Did you know that the Zune, the mp3 player from Microsoft, has a filesharing feature that is probably one of the best ever implemented in mp3 players ? Did you also know that Microsoft restricted playback of song shared using that filesharing option to three playbacks in the new Zune players ? The old players had an even tougher restriction set in place, their restriction was three plays or three days.
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Bypass Zune Guest Syncing
If you want to connect a Zune to a computer that is not its home zone you receive a popup asking if you want to connect the Zune as a guest or “sync with your library on this pc.” The second option would remove all content on the Zune and sync it with the library on the new computer. I suppose this is another feature to please the Music Industry by making it harder to add music from your friends computer to your own Zune. This spells troubles. Imagine if you have purchase a new pc or something gets messed up on your old computer.
Add Divx support to your Zune
The Zune seems really hackable, wonder if that is on purpose or just laziness. Anyways, the following registry hack makes it possible to add Divx movies to your Zune player and sync them successfully. Once that is done the Zune automatically converts them to the native format which makes it possible to view them just as any other video that you have stored on your Zune player. Copy and paste the following lines into a text editor, save it and rename the file extension to .reg afterwards.
Copy data from and to a Microsoft Zune
I do not own a Zune and will probably never own one but I know a few people who do own one, this article is for them. You can enable a hard drive mode in the Zune which is similar to the hard drive mode of the iPods. All you need to do is change some registry keys in windows which enables this.
Zune does not allow to share all songs
Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s iPod is getting some bad feedback lately. It turned out some months ago that shared songs, e.g. songs that you send another Zune user to his Zune, would only be playable for 3 days / times before they became useless. It did not even matter if the song contained DRM or not, all songs, even your own produced ones, would be limited to this.
How to bypass the DRM of Microsoft’s Zune
Every song that you send to someone else from your Zune is restricted to a limit number of plays before it becomes useless on the recipients Zune. This is really bad if you want to swap music files that you created on your own for example. There is however a (rather complicated) way to transfer files from one Zune to the other without those DRM restrictions. First you need to enable hard drive mode in your operating system.
