Ok, so the title is an exaggeration, but I'm a hit slut and want more people to click. One of my complaints about the Zune software was the length of time it takes to scan the device when you plug it in; you have to wait for a few minutes to rebuild its database of tracks on the desktop before you can start to delete things. On Thursday that stopped working. When I browsed to the artist list on the device I saw 3 artists. When I looked at albums I saw a grand total of 8 albums, by those 3 artists. The album list, artist list and track lists on the Zune were incomplete. Hitting F5 in the hope that it would refresh didn't work. I reset the device, I reset the PC, still no luck.

So I looked at it from a developer point of view. I fired up FileMon from SysInternals and watched what the Zune software did when I plugged the device in. It opens up a bunch of files in C:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Zune (where User is your username). Opening that directory I saw some .wmdb files, Windows Media databases. "Aha" I though and renamed the entire directory. It worked, the Zune software acted as if it was a new device, but there was a drawback, it wanted to scan my hard drive for all my music again. This wouldn't be so bad except I've corrected some of the meta data on my tracks and those corrections don't appear to be written in the tracks themselves, but just held in the database. So I restored the original files and had another think. This time I was a little more selective, I deleted all the wmdb files which had guids as part of their filenames, making the assumption that {D5432127-0B41-4B12-8AE9-D4EFC730BDBE} is in fact my device ID. That worked, the Zune software rescanned the device but still had its local music database intact.

That saved me a call to the US, if in fact I could get a working number. Zune support only seems to be toll free in the US, which means those of us abroad can't call it. Bummer, I'd have ended bugging people I know working internally. Lucky escape Mr Butler and Mr Clayton.