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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