r/Zune

a big Zuner back in the day, the good ol' times. still have the original in store brochure somewhere

Need some help getting my zune 30gb working again. Its been dead for at least 15 years. I bought a new battery and screen and button pad since I had misplaced it. I put it all together and it does nothing. No sounds from the hard-drive or anything. No flashes on the screen. I've gone through all my connections again and made sure they are sound. Im reading 3.8v on the board itself so I know the battery is making good contact. The hold button is off and ive tried the "reset" procedure. But it won't respond. The hard drive could be dead but from what im reading it should still do something. Ive even tried booting it up with no hard drive attached. The board doesn't show any signs of being bad but im starting to think it is. But before I spend the money on a new board is there anything else I can do? Unfortunatly no computer I have knows what a zune is and I tried connecting it to my windows 10 but it never recognized anything.

Finally got my most-wanted Zune! Couldn’t afford it back in the day but jumped on this on eBay! Opened it today!

I used to have one of these years ago but it broke and I have been waiting and waiting for one to finally pop up and one did. This is so awesome!

Had this when I was 13yr -17yrs and I just lost . Now I’m 30 my younger sister graduates college tomorrow so we’re cleaning up and they find this under my dads bar. Now I’m destined to get this working to hand down the tunes to my kid . Can anyone point me out to the right charger for my zune, and or a website to possibly refurbish. T.I.A

So, last night i installed a new kinspec/yanzen 128 drive into my Zune 30, and it loads properly, takes me the the "Connect to your pc" and "While connected load Zune software" screens on device.

Zune software will not acknowledge device, i have changed hosts file, i have run the windows 11 fix, i tried a .bat thing i found in another thread.

Last night after changing cables and ports, Zune sw did acknowledge the device, and began the update, but would get stuck at step 3 of 4, multiple times. When i pressed a button on the device it it looked like the device HAD installed the firmware - menus and everything looked correct, but Zune software wouldn't recognize the device. finally i reformatted again and left it over night and it never completed.

Xune software did recognize the device, but wasn't syncing music.

I re-formatted (button press on device) and plugged in again, and now the software won't recognize it again.

I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling Zune software, trying older versions of zune software. multiple cords and usb ports. I had done a regedit previous to installing the new harddrive to make my computer recognize the zune as a external drive, i reset all of that, rebooted my computer.

I'm at a loss for what to try next, if anything.

ETA:

It's working! For future people dealing with this: I went into the "deal with drivers" menu of the device manager, deleted the zune drivers and then re-ran this script: https://github.com/zunes/Zune-driver-fix---Windows-Workstation-error/releases to reinstall the drivers. Once the Zune program recognized my device and updated to the 3 -4 step, but the device looked complete (showed menus normal, and showed firmware install on about screen) i deleted the drivers again and re-ran the script.

thank you u/NotATurntable for your suggesting drivers, i was beating my head against the desk >_<

Specifically in regards to audiobook MP3 files. As you can see in the screenshot, most of the tracks will sync with 0 issues, but some tracks just refuse no matter what I do. Looking into similar issues on this subreddit I read that it could be a bitrate issue? I can confirm that conversion settings in my software are set to off which was another suggestion I found but searching this sub. I've tried multiple Zunes and it seems to keep happening to each of them.

Could it be bitrate being too high? Are there any converters someone can recommend that will allow me to sync my files? Any help is appreciated.

Zune HD a bit scratched but still holding up pretty well.

So, slight update to my earlier post where I ordered an untested 120GB player from eBay. It got here today, and physically, it's in (to me) surprisingly good shape for being used. The glass is pretty clean, and the buttons all click nicely, and the body has wear that I'd consider typical for something like this. However, I dropped it in my dock, and the dock lit up, but the unit doesn't seem to power on. Again, can't say I'm super surprised, they were sold as "untested, you get what you get."

Which leads me to my first question: will these even power on with a dead/deep discharge battery? If so, then it looks like I have a parts donor. If not, are there any other troubleshooting tips I should try before I consider ordering a different one? I appreciate any advise, thanks!

In case anyone has been curious about testing these with bench supplies. I wanted to make sure the device actually worked and that it was in fact just a dead battery. 4V with a 500mA OC limit let me know everything was functioning fine. And surprisingly absolutely no media on this device 🤔.

I ran a 10k resistor between the thermistor pin and ground. Not sure if it's needed, but didn't want to find out later annoyingly 😆.

I use my ZuneHD every day to listen to audio books - no other device has a better user experience for this, imo.

The problem is Zune doesn't support audio books natively.

The solution has been posted about here before - by me and others: You use the Podcast app, and you mark your audio book mp3 files as Genre=Podcast... and your books show up in the Podcast list.

I've been doing this for over a decade, and finally decided to automate some of the workflow. When I get my audio books from the places I get them, they usually come as dozens of .mp3 files, or a single M4B file - and in all cases I need to a utility to modify the files for my zune. I was using an exe called mergeMP3.exe to merge files, and using VLC to convert M4B to .mp3. In both cases - when I was done I had to manually modify the properties of the output to set the Genre=Podcast, set the Album=TitleOfTheBook, and set the Titles of each file to a short name that would show up in the Zune UI.

.

Now I created my own utility to do all that in one -

ZunioBooks will import a list of .mp3 files and merge them into a single file (or groups of files), and automatically output the mp3s with the Genre, Album, and Title set in a format that will be recognized as a Podcast by your Zune Software.

AND/OR it will convert M4B files to mp3, and set the same properties so your Zune software picks it up as a podcast.

Just output to the Podcast directory that your Zune software is already monitoring.

I've never made a public GITHUB repo before - you are free to use this, or even edit/contribute to it if you want. Fork it, copy it, do whatever.

It requires FFMPEG to be installed and configured in the Path.

Any feedback is welcome.

https://github.com/drwother/ZunioBooks

Missed this mp3 player dearly. No clue what happened to my original I pre ordered back in the day so I'm chasing the past. Found this on eBay for $26 cuz it wouldn't power on. Battery was swollen. Hopefully a quick solder job with a new one and all will be well.

Stoked to rejoin the community and dabble in making some mods.