In general, the software is quite easy to use. I tried out the Zune Pass for about a month, which enabled me to download unlimited tracks from their marketplace for around $15 USD. There really wasn’t much there in terms of electronic music, the chief reason for my cancellation of the Pass, but in terms of comedy and free podcasts, the service is quite good. It’s also really easy to transfer music to the Zune – just drag and drop.

What’s missing? The search could be improved, as could the playlist feature – there’s no way to make playlists on the go, as they all have to be created in the PC software. This adds the further wrinkle that if you have deleted any music out of your ‘collection’ on your hard drive but kept it on your Zune, then you can’t add it to a playlist. This is a real problem for me, since I only keep music in my Zune collection folders temporarily prior to transfer. It’s also impossible to edit the name or any other information regarding a track once it is on the device – this also has to be done when the track is still part of the ‘collection’.

The other somewhat bizarre feature when it comes to the Zune has to do with the way it handles the shuffle functionality of the player. Instead of actually randomizing the tracks, the Zune actually uses a weighted algorithm that tracks what you have most recently listened to and gives it a precedence when selecting which song to play next. While this feature might sound useful, it is actually terribly flawed. I will give you an example: when I first got the device, I only loaded a few albums onto it, mostly comedy that I had downloaded from the Zune Marketplace. Since those few albums were all that I had ever listened to on the device, after I had loaded more music onto the player and hit shuffle I received a disproportionate number of these tracks compared to all others. Not only that, but the fact that these tracks kept coming up again and again only reinforced the Zune’s perception that they were what I wanted to hear, amplifying their shuffle priority and leading me to have to delete them from the device.

While this might not seem like that big of a deal, consider the fact that a 120 gigabyte device can hold thousands of tracks. During a typical listening period, you are unlikely to get through more than a small fraction of those, but the Zune will weight them over the un-listened to tracks on the list, meaning that over time they will quickly be perceived as your ‘favorites’ as they are played over and over again. There is an option to add a ‘like / dislike’ tag to a track as it is playing, but this only has a marginal effect on how often the songs are played. I can understand Microsoft wanting to innovate, but this is one feature that should be optional alongside a standard, ‘true’ shuffle system.

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