Letters from Microsoft: An Employee Tosses His Zune

Windows Enthusiasts like to paint me as biased against the Zune because I didn’t get a free gift basket from Microsoft and then turn around with a CNET-style gushing review of the me-too player that manages to consistently slink a year or two behind Apple. But what does one of Microsoft’s own developers think of the device? Here’s an independent report from a person deep inside the Zune maker.

The developer, whom I’ll call “Mike Rosoft,” volunteered the following experience with the Zune in an email: “[some months after being hired] … I did the dutiful thing and bought a Zune 120 gig, thinking it would be better than the 80g iPod I had before. I saw some plusses and minuses to the software interface and the potential of the social and Zune pass aspects (good ideas, typically flawed execution) but I didn’t give much thought to the actual audio quality.

”I figured I’m using a lossless codec, it’ll be true CD quality, I have some nice Creative Aurvana earbuds, it should sound pretty good. But I have pretty sensitive hearing, and over a long time I noticed that I wasn’t enjoying the music as much when I played it on the Zune. It didn’t sound as good as I expected it to, and I was starting to think it was a function of stress and depression, but that wasn’t it.

“Because after I got the iPhone I spent a day transcoding all the music from my collection that I expected to want to listen to from the original Apple lossless files to 256 Kbps AAC (standard iTunes Plus preset). It was only slightly involved. I’d right-click a bunch of songs, convert to AAC, and then with smart playlists and sorting on various columns, I’d drag the converted ones to my iMac with file sharing, import them to iTunes (copying them to the right directories and stripping the ” 1“ added to the name to avoid a collision with the original lossless version with the same extension) and finally deleting the transcoded version from the original PC. I lost my play counts and star ratings, but I’m fine with that.

”After syncing the first batch and plugging in the same Aurvana earbuds, I almost instantly realized that i’d been robbed, by the Zune, because the AAC version sounded amazingly good, obviously better than the uncompressed version on the Zune. So now my whole music collection takes up like 25 gigs of flash and sounds better than I had ever expected.

“I believe they either f*cked up the DAC or the analog circuit pathways on the Zune and lost like 10dB or more of signal to noise. I think the stereo channels might be leaking into each other also. It just sounded muddy and I’d been using it all this time, not just with the earbuds but in my commute to work every day in the car.

”BTW, I think I could perhaps tell the difference between AAC and lossless after very carefully listening to each version, but the differences would be so subtle as to be meaningless in terms of enjoyability. Whatever they screwed up in the Zune to make the lossless version sound so flat and dead was much worse.

“Music is a very important part of my life and Microsoft robbed me of a portion of that enjoyment through typical corner cutting and short-sightedness. I’ve decided I’m going to find a nice grassy space this weekend and get my roommate to film me smashing up the Zune with a giant pipe wrench, a la the scene from Office Space where they smash up the printer. Should be a YouTube hit, especially with the story of why I’m doing it.

”Did I mention to you that after the layoffs, people have been resigning right and left? Always the same story, going to do something else, not sure what, but something else. Two weeks notice, see ya. I’ll be doing the same tomorrow morning along with a friend who’s quitting for the same reasons. In fact, he’s been frustrated longer than me, probably because I was blaming myself and not the real problem of the toxic work environment.

“We can’t figure out: how can you make a great product with shifty tools, and how can you make great, or even acceptable, tools on top of a shifty platform? You can’t ratchet up the quality, certainly not when you haven’t been allotted sufficient time to do so. You can only try to prevent the quality of everything from dropping further into mediocrity.”

Rosoft hasn’t yet posted his video or his story, but when he does I’ll link to it.

Up next: if you think Microsoft’s cutting corners on the Zune in the manner of the Xbox 360 is the worst example of the company’s failing to learn from its previous mistakes, get ready for a big surprise. Because Microsoft is preparing to replicate one of the biggest, most uncontroversial blunders of the recent decade in its misguided efforts to imitate Apple.

Guess what iceberg Balmer’s delirious company is going to aim towards for its next Titanic disaster! (Hint: it’s a far larger mistake than the whole ‘two years late iPod touch clone + Zune HD software problem’ I discussed in the last article.)

You said — Ironically, you can go on audiophile forums (or at least forums full of people who pose as audiophiles) and they’ll refer to the iPod’s sound quality as total junk.

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Yeah, and I can understand that from “audiophiles”, too... LOL...

However, for “the rest of us” who can’t tell the difference between 256 AAC rips versus uncompressed CD-quality files — iPod/iTunes has the best quality.

Of course, those same “audiophiles” that you’re talking about are saying that CDs are not the best either.... :-)

[But, in my mind, it seems that “electronics” can respond faster to sound changes than a physical needle on vinyl, of which the needle has *some inertia*... I haven’t ever heard of electrons having inertia... so I’m wondering about those “audiophiles”... :-) ... ]

However, for “the rest of us” who can’t tell the difference between 256 AAC rips versus uncompressed CD-quality files — iPod/iTunes has the best quality.

The dirty not-quite-secret is that MP3 encoders have come astronomically far since the late 90s. A 128kbps MP3 is no longer junk, but rather a reasonably decent quality piece of audio. On sufficiently high-end equipment, one will detect a difference between a 128kbps MP3 and the original CD, but generally the differences are not large enough to justify calling 128kbps "crap."

That said, I encode the few discs I buy in Apple Lossless. It's there. I might as well.

Of course, those same “audiophiles” that you’re talking about are saying that CDs are not the best either.... :-)

To an extent, they have a point. DVD-Audio and SA-CD are higher quality than CD, which is nearing its 20th anniversary. There just isn't any market demand for DVD-A and SA-CD because CDs are generally good enough, and digital distribution is becoming more prominent.

Media format isn't really an issue these days. Right now the biggest problem regarding audio is the loudness war; people think that louder music inherently sounds better, so dynamic range has gone the way of the dodo in favor of jacking the volume up on the sound engineer's board.

Thank you for posting that Quicktime series -- all in one place, and easily readable!

I've done a bit of development on the Mac (some of it ported from the Apple //GS -- and some of that ported from the Apple //). However, that work (animated 3-D spatial data analysis graphics for archaeology) completly ignored the audio side of Quicktime.

Long before there was an adequate PowerPoint, I wrote my own "presenter" (originally on the //GS)-- mainly so I could move data between multiple screen buffers for a huge variety of transitions (that, then, evolved into powerful video animation effects).

It is encouraging to know that there are far-superior graphics abilities "inside Macintosh" that I can access without the "brute force" low-level coding I developed 'way back when...

Although I'm nearly 72, I'm almost tempted to teach myself another programming language (or three) so that I can take beter advantage of the media goodies that Apple has put "under the hood" of OS X...

If I figured I had the need, time, energy and opportunity to make the most of them, I'd "have a go"... ;-)

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Thanks again for the QT piece(s). Those are some pretty clear reasons why the MS troops feel so inferior that they lash out personally...

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(FWIW, yeah, I'm one of those antique geezers who used to relish the challenge of writing functional programs in a single 80-character line of BASIC code -- with plenty of calls to Monitor Rom routines and to 6502 assembler code I'd written...) ;-)

My husband has a Zune, I have an iPod Nano 4G.

I download songs from iTunes, put them in my custom playlists, sync the Nano with my XP computer and I’m off. My husband downloads to his Zune, fights with it, and crosses his fingers that updating it won’t screw up the time and calendar.

He puts a lot of junk and podcasts on his. Mine is just music from CDs I own, iTunes and a few anime tracks I’ve found. I guess it all depends on how you use it, but I sure do appreciate not having to fight with it.

Glad to see you’re enjoying your iPod...

I have an iPhone, which has all the functionality of an iPod, plus being a phone, plus all the other applications on it, doing all sorts of things, plus being able to carry files around on it.

And, I’ve got music CDs on there, downloaded music from iTunes Music Store, the iPhone Apps from the iPhone App Store, and then videos that I’ve downloaded from the Internet, and videos from the iTunes Music Store, and Podcasts that I listen to, the e-mail functionality, the Safari Web Browser, the camera functionality, the iPhoto library of photos on the iPhone, my calendar on the computer, my address book/phone book on the computer/iPhone — and they all work just fine and seamlessly and I never have any trouble downloading/transferring them over to the iPhone.

So, no matter if one has a *whole lot of stuff* on the iPhone/iPod, it’s gonna work seamlessly and without trouble... you can be assured of that... :-)

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