When will the music player Zune finally support the iTunes libraries?
A column by Saul Hansell on the New York Times “Bits” blog caught my eye today because it makes a completely unfounded assertion about the Zune versus the iPod. Hansell writes, “But now many iPods are replacements by people who already have substantial music collections in iTunes. For those people, the choice is between buying an iPod that will simply work with all their music or investing the time and effort to try to convert everything into Zune’s formats.” This is totally wrong. Microsoft knew it was coming from behind (way behind) and it took pains to make it as easy as possible for iTunes users to switch. First, the Zune natively supports AAC, the default file format that’s used by iTunes whenever you rip a CD. (iTunes can rip to MP3 as well, but that’s not the default.) This was a big deal for a company that had steadfastly promoted Windows Media Audio for many years before it offered full-bitrate support for MP3, mainly because it didn’t want to pay a royalty to the organization
