Zune Sync to a Virtual Machine on a Mac = Easy

Posted by: PatrickJ on Apr 02 2008

Admitting this will probably get me kicked out of the Mac Switchers Club - and to think I only just joined by getting a MacBook a couple of weeks ago.  Oh well, anyway - I am one of those seven people (I’ve upped the number because of Zune 2) who own a Zune. 

A  couple of days ago on my dying Dell PC, the Zune software informed me that it was ‘corrupt’ and pretty thoroughly buggered by the sound of things - and offered me up a pretty lengthy set of steps to correct the issue, involving a complete uninstall of itself and several MS component drivers, reinstall from the web and so on.

Since I am increasingly using only the Mac (and pulling all my data off the PC), I figured that was as good a time as any to see if I could get the Zune syncing with the Mac through a VMWare virtual machine.  I figured it might be possible, but would probably be a bit of a pain, with a lot of hoops to jump through to make things work.  Boy was I wrong.  It was easy.  A breeze really.

To keep a short story short, I didn’t do anything different or special to make it work.  Just fired up an XP Pro virtual machine, downloaded and instaled the latest Zune software from Zune.net, plugged the Zune into a USB port, waited for XP to see the new hardware first and then launched the Zune software.  Then moved all my Zune subscription music across to a shared directory on the host (Mac) machine - and all was good - the Zune software let me setup the device, and synced it without a gripe.

I did not manage to get wireless sync going as yet, but honestly didn’t care too much about that.   You’ve got to like it when a techie sort of exercise ends up being much easier than your expectations

Tags: Zune, Zune software, sync, Zune sync to a virtual machine, VMWare

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