Category: Zune

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blog Free Marketplace Microsoft Zune

Free isn’t always free on the Zune Marketplace

One of the songs on the “free playlist: nov. 24-30” costs 79 Microsoft points or almost one dollar, It is titled “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” the Artist is “Sinai Rose” & it was from the “Kidz Bop Christmas” album. I did try to let Microsoft know before making this post, here & here.

On the bright side this does give me the opportunity to get the errors I was getting trying to download files with a failed download. That can wait until after I post this. I guess another post is in order for that after I get the errors. I say errors because I remember getting at least two different errors.

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blog Marketplace Microsoft Zune

Zune 4.0 issues downloading purchased items

From what I’ve seen so far it looks like if you have one or more failed downloads you can not successfully start a download of something you purchased through the Zune market place. The current work around, that I have found, is to close the Zune software, then after you are sure it is no longer running by checking task manager or rebooting the computer open it again & immediately before any downloads can fail go to your purchase history & start the downloads. You can find the “Purchase History” if you go to Settings in the top right, then go to “account” under that you should see “Purchase History” where it should list your purchases, & you should be able to download stuff again that you have bought but didn’t get downloaded for whatever reason.

This makes me hate that they keep the list of failed downloads even more. I figured this out after several times of being told that a firewall was blocking it from getting access to something from their side. (Sorry I can’t remember the exact error. When I get the error in the future I’ll note it in another post.)

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blog Microsoft Zune

More podcast issues with the Zune 4.0 software

Well I just realized that I had unsubscribed from a podcast after the 4.0 version of the Zune software was released, the issue was that I didn’t really want to unsubscribe I just did so by mistake. I ran into several issues when I did that.

  1. Even though I told the Zune 4.0 software to unsubscribe & delete the podcast the files were never deleted by the Zune software I had to do that manually.
  2. when I resubscribed to the podcast the Zune software had this crazy idea that the files for it were still on my computer & refuses to download previously downloaded episodes.

Yes I will be making a page with a list of all the podcasts that I subscribe that still have a valid RSS feed to subscribe to. That will take some time to compile as I know of 185 different podcasts that I subscribe to. I believe I have already weeded out the ones that are now dead from the list. Right now I just have a list of URLs, but I wanted to include a list of the names & just have the name point to the URL.

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blog Microsoft Zune

Still limited on the number of files on my Zune 120

Well Microsoft changed their error syncing page to no longer include a mention that the Zune will only allow a certain number of files that they don’t specify a specific number still. So I tried syncing a large number of audio only podcasts & I ran into the same issue I have had with the Zune 120, that is I have about 50% of the space unused & I can’t get the podcasts I want on it because I’m limited by something other than available storage space.

This is the 21st century last time I checked & we are not using the FAT16 file system anymore. Heck the most that FAT16 could deal with was 4 GB on Windows NT 4 (You could make a 4 GB FAT16 partition the issues were that no other OS at the time could read it & the cluster size was 64 KB, this was an issue because a file that was 1 KB wasted 63 KB of space.) They fixed some of the issues with FAT16 when they released FAT32 as the file size limit was raised from 2 GB to 4 GB, the limit of 512 entries in the root was raised to supposedly unlimited according to Microsoft.

Everything I’m seeing indicates that the current generation of file systems can deal with 120 GB of data, heck I have two 1 TB hard drives so it makes even less sense to me that they have a limit on the number of files. I really wish they would just fix this or at the very least admit that they have a limit & what the actual limit is.

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blog Microsoft Zune Zune software

A new feature in the Zune 4.0 software that I just noticed

In an attempt to check if they have done something about the file count limit that had appeared in previous versions of the firmware I decided today to test that by syncing all unplayed episodes of several of my audio only podcasts to my Zune. In doing that I discovered a new feature, it looks like the software gives a visual representation of what percentage the additional files will take up on the Zune that is being synced. It shows up as orange on my computer, & it doesn’t say what the expected space is in any way other than the way the bars normally show up using space.

This goes as one of the many features that was never mentioned. My only wish now is that they fix the issues that I’ve run into with the software so far.

I’ll make another post after I find out if it runs into a file count issue on the Zune when the sync finishes.