random incoherence and infantile meanderings

My Zune hardware, despite having a somewhat anemic battery life (but don’t they all) and a defective hold switch (it wants to fall off and it occasionally turns itself on mentally), is a fairly good piece of podplaying tech.

The software, on the other hand, is a mental reject.

To be fair, I realize that part of the problem is that I just ripped the guts out of my box and replaced everything but the hard drive. So Windows XP wasn’t happy with me, and neither was Microsoft’s overly DRM-happy Zune software. I had to reinstall first XP and then the Zune software.

Why didn’t Microsoft follow in Apple’s trail and name the freakin’ software something else? It’s stoopid that I have to say Zune S or Zune H every single time. St00p1d!!!

To continue, even after patching XP up to date and re-installing all the bits of Zune S (‘cuz it’s not just point-and-click), the program faulted out every time that I opened it. It was at this point that I discovered how bloody crappy the official information for the Zune really is. If you want help with your problems, then you are going to have to either look outside of the official channels or be some sort of Knowledge Base ninja (‘cuz I sure couldn’t find any useful information – on ANY topic.) Eventually I found a posting on a forum somewhere that suggested the DRM must be corrupt and to delete the DRM directory under “Documents and Settings/All Users/”. I feel that a !!!!! is warranted at this point.

That worked for me. I deleted the DRM dir and was able to actually update my podcasts for a few days. Syncing the Zune H worked fine and all was well. Until something when glitch and an in progress sync session was interrupted. After that, I haven’t been able to update my podcasts becuase every single time the Zune S fails out as soon as I click on the Collection – Podcast tab. Boom! Fails out with what amounts to no error message for me to trouble shoot with. Of course, it does not check my feeds, download new tracks, update the Zune H, or remove old tracks either.

The delete the DRM folder trick didn’t work this time. I uninstalled the software and re-installed it. It took 15 seconds to reinstall, so I was pretty sure that it didn’t actually get rid of anything. The Zune S failed out as soon as I hit Podcast. So I deleted the DRM folder, uninstalled and deleted the Zune S. Rebooted! And then reinstalled the software.

That actually worked.

For 15 minutes.

I’m back to square zero. I can’t seem to find reliable troubleshooting information for the Zune 2.3 software. As far as I can tell, the error code being sent to Microsoft is something like #0000000005. I haven’t found any information on that error. At this point, I’m going to have to get out Regedit and start pruning things away in a manner that always makes me nervous. Or find a new podcatcher program and manually transfer the ‘casts in and out.

I wish that the software just worked. I also wished that there was any good podcatcher software out there. (Don’t bother telling me about some ‘catcher software that is sooo great, cuz it isn’t. I’ve tried most of them and they are all suckbags in more than one aspect.) I also wish that ID3 tags included a field for “played”. I bet that would catch on really fast as a way to get around the monoliths of podcatching.

P.S.  I didn’t really get into the issues with the software when it is actually working.  I’ll come back to this sometime.