Zune Fails to Import All Music Files

[UPDATE: I think I have found the problem. Zune seems to have a hard time handling music files stored on a networked hard drive.]

I installed Zune this morning and am quite happy with the performance of the software.

Unfortunately, Zune is having a terrible time importing songs from my harddrive into my Zune music library.

Last night, for example, I ripped a CD, ABBA Greatest Hits, using iTunes. This is a CD I just purchased from Amazon.com and now own. The 15 mp3 files from that cd are now in a folder in my hard drive.

This morning, when I installed Zune, it only imported ONE of the songs from that folder of 15 mp3s.

Now, if I go to my music folder and double-click on one of the mp3 files that Zune did not import Zune is able to play the song just fine. The song title appears in the right hand column under “What’s Playing”.

But, even though I have the setting to “automatically add files to my library” when Zune plays them, the song I played did NOT get added to my library.

I even tried to import music from my music folder again without any luck. In the end, Zune only found 600 songs for my Zune library.

But the folder that these 600 songs came from, actually has 3200 music files in it. The VAST majority of which are unprotected MP3 files which are from CDs that I own.

I did call customer support and the problem has been elevated, but so far I’m not impressed. This is probably the simplest procedure that an MP3 playing software should be able to do, and it fails at it. How can I have any confidence that their media player will actually work as well?

Wednesday November 15, 2006