zunplex

Multimedia files are used by a large variety of individuals either for work or leisure purposes. Sooner or later, a handful of songs end up in a playlist, with some applications generating a specific type of format to keep items enlisted. For managing playlists created by Microsoft Zune, this little application called zunplex lets you retrieve songs and generate playlists of a different format.

The first impression the application manages to make is not the best, with a lot left to be desired on the visual side. Little effort was put into creating elements, but although a little confusing at first, the application is rather intuitive through its simplicity.

If you're a Zune enthusiast, there are probably more than one playlists located on your hard disk drive, and chances are items stored within are also spread throughout different folders. This is where the application comes in handy, with the main purpose being straightforward as it is fast.

Unfortunately, the application is not able to automatically point you towards the default location of the palylist files, so you have to manually investigate your personal documents folder. What's more, this is best done through the application's dedicated file explorer, because of the lack of support for drag and drop.

However, once you've successfully located files of interest, all items stored are enlisted along with corresponding details, such as full source path, duration, size and whether or not it is already copied to the destination folder. At the simple press of a button, files from the loaded playlist are copied to a target directory which can easily be specified from the main window.

Additional options allow you to overwrite existing elements in case they are found in multiple playlists. Search criteria can also be saved for later processing or if you consider changes were made to the playlist. For clever arrangement, there's also the possibility to have subfolders created, but customization options in this regard are slightly limited, with no options to set naming, neither for the path or newly copied files.

On an ending note, zunplex might not be the best looking application, but it serves its purpose well, with both haste and quality. What's more, it can simply be used to convert the ZPL playlist to a more common one like M3U. Zune enthusiasts that want to sort out their music collection might find good use for this application.