Zune Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

Although the recent 2.3 software update included a long list of fixes, I'm seeing things that still need looking after. One of them is the way the Zune software seem to struggle with having an accurate index of the content - either that, or it's an oversight in the user interface. If I type "Jars of Clay", this is the research result I get:



I have 15 Jars of Clay albums, yet it only shows me three. Either the Zune software doesn't realize that there are more than three albums, or the user interface designer forgot to add an "Expand" button next to albums to show the user that there are more than three albums. The latter is somewhat unlikely because it says "(3)" after the word albums, meaning there are only three found.

If I look up the artist manually, I see the correct result of 15 albums:



So...this needs to get fixed!

"Being an iTunes user for several years, I never thought much about its search capabilities. Until, that is, I experienced the elegance of Zune software's search. Before you iTunes fans cry heresy, consider the following..."

After having logged some serious search time in both iTunes and Marketplace during their Rock'n’Roll Showdown, Zunerama has posed an article comparing the Marketplace and iTunes search features. Marketplaces search functionality is much more forgiving, allowing for partial word searches and misspellings, while the iTunes seems to be a little more restrictive. Marketplace also has dynamic searching; displaying search results as you type. Having used iTunes for some time before switch to Marketplace, the search functionality was one of the first features I took notice of, particularly the dynamic search functionality.