Z Is For ... Dept.

Not long ago, a friend of mine gave me his old Zune 30GB model (he replaced it with the current HD edition).

He gave me carte blanche to gripe about it as well, because as grateful as I am for having a dedicated music player, I've somehow managed to stumble across every single feature (or lack thereof) that drives me crazy.

• No UTF-8 support. Or, rather, no support for non-Western characters in UTF-8. The software supports such things, but not the device. Not even the current 3.x firmware for the device does this.
• Managing playlists and syncing between the device and its host program is extremely clumsy.
• Also, who thought it was a great idea to not allow cut and paste operations when building playlists?
• Good idea: You can import .m3u playlists. Bad idea: They don't work when you point to UTF-8 file paths. Another workaround shot down.

And so on. I'm still going to use it — I'd be an idiot to turn down something free and moderately useful — but almost all the stuff I've described here seem, to me, to be features that would not significantly dilute the device's focus if they were included.

It also means I have to run two music management programs — foobar2000, my current music player of choice, and the Zune software — which is gorgeous to look at but runs into a serious functionality wall after a certain point. (And which goes unresponsive far too often. And which doesn't support drag-and-drop, or cut-and-paste, or even have a proper import function.)

I guess some deity is out there to make me eat my words when I said I would never use an iPod.