Short of actually playing media, which we will cover in the next couple of articles, the most important task your media player will need to perform is syncing.  This is the actual feat of loading music, videos, and other media from your computer onto your media player.  There are two general systems by which this may be accomplished.   The iPod Nano and Zune both offer a proprietary program, which is the only way to load or sync media.  The Samsung, Sony, Creative Zen, and Sandisk Sansa are all what I call agnostic players.  This means you can use any program or simply drag and drop to transfer data.  We’ll take a  closer look at each of these methods.

iTunes

Let me just start by being perfectly honest.  I have never liked iTunes.  Never.  So, when I recently obtained my iPod Touch and subsequently the iPod Nano 4G, I viewed it as a necessary evil.

The first thing I found was the massive download size.  There are no CD’s included in the box, so before you can begin using your new purchase, you are going to have to head over to iTunes and download this massive 70MB file.  So, come back in a few hours when you are ready to start using your new iPod.

I will admit that once you get iTunes installed, the interface is pretty easy to navigate.  All of your media options (music, movies, podcasts…) are listed along the left hand side.  Just select the one you want to bring it into full view.  I also really liked the coverflow-like approach to my music, as well as the check to sync approach.  It does make it very easy to determine which media to sync or not sync.

The latest version of iTunes also features the new Genius playlist, which is an well implemented addition.  This allows you to automatically create playlists using music from your collection which is related to the song you are currently playing.  It also allows you to find music in the iTunes Store which related to the song you are currently playing.

In fact, it is safe to say that my problem with iTunes is not the interface itself. That works pretty well.  My problem with iTunes is that it is an enormous, slow program.  I frequently experience several seconds of lag time when switching from one screen to the next.  It also does not like to play well with Vista, frequently failing to load or crashing.  I know some of my smarty-pants Apple friends will say “don’t use Vista.”  But to me that is not a legitimate response.  If Apple is making it available for all platforms, then it needs to work well on all platforms. 

The other thing I do not like about iTunes is that it is not multiple device friendly.  I own an iPod Touch and iPod Nano.  iTunes, however, will not allow me to create separate profiles for each device.  As such, I had better want the same media loaded on both.  This is just annoying.

All of that being said, when it works, iTunes does work very well, making it easy to choose which music you wish to sync and easily transfer it onto your iPod.  I just wish it were more stable and less bloated on my computer.

Zune Software

After my experience with iTunes, I was a bit apprehensive to give the Zune a try.  I was really not looking forward to another proprietary system.  Quite frankly, I had gotten to be pretty good at dragging and dropping my media without any syncing program at all.

But, I would need the Zune software in order to check out the Zune, so I begrudgingly headed over the the Zune site to download what I was sure would be another enormous file.   You can imagine my surprise, however, when the Zune software started downloading at only 28 MB.  Roughly half the size of iTunes.

Once loaded on my computer, I found the Zune software to be extremely easy to use.  It is small and light, and does almost everything for you.  All you have to do is get into the settings menu to tell the program where your media files are stored.  It will then continuously monitor those folders, and load any files which are added at any time.

The main portion of the software is divided into three main sections:

• Collection: which is where you can view any music, videos, photos, podcasts, or channels on your computer.
• Marketplace: where you can purchase and download new media files.
• Social: Where you can share music with your friends.

Now, I will say that I had little use for the Social component (very few of my friends can spell Zune, let alone own one).  And I will also acknowledge that the Zune Marketplace does not really compare with the iTunes store.  In an ideal world, I would love to see Microsoft ditch its own Zune Marketplace and team up with Amazon.com to create a much broader store.  As it is, the Zune Marketplace is nice, but really not nearly well enough stocked with music or videos to meet most people’s needs.  I’ll probably continue to find my media elsewhere and load it myself.

Syncing with your Zune is really the best part of the software.  All you need to do is select the media you want from the library and drag it to the Zune icon on the left hand side of the screen.  The best part here, unlike iTunes, is that it does allow you to create different profiles for different Zune devices, so you can sync multiple devices without them being exact duplicates.

Agostic Players

The largest category of media players are what I call agnostic players.  Four of the players we are reviewing in this series (Sandisk, Creative, Samsung, and Sony) fall into this category of  players which do not expect you to use any specific software to load and sync media.  For the most part, they anticipate that you will already have the latest version of Windows Media Player installed on your computer (some even include Windows Media Player just in case). 

Windows Media Player 11 works well enough.  It is relatively user friendly, but I still had some problems with the layout and controls (many of which are hidden under multiple menu layers).  To be honest, if Microsoft had gotten it right, the Zune software would have already replaced Windows Media Player 11.  They both offer pretty close to the same functionality, but the Zune software offers it in a much more intuitive package.

The biggest problem I had with Windows Media Player, however, was my media library itself.  You see, Windows Media Player cannot sync from an external hard drive.  I have thousands of files, and there is no way they are getting stored on my tiny internal hard drive.  This means Windows Media Player consistently returned errors when I tried to sync my media…a problem which the Zune software did not have.  Anyway, I quickly resolved this problem by downloading the free program Media Monkey (below), which had no problem syncing from an external drive.

The best part of an agnostic player, however, is that you do not need to use any software at all.  You can simply open the storage as a folder in Windows Explorer and drag and drop the files you wish to load.  Now that is easy.

I have to admit that one of the real surprises I found while working on this series was the Zune software.  I had always hated media players which lock you into their software, preferring instead the agnostic approach or simply dragging and dropping my media.  The Zune software, however, is so intuitive and easy to use, I ended up wishing that I could have used it for some of my other media players.

OK.  Now that we have your media loaded and ready to go, it is finally time for the big guns.  Let’s take a look at how these things perform.  Over the next couple of weeks, we will be looking at how all of these media players sound and how the display video and pictures.  Stay tuned, the best is yet to come…

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