zune

7 Articles

Bringing Bluetooth To The Zune

September 27, 2025 by 10 Comments

The Zune might have joined the portable media player game too late to ever really be competition for the iPod, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t pick up some devoted fans along the way. Some of them are still breathing new life into the device, such as [The Director of Legal Evil Emeritus] at the Louisville Hackerspace, with this project that gives it Bluetooth capability.

As far as media players go, there’s still some solid reasons to rock a Zune. Compared to other devices of the era, it offers a better DAC, an FM tuner, and no iTunes reliance. The goal of this project was to bring a bit of modern functionality without having to do any modification of the Zune itself. As the player supported docks with IR remotes, this build involves using an ESP32 to listen to the Bluetooth signal coming from the speakers, interpret any button presses, and forward them along to the Zune’s dock.

There is a dedicated scene for these old music players, but this build is unique for not needing to crack open the case and splice in a Bluetooth module. Even then, those typically don’t have the ability to interact with things like this speaker with its integrated control buttons.

We don’t often seen Zune hacks come our way — the last time Microsoft’s player graced these pages was in 2010, when the Open Zune Development Kit was released.

Thanks to [JAC_101] for the tip!

Zune Gets Hacked, OpenZDK

April 17, 2010 by 21 Comments

Here is one that really got some of us at the HAD offices excited (yes, we own Zunes). The introduction of the Open Zune Development Kit (Internet Archive). Sure, there was XNA, and we even toyed around with it. But anyone will quickly realize just how limited XNA is, especially with older hardware.

OpenZDK is in its infancy, with only one application thus far (don’t worry, you can still use XNA apps too). But we wanted to give it a shout out and let the hacker community make this potential into a reality.

[Thanks Galen]

32GB Solid State Zune Upgrade

October 10, 2009 by 20 Comments

Top_by_Top.preview (Custom)

[Andrew] wrote in to show us how he upgraded a broken Zune to solid state. He had one that was giving the Error code 5 when it booted. This means the hard drive is bad. He was able to find a compatible solid state 32Gb drive that, with a little bit of case modification, he made fit. Everything fit back into the Zune and looked completely stock. This was all done for less than $130. He seems pretty proud of getting a 32GB Zune for $150, and we don’t think that’s too big of a deal. We found a bunch of them on eBay for under $100. He even states that he doesn’t see any performance or battery life improvements. So why do we post this? Well, we like to see stuff split open and we actually like the idea of a no-moving-parts mp3 player. We’re hard on our electronics and the thought of that platter getting jarred over and over and over and over really bothers us. Great job [Andrew].

Zune HD Teardown

September 16, 2009 by 19 Comments

dfkaj

Our friends over at ifixit are at it again, how they get these devices so early before release and make a complete teardown in time still amazes us. Today they bring us the latest Microsoft media device, the Zune HD. Some features worth mentioning: The astoundingly thin, 1mm we’re talking, OLED screen. The Nvidia Tegra 2600 processor, hinting at 3D game capability. And finally who could forget the 660 mAh battery. But isn’t that 129 mAh less than the iPod touch? Microsoft’s reply, supposedly the Zune HD is using many more low power hardware solutions in this device. Either way, the competition is on, who will be the victor?

Hacking The Radio Controls In Your Steering Wheel

October 8, 2008 by 9 Comments

[Gabe Graham] sent us this step by step process of building a dock for his Zune and hacking is steering wheel controls to work with it. Like many of us, he was not happy with the performance of those little radio transmitters that hook to your mp3 player. He remedied the situation by mounting a dock for his Zune onto the console and patching into his stereo. The sound quality was great, but controlling it was a pain.

He had one button left on his steering wheel that was not needed for anything.  He created a custom controller for the Zune that would issue different commands based on how long he held the button on the steering wheel. If the button was held for less than half a second, it would skip tracks, any longer and it would pause. Though he could possibly clean up the look of the LED sticking out of the console, the over all effect is quite well done.

Twilight For Zune

June 29, 2008 by 7 Comments


[Mortiz Waldermeyer], the man who brought us the interactive LED pong table, has recently completed a project commissioned by Microsoft: an interactive chandelier that can receive and react to music from a Zune mp3 player. The technology behind this project which [Waldemeyer] calls Twilight is not all that complex: at the core of the chandelier is a Zune, which acts as the receiver for other Zunes in the area. The central chandelier Zune then feeds graphic equalizer display data to another device, which in turn feeds a microcontroller running the LEDs embedded in the chandelier. The chandelier itself is constructed of 15 sheets of organza fabric. The result is a rich, dancing display of lights that people in the room with a Zune can take turns controlling. The installation has just opened in LA.