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Comment by handity | Hacker News Reader

As somewhat of a Zune fanatic, it always makes me happy to see a new Metro-inspired UI, but every one of these Zune-inspired projects falls short when compared to the actual Zune application, which imo is the absolutely pinnacle of music players. It presents your music library in a way that to me is aesthetically pleasing and entirely intuitive. The three column layout, with sorting options for each, is ideal. Filtering does not dump you into a new page. It's hard to describe what makes it so pleasant to use, but no application I've found yet comes close.

I encourage anyone with a local music collection to go download Zune and give it a try.

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Might Dopamine be of interest? It has a similar 3 pane interface at least.

https://digimezzo.github.io/site/software

Dopamine is indeed a good software, but the version on non-Windows operating systems is based on Electron. I think that's really overkill for a music player.

IMHO Xbox 360, Zune, Windows 7-10 Mobile and Metro were very good UX implementations at their time, and bizarrely far superior to the touch mode Windows 11 offers today on tablets. WTF Microsoft, why are you regressing on all fronts?!

Zune never took off because it came too late and was going against a market already dominated by the iPod, and Metro was hated since Microsoft shoved it down the throats of desktop users with Windows 8, even though it was wonderful to use on tablets, except Windows tablets of the time sucked major ballsack since they were powered by anemic Intel Atom CPUs trying to run a full desktop OS compared to the ARM iPads running a mobile OS.

Surface Pro with Windows 8 was pretty good, great performance on that device. I did a lot of sketching and some D&D world building with the pencil :). But the UX had a lot of frustrating spots where you still end up using Windows 95 UI because Microsoft didn’t care to update everything.

Zune never took off because Apple unveiled iPhone soon after.

When all the news and talks are about this iPod killer from Microsoft and then Apple themselves release a truly groundbreaking iPod killer themselves, you look foolish. Zune really got done in by marketing.

Definitely. But even if the iPhone were to be delayed there's no way Zune would have made a significant dent in iPod's market.

It was already the established player and the user base was already locked in with hundreds of $ in iTunes purchases. The usets weren't gonna throw that away no matter how much better Zune would have been.

iPod's market dominance wasn't in some UX magic that couldn't be replicated or braten by competitors, it was in the iTunes purchases that made it comfy to own specific songs and also locked users in.

I was sometimes involved in this project at MS. The music buying experience for Zune was awful, and I regret missed opportunities to be more forceful about telling the Windows Media execs that they were fucking up. Part of the problem was MS insistence on being fair to everyone and having an open system which led to 5000 shitty online stores where you could buy music. Instead of Apple that had exactly one where they owned and controlled the entire vertical.

This was the whole reason for creating Zune. Again, MS had licensed out their awful Windows Media products to 100 Chinese digital music player makers and got a fragmented market of trash, so MS jumped in to try and do it the right way themselves, but sadly too late.

I think the flat Metro UI evolved out of all the work we did coming out of the Windows Media division. I based all the flat design work I was doing for MS on British Sky TV's set top box graphics, simply because they were easiest for my developer brain to code and they also worked really well:

https://youtu.be/-26xPkRXtsU

What you’re describing is enlightening, thank you for sharing. The music purchasing workflow involved collaboration with the marketing people at Apple, which explains their successes.

What's funny is that Microsoft and its partners did all the groundwork to open up the labels and gave Apple an easy ride. I was working with Peter Gabriel and he could call any record label in the world and get us a meeting to show the demos. The startup I was working for would go in and it would spend a lot of energy proving to the labels that digital was the endgame and CDs were eventually going to die. This was a very hard job.

And then a couple of weeks after each demo we'd get a call from the labels and they would tip us off that Apple had come to show them something special that they were working on, and of course that meeting went a lot easier than ours...

(also every record label on Earth was using Macs not PCs, so Microsoft's software either had to be run on a laptop we took, or we had to show them Microsoft's absolutely awful Mac software. PG, bless him, gave me his personal iBook for testing (complete with all his passwords and AOL account), which he probably got from Jobs, but I was in a belligerent anti-Mac era so I shoved it in a closet with the button nailed down and stuck it on that "hold the button" game for two years)

We chose a strict flat metro style on Microsoft Band because it was super easy to render with the tiny CPU we had! All squares and monochrome icons meant we could render at an absurd FPS.

Wait, 5000 is an actual number?

> locked in with hundreds of $ in iTunes purchases

Wasn't one of the big selling points that songs bought on iTunes were DRM-free?

(Sorry, I went to search and you are right: Apple went DRM-free only on 2009)

No. I was involved a lot in these early rights meetings and the labels were adamant that the tracks had to have DRM. All the early demos that got the labels on board had DRM, but all the consumers hated it, everyone at the labels actually hated it too, but I suspect their legal teams were forcing the issue. It took a big personality like Jobs, with a market-leading product to finally kill it.

p.s. haven't Apple been sneaking DRM back onto their music lately? I know all the videos are DRM, right?

The world was also not ready for music subscriptions. That was the really compelling benefit of Zune for me, that we take for granted today with Spotify et al. The vast majority of people I knew, even early adopter types, just could not wrap their head around the idea. “What happens when you stop paying? You’re left with NOTHING!”

100%. These were the arguments we had with Microsoft, Nokia etc. We tested subscriptions a lot in 2000-2004, but you have to remember, this was DOWNLOAD subscriptions. So what would happen is, if you failed to pay you ended up with a player or hard drive filled with thousands of "MP3" files that you could no longer play because the DRM license had expired. The customers were livid as fuck about this scenario.

My argument was to have all-you-can-eat streaming subscriptions, but it was shot down, and at the time mobile data was pretty shitty (I built the original streaming service on a 9600bps GSM modem in 1999) so you could only stream at home.

Microsoft’s decisions on windows will always be very funny. Push a gloriously designed tablet UI onto everybody, face backlash because nobody was buying windows tablets so it was tacky on desktop, come out with good windows tablets finally (or hybrid ones) but change the UI to a compromise that neither desktop or tablet users enjoy.

It's what you get when you have design by comitee instead.

Apple have a measure twice, cut once approach.

Microsoft seem to just hack away, cutting in the dark and don’t bother to measure at all. ;-)

It hurts, Microsoft always ruin the design essentials we love.

Current windows UI and esthetics is pretty good imho, if you ignore the ads being pushed everywhere. I really like WinUI 3

Zune never took off just like HoloLens, Band, Kinect and Windows Phone didn't take off—not because they were in any way late, but because Microsoft is never "all-in" with any of these ventures.

The Xbox was somewhat of an anomaly owing to exclusives like Halo and Gears of War, but it's floundering, and in some countries, like Japan, it's just never taken off, period.

Apple Vision doesn't seem to be a sensation in terms of sales figures, despite the HoloLens beating Apple to the punch, and the stereotypical nonsense being "Apple is always late, but they always do it right". HoloLens just got killed along with Windows Mixed Reality.

Hell, even the Microsoft Band beat the Apple Watch to market.

The problem is that merely having a presence in a niche doesn't guarantee success as it once did. Now, you need to actually iterate, innovate, and satisfy the minimum expected threshold of solving real problems. This is also what Tim Cook's Apple struggles with these days.

What's the killer app for Apple Vision? What was it for HoloLens?

When digital technology was new and exciting, having anything would draw buyers. Now, we're spoiled for choice, things move fast, it isn't years between models, it's months to a year. Early adopters tend to get a bad experience too.

> Hell, even the Microsoft Band beat the Apple Watch to market.

We weren't making any money off of them and the 100% failure rate of Band 2 doomed the project.

Which sucked, customers loved us and we had features that still aren't matched by anything else on the market even today.

Wow, can I just say that my family and I loved our Bands? We had issues with the plastics breaking down on the first gen (had them replaced a few times due to them becoming unwearably uncomfortable due to it within the space of a couple months), but I'll be damned if it wasn't one of my favourite gadgets of all time in terms of tasteful design and innovative ideas.

Many a familial glass of wine was raised to whoever you might have been whilst discussing how much we loved them!

I have some blog posts about the making of Band, if you want to know more about how it was developed feel free to have a read!

https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/cooperative-multitas...

Band, Microsoft Band, oh how heartbreaking it is to read about the name. I once owned a Microsoft Band and was even excited about the second generation. Its design was captivating. But now it's all gone. My only remaining first-generation Band became unusable due to the notorious cracking issue. Now, I'm stuck with my Fitbit, which lacks design taste and inevitably has battery issues every three years. It's a product I have to patiently endure to keep using. Such a pity.

I hear ya. I bought Bands for the whole family as we were all-in on Windows Phone/Mobile. Beautiful ideas left to wither on the vine. Truly a pity.

Apple controls the full driver stack while Microsoft does not. I've had to re-work HID interaction on Windows with WinForms and WPF to work around problematic touch interface drivers on Windows 7 and 10.

Microsoft is more towards licensing software to make money versus making a quality product top down.

Windows mobile gets a lot of flak but the early phones were really impressive with a beautiful, original, fast and user friendly UI.

That doesn’t happen often.

That Zune music subscription was Spotify before Spotify was Spotify

About a dozen years ago my employer wanted an intranet app for our mobile devices. Initially I was disappointed to have been assigned to create the Blackberry app because even though it was by far the most common phone in use by our employees, I could see the writing on the wall with Android and the iphone taking over. But I was also given free reign on the UI, which I borrowed very heavily from the Zune's UI. While it was well received, RIM really started falling apart around that time, which accelerated the replacing of the company issued Blackberries with BYOD. I was sad to see it go but also glad to be freed of the frustration of dealing with RIM and their often offline 'signing server'.

I saw this cool metro theme for JavaFX a while back: https://www.pixelduke.com/java-javafx-theme-jmetro/

Can you download Zune for Windows 11? I have a couple of Zunes I would love to put back in service.

Where can I get the Zune download? Searching on Zune just shows me the hardware.

Copies of the installer are on archive.org - try one of these:

https://archive.org/details/zune-package_202204 https://archive.org/details/zunepackage_4.8.2345.0

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