McWilliams’ World

I’ve been in love with my black Zune 30 ever since I bought it about two years ago. I’m starting to hit the wall with storage on it and my dreaming of a nice, big 120 someday. I also love the continued support from Microsoft with new firmware and software updates.

One of the latest features added to the software was auto playlists. Setting as little or as many filter criteria you want, the Zune software will automatically take care of it and you end up with a customized, dynamic playlist that may change based on how you use it.

One auto playlist I have is “My Faves”. Basically it keeps track of all my favorited songs – that way, I just need to tag them, and the list updates. Pretty cool hu? After amassing 200+ songs, I thought it be a good idea to backup those playlists in case of a system failure or library reset. By the way, I use Mozy to backup most of my critical files – it’s 2gb free online storage.

So recently I installed Windows 7(RC) and discovered that the Zune software had to do a library reset. That’s a bummer since I have 30gb+ of music – so it took a while for it to re-catalog my music. Ooops… resetting the catalog also blows away any favorited tags (any any other meta data of the like). No big deal, right, I’ll just launch Mozy and restore my favorite play list from before the reset and we’ll be all good. I restore the playlist file and then look at my Zune software… it’s only showing about 18 songs. What?! I try it again… same thing. I try copying the XML from the original playlist into the playlist directly, still same thing. Figure it out yet?

Since it was an auto playlist and my library was reset (canceling all my songs marked favorite), the auto playlist was only displaying the songs I’ve favorited since the reset. Grrrr!

No biggie. I’m a computer professional, I can get around this. Here’s what I did:

1. With my original, backed up playlist, I opened it in Notepad++ (because I like it, notepad.exe or any text editor would do), copied all the lines between the <seq></seq> tags. Your playlists can typically be found where you store you music under Zune/Playlists
2. I then went into the Zune software, and created a new standard playlist; “Backup Faves”. This new playlist appears in the Zune/Playlists folder with a .ZPL extension. It’s just a fancy XML document.
3. Again, I open the new “backup faves.zpl” file in Notepad++, and paste the lines from my original file between the <seq></seq> tags.
4. Save it.
5. Verify that the Zune software now sees the change. Success!
6. Now… with the standard playlist updated and showing all the songs, I need to re-favorite them all. This is where the magic happens; I select all the songs in the “Backup Faves” list (CTRL+A) and then hit the Favorite button (the little heart icon) and *BANG!*, *POW!*, all the songs that I liked but were un-favorited were again favorited! Oh happy day!
7. Now, since all those songs were re-classified as my faves, my auto playlist recognized them and is back in business. Slick!

Now, for this to work for anyone, you need to have a backup of your auto playlist. If you reset your library without one, you’ll probably be S.O.L. So make sure you avoid disaster and having to re-categorize everything by making a backup of your playlists on a regular basis.

Backups are your friend!

Hope that helps someone out!

QMP = Quintessential Media Player

I’m a tad anal-retentive when it comes to my MP3 collection (over 20gb). I like to have everything tagged properly and the file name formatted in the right way. How do I do it? I use QMP. To me, it’s simply the best solution for tagging and renaming my media files.

Recently I tried a few tagging applications; MP3Tag and MediaMonkey thinking I might find a stand-alone tagging app that may be better than QMP. Although they do an okay job of tagging, the interfaces and options are over complicated and results aren’t always a lock.

QMP, although it’s primary role is a media player, it has a killer tagging utility. Extremely easy to use and has all the features you need; multi-edit, file rename + formatting options, etc… What I like is its integration with GraceNote. It’s very rare that GraceNote won’t match the track I’m trying to tag – unless the file name or initial tags are completely wrong.

I used QMP for years as my media player but since buying a Zune, I now use the Zune software to play my music. Why not utilize the Zune software for my ripping and tagging needs? #1. I have a wide variety of music and some times the Zune app does not recognize the CD or tracks. #2. There a little to no customizing options when ripping and near zero for tag/filename options. It’s a love hate relationship with the Zune software. I like how it’s laid out but I hate that it doesn’t have certain features built in. It’s a bit dumbed-down. Not to mention that it frequently misdiagnoses an album or track or ignores tag changes. That last one bugs me. 98% of the time the Zune software will recognize changes to a file’s tags right away, but when it doesn’t, there’s not much you can do other than wipe the Zune’s “meta database”; which causes it to re-catalog your entire library. Very annoying.

Typically I follow these rules when managing my music library:

1. Always start with a good rip; I use either QMP, or CDEx to rip my CD to MP3 format, tag the files (at rip time) and name the files properly.
2. If #1 is not an option, then I utilize QMP to re-tag and rename.

Following those rules make for a neatly managed library and the Zune typically follows suit.

So if you’re looking for a good tagging app, look no further than Quintessential Media Player.

Received our two Zunes this morning yesterday via FedEx that I bought off of Woot.com for $99/each – a smmmmmmmmokin’ good deal if you ask me. Let me tell you, I shared the same enthusiasm as everyone else that got in on the deal. Everyone was clamoring to get tracking info and counting down till the units arrived.

Ours arrived in perfect condition – if the refurbished sticker or refurbished notice wasn’t on the box, you’d never know these weren’t new. Absolutely flawless.

I spend most of the day ripping A LOT of my Cd’s that I haven’t got around to dumping. I still used my trusty old Quintessential Player to rip – It just works nice. I’m also going through and cleaning up all the ID tags on my music so they’re recognized better in the Zune software. Again Quintessential Player helps out by using GraceNote to find the track information and apply it en mass.

I’m sooo stoked I got these Zunes! They rock!