gHacks technology news » Zune http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:55:11 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Share Unrestricted Music with your Zune http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/11/share-unrestricted-music-with-your-zune/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/11/share-unrestricted-music-with-your-zune/#comments Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:56:21 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/11/share-unrestricted-music-with-your-zune/ 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.

Songs would expire when they reached either limit which made the wonderful filesharing function less attractive and more or less unusable. Users over at the Zune Scene website have found a way to bypass the 3 play rule limit of the Zune by changing the genre of the song to Podcast.

Yes, that is all, change it to Podcast, send it to another Zune and witness for yourself that music exchanged that way can be played indefinitely. It requires some work though because each and every song has to be declared a podcast. The user of the second Zune can naturally change the genre back without imposing the playback restrictions.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/11/share-unrestricted-music-with-your-zune/feed/ 0 Free Audiobooks from the Gutenberg Project http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/20/free-audiobooks-from-the-gutenberg-project/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/20/free-audiobooks-from-the-gutenberg-project/#comments Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:34:24 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/20/free-audiobooks-from-the-gutenberg-project/ Gutenberg was a German inventor most famous for inventing movable type printing around 1450 in Germany revolutionizing European print-making. Project Gutenberg offers more than 20000 free Ebooks for download and has a audiobook section as well. The audiobook section of Project Gutenberg offers a great list of free audiobooks in various languages with the emphasize on English audiobooks. Please note that all audiobooks are read by humans, some audiobook sites offer books read by computers instead. Human read audiobooks are of a higher quality.

I bet you are asking yourself what you can expect from the audiobook section of Project Gutenberg. Lots of high quality audiobooks read by skilled natives. Let me name a few authors and books that caught my attention in first place: Hans Christian Andersen, Jane Austen, Balzac, Joseph Conrad, Descartes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Goethe, Kafka, Jack London, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker and Mark Twain.

Lots of famous classic novels that are worth the download if you ask me. The only drawback that I could find was that the files are encoded with a maximum of 32 Kbit which is not that of a problem for audiobooks and that they are split in different parts that have to be downloaded separately. I would say that there are currently more than 100 audiobooks available that can be downloaded free of charge.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/20/free-audiobooks-from-the-gutenberg-project/feed/ 2 Bypass Zune Guest Syncing http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/13/bypass-zune-guest-syncing/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/13/bypass-zune-guest-syncing/#comments Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:47:07 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/13/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.

original zune guest syncinghacked zune guest syncing

A user from Zuneboards created a hack to bypass guest syncing. Just download the following file and place it in the Zune directory which is usually program files \ zune and run it from there. Et voila, no more guest syncing when you connect a different Zune to your computer / your Zune to another computer.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/13/bypass-zune-guest-syncing/feed/ 2 Add Divx support to your Zune http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/02/add-divx-support-to-your-zune/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/02/add-divx-support-to-your-zune/#comments Fri, 02 Mar 2007 08:53:32 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/02/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.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\Zune\Extensions\.avi]
“Extension.Handler”=”Microsoft.Zune.1.AVI”
“MediaType.Description”=”Video Clip”
“MediaType.Icon”=”C:\\Program Files\\Zune\\ZuneLoc.dll,-736″
“Extension.MIME”=”video/avi”
“AlreadyRegistered”=”no”
“Runtime”=dword:00000007
“PerceivedType”=”video”
“Permissions”=dword:0000000f
“UserApprovedOwning”=”no”
@=”"

Double-click the newly created file and the information that it stores will be added to your registry. You probably need to restart your computer before you can drag and drop divx movies to your Zune player.

Another method would be to rename the divx files to .wmv and add them to your Zune player. Once they appear in the library you would rename them back to .avi and sync it afterwards which should automatically convert the file and make it playable in the Zune player.

sources: Engadget and Zunescene

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/02/add-divx-support-to-your-zune/feed/ 2 Copy data from and to a Microsoft Zune http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/28/copy-data-from-and-to-a-microsoft-zune/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/28/copy-data-from-and-to-a-microsoft-zune/#comments Wed, 28 Feb 2007 09:40:10 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/28/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.

Press Windows + R and enter regedit. Hit enter and go to the following registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ System \ ControlSet001 \ Enum \ USB \ . Search for “PortableDeviceNameSpace” and change the following registry keys to enable hard drive mode:

  • EnableLegacySupport to 1
  • PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell to 0
  • ShowInShell to 1

Plug in your Zune and make sure the Zune software starts. The Zune should now appear in My Computer

source: Phaleux

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/02/28/copy-data-from-and-to-a-microsoft-zune/feed/ 8 Zune does not allow to share all songs http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/20/zune-does-not-allow-to-share-all-songs/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/20/zune-does-not-allow-to-share-all-songs/#comments Sat, 20 Jan 2007 07:58:40 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/20/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.

This was apparently not enough for the usual suspects. Sony, we do love Sony – don’t we, and Universal decided to prohibit even this type of sharing for more than 40% of the songs that one could buy on the Zune marketplace. The first question that comes to my mind is why Microsoft is paying Universal roughly $1 for every Zune sold if Universal does not even allow that some of their songs are shared with all the limitations of the Zune player ?

This is probably blown out of proportion by the blogging scene at the moment but I think Microsoft should at least have the courtesy to label songs that can’t be shared. Every user should now if it is possible to share a song that he has bought from the Zune marketplace.

Record Companies again show that they do not understand the market at all. What would another Zune owner do if I would send him a song which he likes ? The song becomes unplayable after a time. Would be buy it ? Probably ? Would that mean profit for the companies ? Yes it would.

You know why I bought some CD`s for the first time in years ? Because I was able to listen to the whole tune online (ripped it) and offline before I decided to make the purchase. I personally think that they lose money because of the restrictions that they impose on their customers.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/01/20/zune-does-not-allow-to-share-all-songs/feed/ 3 How to bypass the DRM of Microsoft’s Zune http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/25/how-to-bypass-the-drm-of-microsofts-zune/ http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/25/how-to-bypass-the-drm-of-microsofts-zune/#comments Sat, 25 Nov 2006 16:47:40 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2006/11/25/how-to-bypass-the-drm-of-microsofts-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.
To enable hard drive mode you need to change some registry settings. (without the Zune connected and the Zune software running)

  • Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ControlSet001\Enum\USB\
  • Search for “PortableDeviceNameSpace”. This should be contained in the Vid_####&Pid_####\########_-_########_-_########_-_########\Device Parameters within the above …\USB\ The ##’s listed here will be numbers and letters specific to your Zune
  • Change the following values:
  • EnableLegacySupport to 1
  • PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell to 0
  • ShowInShell to 1

This ensures that you can access the Zune from My Computer to drag and drop files to and from it.

The trick so send files without the DRM restrictions would be to rename those files to .jpg and send them to the other Zune with one valid jpg file.

Now, take your Zune and send the folder containing these files to your buddy along with a real photo. If you only send a fake photo, an error is thrown. The last step is to have your friend sync the Zune with their computer, open the “containing folder” where the files were downloaded, and rename the files back to their correct extension. (source)

If you do not apply the storage hack before and use the Zune software to rename the files an error will appear. This is only working with the hard drive hack.

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