View Zune Content By Content Type

  • Article

If you’re a Zune user, by now you’ve probably installed the Zune 4.2.x client software. There are a lot of cool new features in this release, including the Smart DJ feature, which I use fairly often.

But there’s a lesser-known feature that I ran across that I thought I’d share, which is the ability to sort the content in your collection by its origin, as shown below:

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Here’s my take on the content types:

  • All Content is pretty self-explanatory…everything you’ve ripped or downloaded
  • Personal Content is any content that contains no DRM, whether something you’ve ripped, or your own recordings
  • Protected Content (from what I can tell) appears to list only DRM content for which you have obtained a permanent license, for example, tracks you’ve purchased on Zune Marketplace
  • Zune Pass Content includes any DRM content you’ve downloaded via Zune Pass, but do not have a permanent license for

Why is this important? Because if, like me, you like to use your 10 free tracks from your Zune Pass subscription to purchase music you’ve already downloaded via Zune Pass, filtering your content to just Zune Pass content makes it easy to locate which tracks you have that have not yet been purchased. Good stuff!