Zune doesn't like my NAS?

I have done some troubleshooting on my problem importing music into my Zune, and have concluded that the problem is that Zune has a difficult time adding songs from a NAS hard drive.

Yesterday, I took a cd, Ennio Moricone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, and used Zune itself to rip this cd to a location on my NAS hard drive. Zune was able to successfully rip the CD and all mp3s were saved. If I double clicked on one of those files from Windows Explorer, Zune played the file just fine.

However, I could not ADD any of those files to my Zune library.

When I then used Zune to rip the same CD to my laptop’s hard-drive, the songs were added without any problem at all.

It isn’t that Zune doesn’t support music libraries on an NAS, because Zune DID manage to add 600 files from my NAS. The problem is that Zune is finding, but not adding 2400 files from my NAS. That ABBA CD I added was on my NAS and Zune was able to find and add 1 file from that networked location. But then it ignored all the other tracks in that same folder. This kind of inconsitancy seems like a bug, not user error.

The bottom line for me is that iTunes has no problem working with the library of music on my NAS, so therefore I am sticking to using iTunes.

For the record, I am not an Apple fanboy. I don’t own an iPod, and in general Apple’s marketing kind of annoys me. So this isn’t some sort of Apple fanboy bashing Microsoft. I really wanted to like Zune, because I have been very disappointed by iTunes 7. Instead, I have just re-installed iTunes 6 on my laptop and am going to hold off on any more Zune installs.

Thursday November 16, 2006