Getting The Most From Your Zune MP3 Player

If you’re one of the many who bucked the trend of the iPod army and picked up Microsoft’s Zune MP3 player, you may be regretting your purchase. Although many of the Zune’s features are pretty exciting, like wireless song sharing with other Zunes in the vicinity, Apple’s much broader software development base and ongoing technical innovation have left the little player that could in the dust. In this article, I’ll give you a few tips that you can use to make your Zune a little bit more fun to use – sure, these techniques may be viewed as “hacking” the device and could end up voiding your warranty, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. If you want your Zune MP3 player to really reach its full potential, follow these simple instructions.
The first step in upgrading your Zune is to swap out the hard drive for something a bit more spacious. Let’s be frank – you can always use more storage, and it’s fairly simple to grab a bigger drive for your MP3 player and pop it in. An 80 gigabyte Toshiba drive will work just fine, or you can even rip one from an old iPod. Disassemble the casing of the Zune and install. Now doesn’t that feel a little more spacious?
Are the restrictions for sharing songs on the Zune MP3 player getting you down? If you wirelessly grab a song from a friend, you can only listen to it three times before the Zune’s software deletes it. But there is a way around this annoying restriction. First, download Microsoft’s .NET framework onto your computer, then get a copy of the free ZuneHDPatch software. This enables your computer to recognize the Zune as an external hard drive, not just a media player. With that done, run the Zune software and set it to “syncing” and you can now copy files back and forth to your PC. With the songs that you snagged from a friend, copy them to your hard drive and change their file extensions to .jpg. Add one real JPEG image to the folder and send it to a friend’s Zune. Sync that folder to a PC, change the file extensions back, and move the songs to your Zune and you’ve got permanent copies forever. Pretty slick!
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to hacking and modifying the Zune MP3 player – there are dozens of applications out there that let you do things as varied as download YouTube videos automatically to share files of any format. With a little hard work, you can turn that poor sad Zune into a multimedia juggernaut that can go head to head with any iPod in town.