of songs to the first disc and headed out to the car. As luck would have it, my car is new enough that it is compatible with CD-RW media... I had my solution.

Of course, the CD-RW solution was not without its shortcomings. The first was inherent in all of the solutions so far. I was using a podcast aggregator but had to manually check to see which podcasts had new episodes that had downloaded overnight. Then, I had to locate, by file name, which were the newest files that I wanted to burn to CD. The next shortcoming was that setting up the burns took several minutes out of my morning preparations then took about 20 minutes per disc (I bought 4x discs) and I often found myself having to wait for the burn to complete to be able to leave with my podcasts. The final shortcoming is podcasts that last over 80 minutes (max burn length for a CD). It doesn't happen often but it does happen. When it did, I would have to use another program to split it into smaller chunks.

Enter the Zune and my reason for being so grateful to Todd for this gift. First, the Zune does not create that high-pitched, headache-inducing, electrical whine when used with the FM transmitter. The sound quality is not as sharp as I would prefer but it is much preferable to the 2780. Second is the podcast handling of the Zune. All I have to do is subscribe and set a few preferences and the latest shows are automatically sent to the device when I sync. On the flip side of that functionality, the shows on the device that I have completed (listened to all the way through) are automatically deleted from the device but are retained on the computer. Finally is something unique to the Zune: wireless synchronization. The Zune has an 802.11 wireless radio and can synchronize through my secure home wireless network. The setup requires some information (such as my encryption key) to be entered into the Zune software on the PC and a single wired sync. From then on, all I have to do is get up in the morning, kick off the wireless sync, and go take my shower. When I'm ready to go, it has long since completed it's sync. It couldn't be easier.

On a recent show, Todd gave several criteria for his perfect podcast device. I plan to review those criteria and evaluate the Zune against them. Whether it meets all the criteria or not, the Zune is incrementally better as a podcast player than any of my previously available solutions.

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*Why squircle, you might ask? The main navigation button on the series two Zunes is not quite a square and not quite a circle... it's a squircle (pronounced with a hard C).

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