I’ve officially created a new title for myself: ” Zune Loader.” One who spends a couple of months loading up and perfecting the content on his or her Zune. I’m guilty as charged! I’ve had the Zune almost two months now, and am still amazed by how much it does, and how well. I never counted on using it for video, and yet I keep a couple gigs of videos loaded to watch late at night. As you can imagine, though, loading up a 120GB media player is a lot of work. Just how much?
Well, it’s not hard work by any means, but it is tedious. Expect to spend a lot of time doing this. CD drives can only rip music at a certain speed. And it takes time to tweak up all of the tags on the files, so they show up as expected on the player. And when you’re using your Zune, you’re more than like to find errors in track names, artists, albums, and find odd files where you didn’t expect them. If you’re prepared, though, you can save yourself some time and agony. Much of what’s written below is applicable to the Zune and other MP3 players, but some of the ideas will surely apply to anyone who’s preparing to create a portable version of their music and video collections.
First of all, figure out where your music is at. Do you have it on CDs? What about files on your computer? I have FLAC files on my computer from CDs I had ripped myself, along with some MP3 files I’d created a few years ago, in addition to other MP3 files I’d swapped with others. I also had some in-progress WAV files from needle drops I had made from LPs. When I first got the Zune, my first reaction was to load up a few CDs so I could try the player out. I’ve learned that it pays to be organized.
Now that you have your music, decide what you want to do with it. With a smaller MP3 player, like the memory-based Zunes, you don’t have much room to store files. On larger players, you can go with lossless files for best sound quality, but you reduce your battery life since the hard drive has to spin more often to fill the player’s internal buffer…and of course, you eat up more storage space.
I settled on the Windows Media Audio 10 Professional codec, as opposed to the 9.2 versions (either lossy or lossless). The sound degradation is barely noticeable, if at all, and at a variable 192kbps bitrate, it maximizes both storage and sound quality. Some files are MP3s, but I’ve made sure that I have none lower than 192kbps. (In the case of MP3s, I can hear more degradation at 192kbps than I do with the WMA files.) Most of my MP3s are 256kbps or higher.
In order to accomodate all the ripping and file storing I would be doing, including keeping a complete backup directory of my player, I grabbed a cheap 640GB SATA drive.
With the Zune software, you can set up directories that Zune will monitor for changes. You don’t want it to scan your entire hard disk all the time, and have it greedily grab up any sound file it finds. What I did was set up a Zune directory, under which I have Audio and Video directories. That way, I can drag and drop entire directories to the appropriate Audio or Video space on my hard disk, and the Zune software will recognize it automatically. Under Audio, the directories are set up by artist, with each album inside the appropriate artist folder.
You need some utilities to work with the audio files. I’d first toyed with EAC (Exact Audio Copy), but its interface left a lot to be desired. These days, many media player owners use the dBpoweramp utilities. I’m using the complete set, with all codecs installed. For CDs, I’m using the dBpoweramp CD Ripper. For lossless files already on my hard drive, I’m using the dBpoweramp Batch Converter, which allows you to select entire directories to process.
Both of the dBpoweramp utilities allow you to set up a dynamic directory scheme–this will automatically create the folder you need to store your music files in. It will save you a lot of work down the road, if you take the time to set up this feature. I’m using this variable string to set my directories up:
[IFCOMP][IFVALUE]album artist,[album artist],Various Artists[]\[album]\[track] [artist][][IF!COMP][IFVALUE]album artist,[album artist],[artist][]\[album]\[artist] – [track][] – [title]
(That’s all on one line.)
To make your life easier, though, follow these hints. If you are ripping CDs, be sure that you retrieve META data for your CDs before ripping them, or fill it in manually. If not, you’ll end up with generic naming, and you will not know what is in your files. Make sure the tags are pretty much close to what you want them to be, or at least good enough to identify them. We can touch them up later.
If you have FLAC or APE files on your computer already, I would recommend touching up your tagging before you run the Batch Converter. All of the tags carry over to your MP3 or WMA files, saving you work later on. WAV files cannot store tagging data, though, so you may want to compress those WAV files to FLAC, tag them, then do your conversion afterward. It’s twice as much work, but it’ll save you some grief.
If you have FLAC files storing an entire album, and have a CUE sheet, you will need to split those into individual tracks first. EAC can do this for you, but it insists on working only with WAV files. I’m still looking for a reliable utility to do the splitting, that will do it without going through a conversion process beforehand.
To touch up your tagging, the MP3tag utility is about the best out there. You can edit just about any tag imaginable. One notorious omission is the “Album Artist” tag, but MP3tag calls it the “BAND” tag, which is the same.
To make finding music easier on your Zune, make sure you fill in a correct album artist. If you have a compilation with many artists, you have a choice of giving each track its appropriate artist, or just tagging the whole album under “Various Artists” for both the artist and album artist tags, which will prevent the individual artists’ names from showing up. (For example, I have a Rhino box set with 100 tracks on it, with perhaps 80 of those tracks by different artists. As a result of the way it was tagged, I now have 80+ additional artists with only one or two tracks each, listed in my “Artists” listing on the Zune. In cases like this, I’d probably just use the Various Artists in both tag locations, and just append the name of the artist to the song title.) One other thing to look for are duplicate names for the same artist: for instance, I have recordings under both “Dave Brubeck” and “The Dave Brubeck Quartet”. To reduce clutter, I’d probably combine everything under one of those two artist entries. In rare cases though, I’d keep them separate–for example, I’d leave Brian Setzer and Brian Setzer Orchestra separated since they are different types of music, and if I ever wanted to do a shuffle by artist, this would keep them separate.
With both MP3tag and dbPoweramp, you can add cover art in the program, and it will save it for you. For sources of cover art, I usually check Amazon first. Failing that, I’ll attempt using http://www.allcdcovers.com for the art, All Music Guide, or even a search on Google Images. The default size on the Zune is 240×240 pixels, so it’s best to find art that size or larger.
One thing that’s a struggle to get used to is that the Zune sorts by name. So you’d find Dave Brubeck under “D” and Brian Setzer under “B”. The word “the” is ignored. But after years of filing by band name or artist’s last name, this is a bit odd to get used to.
I’m still trying to figure out the best way to organize photos, but I’ll report back here when I find something out. I ended up with some photos lumped all into one folder, where other photos got scattered into their own separate folders.
Video woes: it took me awhile to figure out how to work with video on the Zune. The WMV format was recommended, but each time I tried it, the Zune software ran it through some kind of conversion process that took forever. I found out a few weeks later that the Zune will accept any .mp4 file without conversion, which is neat. For converting between video formats, I found a program called “WM Converter” that will save to the .mp4 format. To rip DVDs, I’m using AoA DVD Ripper, although I’m having problems with a few DVDs that seem to be authored differently, and I have problems with skipping or out-of-sync audio and video, or parts of discs where a title or chapter won’t even get processed.
When I rip or convert video files for the Zune, I make sure I stick to the 320×240 pixel size to save storage space (the Zune can’t display in higher resolution unless you connect an external TV to it), and I use the 512kbps video bitrate and 128kbps audio bitrate, which is good enough. Frames with still images look occasionally blocky in the background, but it’s not distracting. Otherwise, the images are sharp and motion seems to be quite fluid. One thing the Zune software does is grab the filename as the default title of the video–you can edit it later on, but it may be better to make sure your MP4 file is tagged with a title, or has a short filename that makes sense.
I’ll post more tips in the future as I come across them, and will give an update if I find any better audio or video processing programs. My only wish is that I didn’t have to use the Zune software to load the player. My comptuer runs pretty much everything, but the Zune software is slow and sluggish, not to mention having rather strange graphics. It does the job, but it’s slow.