Well I just remembered another issue that I’ve been having with the Zune software & apparently the 4.0 version didn’t fix it either. I have episodes from my podcasts showing up in my music & video collections. Obviously the audio podcasts are showing up as music & the video podcasts are showing up with the videos.
Above you see an example of the issue that I’m talking about. This is one of the reasons I want to be able to have the podcasts outside the audio folder. Also it makes more sense to have the pictures from the Zune sent to a folder other than audio. Last time I checked a picture was not an audio file. Also most of the stuff in the audio folder other than podcasts is music & most of my podcasts as not music.
I was really hoping that they would see reason. I was also hoping with this release that would release a firmware for the 120 GB Zune & older models that gave us Unicode support so that the music I have from Japan can actually use & display it in the native language. I say that because trying to guess who “□□□□” is really hard to tell if it is “新居昭乃”, “岩本正樹”, or some other artist that happens to have four Japanese characters for their name. I don’t see why I should have to update my entire collection to match the complete & total lack of Unicode support on the Zune. I know that the Zune HD is supposed to have Unicode support but that doesn’t help me as I have a Zune 120 & the Zune HD does not have anywhere near enough storage space for my needs to even think of buying one. If Microsoft would release one that is 120+ GB in size I might consider buying one, but otherwise I will not purchase one as it won’t meet my needs.
That reminds me of another issue I have with the software Podcasts like “The Bungie Studios Podcast” is listed under the “t’s” in the software but on the device in the “b’s”. Its inconsistencies like that I don’t understand that they miss. I also noticed in the music section they ignore the word “the” if it is the first word for sorting titles in the software & on the device. For example you will find “The Beatles” under the “b’s” in both the software & on the Zune itself. So to fix that one the easiest way would be to just fix this issue.
Edit September 17th 2009 or 2009-09-17 I updated the blog to support UTF-8 which I had forgotten that I didn’t add this post made me realize that issue so I corrected it, but I had to put the “□’s” & Japanese characters back as they all became “?’s”.