Here is how to copy media to the phone.
The media is on Jacinth in the directory /home/jimc/public_html/music . This is exported via Samba under the name //jacinth/music . It is a public share, that is, no credential (loginID and password) is needed to mount it.
Start Piki's Windows 7 instance. Log in.
Connect the phone by USB. Zune will start automatically. After 30 secs or so it will show the Phone page.
You only need to do the following procedure once, to index the shared media.
A box opens listing your library directories; initially these are just
C:\Users\$USER\Music and C:\Users\Public\Music. Hit Add.
In the second from bottom row, type in the directory name. Network
is
useless; it never finds Jacinth. The name you want is \\jacinth\music\mp3.
(Zune can't handle Ogg Vorbis format so it's a waste to index it.)
Finish by clicking on Include Folder, then OK in the library list box, and
OK on the Settings-Software page.
Now turn to the Collection page (2nd row); in the 3rd row click on Music; and in the 4th row click on Playlists. Zune will probably still be going through the new directory and indexing tracks and playlists. Give it plenty of time (10 to 15 minutes, for 100 albums). It will show a playlist named after each directory containing all the audio files in lexical order, plus it will show each of the playlists in it. (I can't tell if it's using the ZPL or M3U files; it isn't using both.)
Now to move media to the phone:
The phone being connected, the phone icon in the lower left corner will be gray and black (vs. white). Click on a playlist and verify that you have the one you want. Drag its title in the Playlists column onto the phone icon. Zune will copy the playlist and the tracks onto the phone. Progress is shown as a percent, and also a phone icon will be shown next to each playlist and track that has been copied so far. Let copying finish.
Disconnect the phone. Wake it up. Starting on the front page, click on Zune. Pick Music. Turn to Playlists (shortcut: swipe right twice.) Click on the triangle (play button) at the left of a playlist. The tracks in the playlist will be performed in order.
Procedure to mount a Samba share. But this is useless for media; Zune does not recognize playlists in generic directories.
Click on Computer
(not Network
which would be much more
logical).
On the toplevel page that opens, there is a button in the toolbar
(3rd row) for Mount Network Drive
. Click it.
In the dialog that opens up, you can change the drive letter but
you might as well leave the default, which is Z: . Fill in the share name,
using backslashes: \\jacinth\music . Or you can hit the Browse button
but sometimes it misses the exported share. Turn off reconnect at logon
and connect using different credentials
. Hit Finish.
The directory will be mounted and a Windows Explorer page will be opened showing it.
The player wants MP3 files; change (double click) to the mp3 directory.
Connect the phone to Piki by its USB cable. Zune will start up
automatically and after about 30 secs it will turn to the phone page.
Click on Collection
(2nd row at the top). This shows the media stored
on Piki, just some demo albums.
Drag and drop an album into the Albums section. However, it does not
have the metadata that Zune expects, so it appears as Unknown Album
.
There is a phone icon (rectangle) at the lower left corner of this page. Drag and drop the album symbol onto this icon.
However, the tracks are all jumbled with the rest and the playlist in the album is ignored. This is not very satisfactory. Apparently Zune does not recognize playlists in generic directories. <