3.3. Other Music Views
In addition to the default Artists view, Zune
supports other Music views. These are accessible via a set of links that
appear in the upper right side of the Zune application window. They
include the following:
Genres: In
this view, the Zune player's three-column view changes to columns for
Genres, Albums, and Songs, so the top-level sorting here is by genre:
Alternative, Classical, Comedy, Pop, Rock, and so on. It will vary based
on the types of content you have in your collection.
Albums:
In this attractive view style, Zune switches to a unique (for Music)
two-pane view. Here, you will see large album art in the larger,
leftmost pane, and a list of songs in the right pane. As shown in Figure 15,
this view is quite visual and an excellent way to enjoy your music
collection, especially if you're old-school and still think about music
in terms of albums.
Songs:
In a nod to the textual, columnar media library style used by Apple
iTunes, the Songs view provides a list-based look at your music
collection. As shown in Figure 16,
this view includes the columns Song, Song artist, Album, Genre, Rating
(see the next section), and Device (that is, whether the song in
question is synched to the attached Zune device).
Playlists: From here, you can manage your playlists and autoplaylists. We examine this important functionality in just a bit.
3.4. Rating Content
While media players such as Windows Media Player and
Apple iTunes support a ratings system whereby each song (or other
content) can be rated on a scale from 1 to 5 (or from 0 to 5 if you
consider no rating a 0), Microsoft has simplified this to the bare
minimum in Zune. Instead of five stars, you can assign three different
ratings:
Unrated: In this case, the item has not been rated.
I Don't Like It: This rating is reserved for songs and other items you specifically do not like.
I Like It: This rating, of course, applies to songs and other content you enjoy.
NOTE
What's interesting about the Zune rating system
is that if you've already rated songs in either Windows Media Player or
iTunes and then later install Zune, the Zune PC software will import
your existing ratings and convert them to Zune-friendly values. Songs
you've rated as 3 to 5 stars will be given the "I Like It" rating. Songs
you've rated as 1 or 2 will receive "I Don't Like It." Unrated songs,
of course, remain unrated.
Zune uses cute little heart icons to represent each
rating. The I Like It rating is a solid heart, while the I Don't Like It
rating, humorously, is represented by a broken heart. Unrated songs get
no icon. Each icon option is shown in Figure 17.
To set or change ratings, just click the heart icon
next to each song in the Songs pane. Each time you click, the rating
will toggle to the next available value. (You can also right-click songs
and choose an appropriate rating from the context menu that appears.
This method works for rating multiple songs simultaneously, though of
course each will be assigned the same rating.) You cannot rate an entire
album by right-clicking it in the Albums pane.
NOTE
As with Windows itself, it's useful to remember
that right-clicking throughout the Zune user interface can reveal some
interesting features and options. The old adage is as relevant here as
ever: when in doubt, right-click.
3.5. Working with Playlists
Like most media players, including Windows Media
Player and iTunes, Zune supports both manually created playlists, which
are simply called playlists, and automatically generated playlists,
called autoplaylists. (Other media players call them smart playlists.)
Manual playlists aren't as smart as autoplaylists,
but they're still a powerful tool, and they can and should be used to
create lists of songs you're going to burn to CD or copy to a Zune
portable device. Autoplaylists, meanwhile, are created using various
filters, so they can change automatically over time. For example, if you
create an autoplaylist of songs rated I Like It, that playlist will
change over time as you rate more songs.
Here's how they work. The songs listed in the Songs
pane are basically a temporary playlist. This temporary playlist changes
as you select different items in the Artists and Albums panes; and when
you actually start playing a selection of songs, it becomes the Now
Playing playlist. This, too, is temporary in that it's not saved to disk
or synchronized with any portable players. It's ephemeral, existing in
the Zen-like now.
Zune provides a number of ways to formally construct a
(manual) playlist that has a name and is saved to disk, including the
following:
The Playlists icon:
In the lower-left corner of the Zune application window is a Playlists
icon. (The icon resembles a dog-eared sheet of paper with a Play symbol
on it.) If you mouse over this icon, a pop-up menu appears. It has three
options by default: New playlist, New autoplaylist, and Now playing. If
you create other playlists, they'll appear in the list as well, so
everything in this list other than the first two items is there so that
you can make it the current playlist. If you click the Playlists icon,
the Zune UI will send you to the Playlists subview in Music.
Collection => Music => Playlists:
From this subview you can create new playlists or view or edit any
playlists you may have already created. If you don't have any playlists,
this view resembles Figure 18.
Right-click:
A better way to interact with playlists is through the Zune software's
right-click context menus. If you find an album or some songs you'd like
to add to a new or existing playlist, just select them, right-click,
and choose Add to playlist. When you do so, the Choose a Playlist dialog
appears, shown in Figure 19.
(If you have not yet created a playlist, however, you'll see a simpler
Playlist dialog, from which you can create a new playlist.) From here,
you can select an existing playlist or click the New Playlist button to
create a new playlist.
Drag and drop:
One of the more unexpected ways in which you can interact with
playlists is similar to the right-click method except that you have to
do a bit of work first. That is, you must mouse over the Playlists icon
and either create a new playlist or select an existing playlist from the
pop-up menu that appears; in either case, that will become the active
playlist. Then, you can find content in the Artists, Albums, or Songs
pane that you'd like to make part of that playlist, select it, and drag
it over to the Playlists icon (see Figure 20).
From the Playlists subzone, you can add items to the
Burn list to burn them to a CD or DVD, in much the same manner as
described above; drag and drop works just fine using the Disk icon
you'll see there, as does the right-click menu. You can also use these
methods to sync playlists to a device.
To create an autoplaylist, mouse over the Playlists
icon in the lower left corner of the Zune application window and choose
New autoplaylist from the pop-up menu that appears. Or, navigate to the
Playlists subview and click the New Autoplaylist button. Either way, the
Autoplaylist dialog appears, shown in Figure 21, enabling you to configure the filters that will determine which songs appear in the autoplaylist.
Creating an autoplaylist
might seem difficult at first, but it's actually pretty straightforward.
Suppose you want to create a list of songs that were made in a certain
decade (for example, the 1980s). To do this, you would simply change the
years in the Year date fields to 1980 and 1989. Then click OK. It's
that simple.
