Zune 30 – Getting back into physical media

Not only did I resurrect an old iBook, I have also bought one of my childhood dream devices from the same time period. It's a – please don't laugh – 1st gen Zune 30. Infamous for it's brown color and made somehow popular by the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise after its death, Microsoft's attempt to take on the iPod still has a lot to offer.

With the upcoming of streaming services like Spotify, music has become something that you no longer own, but rent. It's great to have nearly all the music available accessible anytime and anywhere. But for reasons like ending license deals or AI kerfuffle, music can get removed from one day to the other (looking at you, King Gizzard and Dendemann).

By actually owning music, maybe even by having physical media, no one can take these away anymore. You no longer have to rely on a stable internet connection, and don't have to be afraid your monthly renting fees fund some questionable investments.

As much as I appreciate music streaming for discovering new music with ease, listen to full albums on your music player is and feels much more intentional. Streaming some background music while working or writing? Yeah, why not. But actually listening to music for the sake of it is a different thing. Calmer, more mindful and to me also meaningful.

I still have a nice collection of digital music, some CDs and even LPs. And this is where my Zune comes into play.
One might argue that a modern MP3 player would work better, or even your smartphone. That's objectively true, but, where is the fun in that?

As there are basically no Zunes in Europe (for a "fair" price at least), ebay.com was the way to go. I received a Zune in black-blue in decent shape, fully working, from China. As usually, the battery won't last forever (around 8 hours of playback), so there is a battery swap upcoming. Albeit not too heavy, the Zune is rather chunky by today's standards. It's boxy, there is no clickwheel, but a fancy looking D-pad. The keys are decent. There is a big, low-res screen with limited color reproduction. By any means I should hate this thing. But I do not. It's pleasant to hold, pleasant to look at, and pleasant to use. I really, really like it.

Getting the software side to work is also not as bad as I thought it would be. Instead of using the Zune mediaplayer software for Windows (I also have a Sony Vaio with XP here now), I can more easily transfer the music directly from my modern Macbook – Android File Transfer for Linux got me covered with nearly fully-featured support for Zunes. Adding music is simple, removing takes some more effort though. I did not add any podcasts yet, but this should work as well.

For music, I ripped all my old CDs with the help of the iBook and iTunes. Using an external USB sound card (that I have to drive my studio speakers), I can also capture my audio from my record player and edit it with Audacity to digitalize it. One could argue that this might not be the best investment of time, but it's fun.

And how does the Zune actually sounds like? Well, quite good. I combine it with Sennheiser HD 25 most of the time, giving it a full retro feeling and satisfying audio quality. I only have to get used to the cable again, but tucking them under my shirt works quite well and stops the cable from getting caught on something.

Future upgrades
The Zune 30 is pretty tinker friendly. As mentioned, the battery is not the strongest anymore. Luckily, the Zune can use the iPods (Gen 5–7) batteries and get an upgrade of the capacity while doing so (800 mAh to 3.000 mAh in my case). And while I'm on it, I will replace the hard disk drive with an SSD and double the storage that way.

You can also wireless charging and Bluetooth 5.0 to the device, but maybe this is something for a later date.

Update
The Zune now has the 3.000 mAh battery (thick variant) as well a 64 GB SSD. The installation was extremely easy. For some reasons the Zune software could not load the firmware even with the updated resources server, so I had to dig through the internet and install a local http server, add some files and point the Zune software towards it. The files were prodvided by Andrew Howe in this Onedrive share, I loosely followed his instructions on Youtube (I only needed the server and populated the htdocs folder and point resources.zune.net to it).
As a nice side effect, the album art loads way quicker now.

Also, I wrote some code so my current music library on my Zune can be accessed from the web as well – just for fun.