New Zune rating system? I don't like it
Earlier this week, Zune product manager Cesar Menendez confirmed on his Zune Insider blog that Microsoft will introduce a new rating system for songs. Instead of the five star system that's been in place on iTunes, Zune, the Windows Media Player, and just about every other music software from the beginning of time, Zune is moving to a simple binary system. If you like a song, it gets a heart. If you don't, it gets a broken heart.
I don't heart the new Zune rating system.
(Credit: Zune.net)I understand that the Zune team has done some market research that purports to show that some users don't understand or make full use of the five-star system, but this attempt at differentiation feels arbitrary and in some cases harmful. The reason: a lot of sophisticated digital music fans--which, if I recall, were supposed to be the original target for Zune--use the star ratings in different ways.
In my particular case, my wife and I both store all of our music on the same computer. We each have each have our own iTunes library (which the Zune software automatically imports) to organize this music. Our tastes overlap to some degree, but occasionally a song will come up on my playlist that I hate, but that comes from my wife's library. I give that song two stars, meaning "delete from library, but not computer." If it's a song I know comes from my library, and I hate it, and I suspect she won't care whether I delete it or not, then I rate it one star and nuke it from the computer to save space.
Songs that get to live are rated between three and five stars. This is helpful when I'm compiling a playlist for a dinner party--I don't remember every song I've ripped, but I can run through genres and organize them by stars, and sometimes a four or five-star selection that I haven't heard in a long time will stick out.
No more. Worst of all, the conversion process will rate every song two stars or higher as "like," which in my case means I might be subjected to Beyonce, Journey, or worse.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
P.S.: Maybe they're not going after hardcore music fans, but some other hardcore demographic.
Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattrosoff. 
The system is one I use daily. My collection is right around 4500 songs, with about 2000 of them making the cut to my 'best' playlist. I typically leave my player to randomly shuffle through my 'top shelf' playlist when I don't want to hear a specific band, and more often than not I am delighted to hear songs from my collection that haven't been getting regular airplay from me.
I am really looking forward to the new Zune players and software. I suppose I can manually recreate the playlists I have been enjoying but that just seems like a huge step backwards. I always think that a big part of what makes new technology so exciting is it's automation and ubiquity, and at first glance this new ranking system seems to loose some of those qualities.
Hopefully Windows Media Player doesn't follow suite, I'd have to dump it for WinAmp or something else.
1st of all no hipster indy music fan is ever going to buy a Zune from the most evil corporation ever conceived by man.
2nd of all the new Zune is still huge, still unoriginal and the Marketplace sucks. So remind me, if Apple is, supposedly, such an evil corporation (according to 95% of Cnet articles) with a great product, why should I fork over any money to an even more evil corporation as M$ for a substandard unimaginative bulky Zune?
actually thinking about giving the Zune a chance too, I dunno we'll just have to
wait and see how the other features stack up?
A remedy to this would be simply a 3 prong system. Full heart if you LOVE it, half if you aren't sure, X'ed heart if you HATE it. That way everyone wins
- Come on, are you serious!?
- by seanh1231 November 11, 2007 9:33 PM PST
- To be honest, I have never once used the star system on any player I've ever owned (Creative Zen Micro, iPod Nano, Zune), so to me the new system might get me to use it with it's added simplicity. And I find it absolutely unbelievable that some of these people here would actually allow something some extremely minor make or break the Zune80. Some people just stress over the stupidest things.
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