Jason Dunn of ZuneThoughts was attending the CES 2007 last week in Las Vegas. On a meeting with other "Mobius" members with Zunes, they tried to share tracks and photos. The normal tracks have the 3d/3p restriction. But it looks like a large part of the tracks bought from the MarketPlace cannot be shared at all. Jason says he was told by another member that we are talking about 50% of the tracks. On a small 8 tracks sample he tried by himself, he found 3 restricted files.

Of course this wouldn't be a problem if Microsoft allowed the customers to know in advance which tracks are shareable and which are not. But you can only find out this at the time of sharing when you get an error. Also a different price for a different product would be nice. Why should the customer pay the same $0.99 for both categories ?

Maybe after the meeting with the music industry, Microsoft will clarify this issue.

related article:
Exceptions on Sharing some tracks
Zune Flash Memory Players (Read more about the meeting with the music industry)
Restrictions of the Zune Pass  

[via ZuneThoughts ] 

Comments (4)

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Wireless is useless unless they change the restrictions!
written by ChongO, January 17, 2007

My bud just got himself a zune, me wanting to test out the wireless asked him to send me one of the free songs included on the ZUNE.... Now in order for me to PLAY this FREE ZUNE SONG I need to buy it after 3 days or 3 plays! Pay for free content I accidently lost when I synced to my laptop... thanks zune for auto deleting all the free stuff.

I will pretty much never mention the wireless capapbilities of the zune when telling someone else about it. Its useless. I understand putting the restriction on songs that I have downloaded using the Zune pass. But on songs that I have on my collection that are free?

whats up with that?

Love my zune but hate the battery draining useless wireless adapter! I hope microsoft fixes that.

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Losing preloaded contents
written by Zune-Online.com, January 17, 2007

ChongO: it widely know the 3d/3p applies to both free/non-DRM tracks and Zune Marketplace tracks...

I will send you a link to download the preloaded content you lost. I suggest you don't use the automatic sync in the future. Manual sync adds more steps, but you are sure what you add and delete in your player.

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Auto SYNC should do just that! SYNC
written by ChongO, January 17, 2007

My understanding is SYNC would syncronize all the media on the PC to the ZUNE and everything on the ZUNE to the PC. with this ZUNE software it syncs only from PC to ZUNE and NOT ZUNE TO PC... at least thats not what it did in my case, thats how I lost the free content. Whats up with that?

Any news as to when software updates will be available? PODCAST support? changes to the WIFI?

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Zune sync
written by Zune-Online.com, January 18, 2007

When connecting Zune to a computer it asks you if it is a guest or host on that one. If you select host the contents of your player will be deleted and substituted with the contents of the PC library you connected it.

You can also drag and drop contents from your Zune to the "sync" panel and press "copy to computer" and these will be transfered to your PC.

Be sure, if we hear something about feature-adding updates we'll let you know at once

If you have more questions which are a bit irrelevant with the article please ask these in our forum.

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