I’m an iTunes-addicted you know, but I’m always searching for new music players and new ways to view, catalogue and listen to my big music collection. Some weeks ago I was reading this post on Anything But iPod blog (subscribe its feeds, it’s a very interesting website) and I stumbled upon the following pic:
When I saw it, I said “Woah, that media player looks amazing! It could be very nice to setup that touchscreen music jukebox I’m thinking about since years!“. Well, that eye-candy and unknown mediaplayer potraited in the pic is Zune Software 4.0.
Zune Software is the iTunes-like application for managing Zune players and brings a really fresh and innovative user interface. I gave it a try and I think it could be a really nice graphical “front-end” for a well-tagged music collection like mine.
Talking about fuctions, it’s not complete, powerful and usable like iTunes, at least for maniacs/pro users like me, but a system with Zune Software as frontend + iTunes & Tagscanner as backend could work lovely as music jukebox.
As I said, I gave Zune Software a try with a bunch of netlabel music, and I did some screenshots I wanna share with you (click on thumbs to enlarge):
The “Now Playing” view is just gorgeus as you see 
The “Collection” view is a the standard way to sort and browse your music library.
You can manage a pictures library as well. I know it’s not a strictly music-related feature, but it feels nice to view artworks while you listen to some tunes so check it out
This is the innovative “Quick Play” view, where you can “pin” your favourite albums and playing them with just one click “Quick play” show the most recent albums you added to your library and your playlists as well. Very handy and cool!
If you wanna give Zune Software a try, just go here and get the setup file, you don’t need a Zune player to use its basic funcions. If you have troubles installing it and/or if you don’t want to download tons of Microsoft updates, open “zunesetuppkg-x86.exe” with 7zip or similar software, extract “Zune-x86.msi” and run it
Have a nice Zune, my dear free music fans
