Something prettier than Windows Media Player? Try Zune.

Not long ago, I saw a multimedia playback software on Andrew‘s laptop that had a user interface design that far surpasses the typical Windows UI. One of the best feature I really liked about it was the Album Art wall, which is a dynamic mosaic that is automatically generated from the music you have on your computer.

When I asked which software it was, Andrew told me that it was “just Zune”. Sadly, the Zune as in the device is not out in Australia (yet), but still it’s possible to just install the Zune software and use it as a really good looking player. Then if you do something like what Long did, you can even get around the region restriction and get access to Zune Marketplace as well.

I recently installed the Zune software, and sure enough it was pretty. I think it looks much better than Media Player, and it does what I need it to do (i.e. play music and movies) 99% of the time. The other 1% is my complaint that it uses so much CPU – surely it doesn’t need both my 2 GHz cores just to play music.

We can expect many great things from Zune – Ballmer’s recently confirmed that Zune is coming to Windows Mobile, and that means your phone as well if it’s a WM phone. With no specific timeframes given, we’ll just have to wait and see what Zune’s up to.