You might think dancing to mariachi music while wearing a sombrero with a margarita in your hand is the epitome of awesome — but you could be wrong. Plan your Post-Cinco de Mayo festivities tonight, because 05.06.08 is the release date for the Zune Spring update 2.5!

What can you except to see tomorrow after your update?

Integrated expanded capabilities of the Zune Card with the convenience
of the PC software and the mobility of the Zune player.

Extended Zune Marketplace with greatly increased video selections,
featuring download-to-own TV episodes.

Added a number of customer-requested features and improvements to
the Zune PC software and the Zune Social.

Here is the break down on what your Marketplace and .NET will look like tomorrow. Hopefully after reading this, you’ll be just as glad as I am to be part of the Social. ;]

THE SOCIAL
The social is centered around one thing — The Zune Card. It’s our online musical identity that displays music played on Zune and the Software.

Get Card’d
Since Its release you’ve experience what the social is all about: you, your friends and sharing. The Spring update is here to build on this concept to make it more enjoyable than before.

Zune Cards are now integrated in the PC experience so you’ll be able to see and listen to the music your friends play from within the Zune software. Much like you are able to view what games your friends have played on your Xbox 360. Your friends’ Zune Cards are now part of the Zune software, so you can easily sync Zune cards to your Zune by dragging and dropping their Cards onto your Zune’s icon.

I am a HUGE advocate of the Zune Pass program and here is a new reason why I am not regretting my decision on becoming a subscriber. If you’re a Zune Pass subscriber, you automatically receive
the full tracks including your friends’ recent plays, their favorites and popular songs from their most played artists.

If you don’t have a Zune Pass, you’ll still be able to see your friends’ recently played, favorites, and top artists playlists along with the associated album art and track information.

Don’t you know WHO I AM?!
Build your rep. Now the Zune Social will begin to award badges and icons. If you are a cross-over XBOX fan this concept should be familiar to you. These are graphical icons on your Zune Card that represent milestones like being the top listener of an artist, passing a specific number of total plays, helping other users in the Zune forums and more.

Now Playing - Windows Live Messenger
“It’s about TIME!”, I’m sure is your expression for this one — I know mine was! FINALLY, we can display our music as our LIVE Messenger status.

THE VIDEO
Zune took its first steps with video in 2007, offering thousands of music
videos in Zune marketplace as well as the ability to export TV shows or
movies recorded with Windows® Media Center, in Windows Vista®
Home Premium or Ultimate with you.

About time our precious little device did what it seems to be born to do — video. With such a beautiful screen not bringing video content would have been silly, silly thing to do. Sure, we had music videos available, but can there be more? The answer is simply YES. The Spring Update will expand by adding TV shows to the Zune Marketplace. Zune will feature episodes of popular shows available for download. You can browse shows by genre or by network and we’ll showcase TV programming in the same way we promote music artists. Each episode will cost 160 Microsoft Points (approximately $2.00 USD) and will come with licenses for up to five PCs, and can be sync’d to your Zune.

THE ‘ASK AND YE SHALL RECIEVE’
Zune takes what we think very seriously. Because YOU are the social and YOU make it YOU, they took your feedbacks and comments into work. Heads up for those watchless people — no clock. ;]

Auto playlists
It’s simple to create an automatically updated playlist based on rules you set from within your PC software. Those rules can include specific artists, genres, ratings, years, even your mood. As your collection grows, tracks that fit your criteria will automatically be added.

Gapless playback
Zune users will now be able to listen to an album without the brief gap between tracks, both on their Zune and the Zune software. Now play the album and the feature is automatically turned on. This is especially important for the continuity of live or electronic music albums.

Improved Sync
Sync multiple Zune players at once – convenient for households with multiple Zune owners. Drag and drop to queue up content ready for syncing with an unconnected Zune. Once that Zune is connected or comes into range of a trusted Wi-Fi network, the content will automatically update to your Zune. When your Zune is close to full, you’ll be able to manage the content to sync or remove with an easy to understand display, which highlights items taking up the most memory.

Organize Your Collection
In addition to sorting your music collection by artist or album, you can now sort by genre. While browsing by genre, you can further sort your music by artist, album, or release year.

Editing Album and Track Information
Want to change the artist name on a song? Drag and drop the song to the artist. Want to change the genre of an album? Drag and drop the album into the new genre – the Zune software will update to reflect your changes.

The advanced metadata editing features make it easy to edit multiple tracks or survey album and artist information. Display info about any album in your collection; right click and select ‘find album info’ and
quickly find the song names, the release year, the genre and more. You can quickly and universally apply these changes. If you have an image saved to your clipbook, you can paste that image to
replace the album art on any album in your music collection. You can click multiple albums and edit them all at the same time – just select them and the software will guide you through it. By right-clicking on any given song, you can quickly edit the artist, album, song title, genre and more.

Sync Groups
Sync groups allow you to have the benefits of automatic sync, for specific sets of content. When you drag and drop an album, artist, a Zune Card, or playlist from your Zune software to your Zune, a sync group is created. Your Zune can always have the latest versions of the media you love, because now you can create sync groups to control the content that syncs with your Zune. These are based upon rules that you specify (much like auto playlists) so that when you connect your Zune, any content that matches one of these rules will be added or removed from your Zune automatically.

There are also new models you can view on the images. Be sure to download and give any feedback here or on the zune.net forums!

FOR MORE IMAGES CLICK HERE.

This post was made by Drea Avellan on May 6, 2008 and is under .net, News, spring update with .