The (Outdated) Zune HD for Today?

During my early days of soundtrack discovery, I used to think that composers were in deep competition against each other. Now it seems they are like a community that loves something and they are all friends. Composers meet each other at events, talk music, and have a blast. Other times they are too busy so they recommend an alternative composer for the job, or bring someone on to collaborate in order to give the score greater depth. 

I was definitely wrong, but that shows how shallow my understanding of things was. That was back in 2009 when I was 12, I had some excuse!

This is also when I purchased my first mp3 player. Does anyone remember what it was called? That greatly anticipated media player that died 2 years later? Come on, it's...it's...

The Zune HD!

Actually, it was the entire product line that Microsoft killed off. I still have mine, but unfortunately it is looks very sad. I did not respect it despite spending $200 on it, but then again, remember I was 12! It was one of the cool Zune Originals with a custom engraving of the solar system on the back and colored in a very nice green. That thing looks terrible. 

Well, I wanted to visit the olden days, so I grabbed one off eBay about a week ago that happened to be still sealed in the box. This got me excited, giving me the chance to start anew with this little device. When I opened the box I soon realized "dang, this thing is tiny!" 

At the time it was the rave. The Zune media players (Not just the HD model) were praised for their superior audio quality over anything else available. The newest Zune HD had amazing specs (at the time). 3.3 inch OLED display, custom Nvidia CPU: 65nm with 6 cores (cores for each task, i.e. audio, video, 3D graphics, etc.), 128 MB RAM. It was said that the graphics were "amazing."

Okay, it is no longer 2009 and Qualcomm just announced a 7nm CPU, and concidering most CPU's out there are 14nm, this tech is seriously outdated, like by 14+ tech years. Anyway, the point is, with these Zunes so cheap, should you pick one up?

I grabbed a 16 GB model to test it out. I wanted to see how it holds up to today's music needs. I figured I would use it just for music, nothing more, because I feel it doesn't do so well at everything else (including web browsing, wow it's terrible). 

First, I needed to install the latest software, which requires a small hack that involves virtual servers. Contact me for details on this. 

I started ripping some of my CD's in wma lossless which can reach bitrates of up to 960 kbps I believe.