The Zune team has been hard at work in the Zune headquarters (cleverly disguised as a library) lately and is now going live with the next milestone, version 2.5. It is a fairly substantial update adding to the social aspect, implementation of auto playlists, better meta data editing, and even a video section where TV shows can now be downloaded. The most interesting I find to be the Gapless playback, since it has always been such an elusive appearing only on a hand full of devices over the years. It may go unnoticed by some, but for the live music listener and or electronic mix fan it’s a feature we longed for.

For the details on all of the latest changes in software/firmware version 2.5 check below for a quick look list and screen shots of the software that should be live in a few hours.

Linux users have in the past been confined to using MSC based MP3 players, ones that act like basic drag and drop memory cards, so choices have been limited. In order to get MTP based devices to work Linux users had to used programs like Gnomad2, Rhythmbox, or Amarok to transfer media to these devices.

In the latest Ubuntu version 8.04 a simple command (sudo apt-get install mtpfs) will install full MTP support. MTPFS provides a full file browsing experience just like an MSC based device with the ability to browse playlists, write playlists, and write metadata to music tracks.

This is great news to MTP only devices like the Creative Zen family, but I also throw out a proposal for the Zune. The Zune uses a modified version of MTP called MTPZ. If this isn’t too modified from MTP, then could this be a slight hack to get full drag and drop Linux support to the Zune?

[Linuxtechie via MTP on Linux Forums]

A while ago I ranted about the major headaches of Windows Media Player 11 and how it fails at being a good desktop media player. There are plenty of things to add to the list, but Jason from Digital Home Thoughts appended my list with some more problem areas.

There is a list of 8 dealing with performance issues and such, but two stand out that are particularly interesting to me: embedded album art and WMP’s obsessive need to sync every possible storage device you plug in.

Let’s face it, Windows Media Player is a dog- its slow, fails to play anything outside of a few major codecs, and it fails to extend its usefulness to portable devices. Microsoft’s own Zune media player even outperforms WMP in many aspects, only failing at more of the hardcore features such as library organization and tag editing.

Ditching the WMP code and building on top of the Zune software or opening the Zune software up to all all MP3 players would be an ideal approach, but I doubt either will happen. So instead here are 3 extremely critical aspects WMP need in order to be a viable media player for the masses.

Here's a cool little program that automatically processes and converts Windows Outlook and Mac Mail e-mail, Microsoft Word documents, PDFs, and other texts into MP3 files that are 4 to 5 times smaller than the average song. Created by MagneticTime, iAudioize uses more natural-sounding voice technology (named Heather) to make you feel like you're a successful CEO who can't be bothered with mundane tasks like reading. Instead, you are read to.

Files that have been "audioized" can be played back on your computer and/or exported to a number of portable devices including MP3 players, PDAs, and cell phones. The free trial allows 10 uses; otherwise the program is $40.

[via jkOnTheRun]

Songbird is a yet to be released desktop media player that integrates many different music and media services. For now their site is only showing support for Sony Connect, eMusic, Insound, and Odeo, but I believe that they plan to make other services available when it is released. The program is based on the Firefox browser and is being programmed by the some of the team from Winamp and Y! Music Engine.

Yeah… it looks fairly similar to iTunes, but I find it to be a welcome similarity. The one good thing about iTunes is its user interface. On the surface, anyway. The rest of the program is counter intuitive and tries to take over your music collection.

[Songbird] thanks Kaif