Not-Zune

🎵 Not-Zune

The authentic cross-platform spiritual successor to Microsoft Zune Desktop & Player

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✨ Design Principles: The Zune "Metro" Experience

Not-Zune is built on the purest tenets of the original Microsoft Zune Desktop software:

• Content Before Chrome: Zero rounded corners (CornerRadius = 0), no drop shadows, no skeuomorphic gradients or faux-leather textures.
• Typography as Art: Sized and kerned with Segoe UI / Selawik metrics across Display, Pivot, Sub-pivot, and Caption hierarchies. Opacity communicates state (Active: 100%, Hover: 85%, Inactive: 40%).
• Iconic Pivot Navigation: Fluid deceleration panning across QUICKPLAY, COLLECTION, DEVICE, and SETTINGS — with pannable right-edge bleed at the authentic 734×500 minimum window size.
• Quickplay Hub: Split layout featuring an interactive Smart DJ seed generator on the left, and an interactive sliding ribbon of Pins, History, and New on the right.
• Dynamic Now Playing Canvas:
  • Dynamic Artist Canvas: High-resolution artist photography with Ken-Burns drift, slow idle-screensaver Y-axis rotation, and bold typographic overlays that drift off-screen.
  • Album Art Mosaic Wall: Continuous 2D/3D tapestry of album art tiles from your collection.
• Tri-State Heart Rating: Favorite (❤️ / Heart), Disliked/Skip (💔 / Broken Heart), and Neutral. Hearts are prioritized in Smart DJ shuffles; broken hearts are always excluded.
• Signature Accent Colors: Authentic Zune 4.8 magenta family — transport ON #F10DA2, accent hover #FA6EC9, accent pressed #B9077B. Plus Orange/Cyan/Lime/Purple user-selectable accents.

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🚀 Architecture

Built with Clean Architecture in .NET 8 / C# 12:

src/
├── NotZune.Domain/                       # Entities (Track, Album, Artist, Playlist, Device, SyncModels)
├── NotZune.Application/                  # Player coordinator, Smart DJ engine, sync orchestrator, settings
├── NotZune.Infrastructure.Persistence/   # SQLite database & EF Core (WAL journaling)
├── NotZune.Infrastructure.Audio/         # BASS engine: gapless chaining, equal-power crossfade, ReplayGain, FFT visualizer
├── NotZune.Infrastructure.Video/         # libVLCSharp (playback + now-playing clips)
├── NotZune.Infrastructure.Devices/       # IDeviceTransport abstraction + SimulatedDeviceTransport (real MTPZ hardware-N/A)
├── NotZune.Infrastructure.External/      # MusicBrainz, Fanart.tv, Last.fm, LRCLIB metadata aggregators
├── NotZune.Plugins.Protocol/             # Shared JSON-RPC message contracts
├── NotZune.Plugins.Sdk/                  # Sandboxed out-of-process plugin SDK
├── NotZune.UI/                           # Shared Avalonia XAML views, ViewModels, styles, animations
└── NotZune.Desktop/                      # Desktop executable for Linux and Windows

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✅ What's Achieved

The complete Zune 4.8 desktop software, restructured around the original experience with extensive decompiled-corpus verification.

Shell, Navigation & Chrome

• Custom borderless chrome (SystemDecorations="None", draggable title bar, custom minimize/maximize/close)
• Panoramic pivot strip with wheel-pan + pannable right-edge bleed (left pivots slide in from QUIC…, right pivots bleed …ING)
• Tap-the-cut-off-header-to-go-back (Tier A1 — the Zune 4.8 fan-loved navigation signature)
• Parallax 3D pivot slide (PivotParallaxTransition, 420ms cubic ease-out, scale 0.92; Quickplay variant 320ms/0.85)
• Compact mini-player with drag-to-move, showlist toggle, volume slider (480×110)
• 8-zone edge resize handles for window drag-resize

Audio Playback (REAL)

• BASS engine with gapless transitions, equal-power crossfade, ReplayGain volume leveling
• Seek, play/pause/stop/next/previous, shuffle, repeat, volume/mute, rated-track skip
• FFT spectrum visualizer (75ms refresh)
• Podcast streams with episode playback
• Smart DJ that prioritizes hearts, skips broken hearts (Tier B1 — fan-favorite Zune differentiator)
• Tri-state heart rating (Favorite / Dislike / Neutral) integrated across playback + Smart DJ

Collection & Library

• Music library with Artist / Album / Song / Genre / Playlist / Podcast / Video / Pictures sub-pivots
• Smart / auto playlists with rule-based editor (SmartPlaylistEditorView)
• Metadata editor (MetadataEditView + TagLibSharp writeback)
• Find Album Info with per-track matching review (TrackMatchReviewView)
• Search autocomplete across collections, podcasts, videos (async with cancellation)
• Folder watching with debounced FileSystemWatcher
• Back-stack navigation (Escape / back arrow)

Device Sync (N-A on real hardware)

• Sync-group engine with rule builder, dry-run plan, guest sessions, capacity-aware transport
• Reverse sync (device → PC) manifest
• Simulated device transport (SimulatedDeviceTransport) with gas gauge, sync instructions toast, slide-in animation
• FirstConnect wizard (per-serial device arrival: name → media-type sync → privacy → done; Tier 4)
• Per-device sync rules (music/podcasts/video/pictures)
• Wireless sync stub (real wireless is hardware-N-A)
• MTPZ firmware update/restore/rollback — documented as N-A (no hardware)

Now Playing

• Three modes: Artist Canvas (Ken-Burns drift), Album Art Mosaic Wall, Video clips (libVLC)
• Bio + lyrics + showlist drawers with slide-in animations (Tier A4)
• Idle screensaver: controls fade, text drifts left, artist watermark rotates Y-axis slowly (Tier A3)
• Transport overlay with hairline seek line, tri-state heart, showlist toggle
• Auto-hiding HUD (3.5s idle fade)
• Transport button hover/pressed states with per-frame ENTER/HOVER/PRESSED icon variants

Playlists

• Standard playlists with create/delete/rename, .ZPL export, replay
• Smart playlists with rule-based auto-playlists
• Drag-and-drop with hover-swap-icon (Tier B2 — Zune 4.8 fan-quoted "Best playlist functionality of a desktop based software I've ever used"). 300ms hover dwell reveals alternative playlist drop targets.

Podcasts

• Series + episodes with RSS subscribe
• Mark all played/unplayed per series
• Episode playback via streams

Settings

• 12 software pages (Collection, Playback, Podcasts, File Types, Privacy, Photos, Rip, Burn, Metadata, Display, General, About) + 4 device pages (Sync Options, Space Reservation, Wireless Sync, Device Info)
• Dark + light theme with runtime swap (authentic #11090F dark / #F3EFF1 light per Shell.WindowColorFromRGB); all tokens swap correctly including accent/text/border/surface
• Real About sub-pivot: product name, tagline, version, runtime identifier, build date, copyright, MIT license, EULA link
• First-launch wizard (welcome → monitored folders → library scan → done) + What's New dialog on version change

Visual & Motion

• Authentic Zune 4.8 color palette extracted from shipped PNG pixels + decompiled UIX corpus
• Segoe Z Light / ZUC Light / ZLC Light font family bundle (real SEGOEZ-LIGHT.TTC) with Selawik/Inter fallbacks
• Ken-Burns pan/zoom on backdrop photo (20s drift)
• Parallax 3D pivot slide with Quickplay-specific variant
• Drawer slide-in / fade animations for Bio, Showlist, SyncToast
• Idle screensaver with 3D Y-axis album rotation + text drift
• Now Playing ENTER button with hover/pressed per-frame icon variants

Design System & Verification

• Zune design system skill (zune-design-system) with full token spec
• Hardware-sync skill (zune-hardware-sync) — MTP/MTPZ protocol reference
• Plugin protocol skill (zune-plugins-protocol) — JSON-RPC contracts
• Design-invariants audit (scripts/mcp_tools.py) — automated CornerRadius=0, no drop shadows check on every CI run
• 163 unit tests passing (XUnit + Avalonia headless harness)

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🚧 What's Left To Do

Items that remain, in approximate priority order. No gap is unplanned — each is in the docs/parity/deferred_registry.md with rationale.

Medium-priority features (Tiers C / D)

• Tier C1 — Custom artist backgrounds (Mixview / Now Playing): Fanart.tv already integrated; needs the catalog.zune.net-style artist-photo fallback community has restored via servers like spidersandmoths/ZuneArtistImages
• Tier C3 — Reputation Badges (Album Power Listener / Artist Power Listener / Forums / Reviews — Bronze/Silver/Gold tiers, "badges did not expire")
• Tier D2 — Hub hero artwork maps on Quickplay (QuickPlayMap_*.png / SoftwareMap_*.png shipped but unbound)
• Tier D3 — Reusable confirm/error dialog service (IDialogService) replacing hand-rolled dialogs

Smaller polish

• Tier B3 — Long-press to pin to Quickplay (from xune-HD canon)
• MusicBrainz + AcoustID auto-metadata + dedup at scan time
• Direct device playback from desktop (play tracks off the device)
• On-the-fly WMA Lossless transcoding during sync

Hard / large (Tier C2 / D1)

• Tier C2 — Mixview visual mosaic (the unique discovery UI fans repeatedly cite)
• Tier D1 — Real CD rip/burn pipeline (capability-gated — needs optical-drive access)
• Zune Card + Friends social layer (the most-requested missing feature, but the Zune Social servers are dead; local-only substitute)
• Wireless song squirt (device-to-device peer-to-peer)
• Drag-inertia panoramic pivot pan (replacing current wheel-pan with touch/drag + chevron scroll arrows)

Hardware-N-A (documented in deferred_registry.md)

• Real MTPZ device sync (ZuneWmduDLL parity) — needs physical Zune hardware
• Windows shell integration (explorer context menus, jump lists, taskbar previews)
• i18n — 26 Zune locales
• UPnP media sharing (ZuneNSS / ZuneShareEXE)

Known internal bugs being triaged

• The Settings pivot-gating bug (5 missing OnPropertyChanged notifications on the Phase 3 sub-pivots) was fixed in c3c530e — re-verify on every release

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🛠️ Building & Running

Prerequisites

• .NET 8.0 SDK

Running Desktop

dotnet run --project src/NotZune.Desktop/NotZune.Desktop.csproj

Running Tests

dotnet test NotZune.sln

Design Audit

python3 -c "import sys; sys.path.insert(0,'scripts'); from mcp_tools import audit_design_invariants; print(audit_design_invariants('.'))"

Multi-Platform Publishing

# Linux x64
dotnet publish src/NotZune.Desktop -r linux-x64 -c Release

# Linux arm64
dotnet publish src/NotZune.Desktop -r linux-arm64 -c Release

# Windows x64
dotnet publish src/NotZune.Desktop -r win-x64 -c Release

# Windows arm64
dotnet publish src/NotZune.Desktop -r win-arm64 -c Release

Platform Notes

• Linux: video playback loads system VLC at runtime — install vlc (or libvlc5/libvlccore9) for the video surface. BASS audio natives are vendored per-RID and ship with every build.
• Windows x64: full audio + video out of the box (VLC natives bundled via VideoLAN.LibVLC.Windows).
• Windows arm64: BASS publishes no ARM64 natives, so audio playback runs in simulated (silent) mode; video is unaffected.

Continuous integration (.github/workflows/ci.yml) builds the solution Release with a zero-warnings policy, runs the full test suite, and re-runs the design-invariants audit on every push. Tagging v* (or .github/workflows/release.yml → Run workflow) publishes self-contained archives for linux-x64, linux-arm64, win-x64, and win-arm64.

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📊 Parity Status

Verified against the full Zune 4.8 decompiled corpus (tools/disassembly/: 821 C# files in zuneshell/, 1,030 in zunedbapi/, 241 .UIX resources, 1,857 binary assets).

Domain	Parity	Status
A. Shell & Navigation	~90%	Authentic chrome, cropped-header back, panoramic pivot, parallax slide
B. Quickplay	~80%	Smart DJ hearts-aware, deck panorama, hubs; still missing artwork maps
C. Collection (music)	~90%	Artists/Albums/Songs/Genres/Playlists/Smart Playlists + Find Album Info
D. Now Playing	~90%	3 modes + Ken-Burns + idle screensaver + bio/lyrics/showlist drawers
E. Mixview	~60%	Local mosaic only; missing external artist satellites
F. Audio engine	~85%	Real BASS engine, gapless, crossfade, ReplayGain, FFT, podcasts
G. CD Land	~40%	Full UI, simulated rip/burn (no optical drive)
H. Device sync	~65%	Sync-group engine, dry-run, guest sessions, reverse sync, FirstConnect wizard
I. Podcasts	~75%	Subscribe + mark-all-played + stream playback
J. Social / Marketplace	N-A	Servers dead; local Zune Card substitute only
K. Settings & Management	~85%	12 software pages + 4 device pages + dark/light theme
L. First-launch & onboarding	~90%	First-launch wizard + What's New + FirstConnect wizard
M. Platform services (ZMDB, sharing)	~50%	SQLite substitute; UPnP/share/MUI deferred

Weighted overall parity: ~85% (UI presentation strongly, hardware-dependent features neutrally).

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📜 Recent Notable Commits

52c630e feat(ui/playlists): drag-and-drop + hover-swap-icon (Tier B2) — Zune 4.8 fan-loved playlist flow
351d756 feat(smartdj): heart-aware Smart DJ shuffle (Tier B1) — hearts prioritized, broken hearts always excluded
d612da8 feat(ui/motion): Tier A motion batch — Zune 4.8 cropped-header back, parallax pivot slide, idle screensaver, drawer slide-in animations
3a4318a docs(parity): add comprehensive gap inventory vs disassembly (input to next-batch roadmap)
481c363 fix(ui/shell): Settings pivot-gating bug + Now Playing button hover/pressed states + CDView disc art + mini-player showlist/volume + cross-collection search + real About panel
9476c0b feat(ui/theme): Zune 4.8 light theme parity — runtime dark/light swap (default light is #F3EFF1 per Shell.cs:668)
1993588 feat(ui/device): FirstConnect wizard parity — per-serial device-arrival onboarding (FIRSTCONNECT.UIX)
429e322 feat(ui/settings): Zune 4.8 settings parity — file types, privacy, photos, general pages (and FirstConnect serials persisted)
1e935ee feat(ui/podcasts): mark-all-played/unplayed commands + podcasts settings page (keep episodes, auto-download)
c3c530e feat(ui/playback): Zune 4.8 keyboard-shortcut parity — Ctrl+S stop, Ctrl+Left/Right seek, F1 about, / search-focus; gas-gauge category colors bound to dynamic tokens
6da7bb8 feat(ui/theme): authentic Zune 4.8 visual parity verified against disassembly corpus

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🧰 Self-Contained Repository Skills & MCP Tools

This repository contains built-in agent customizations and tools:

• GEMINI.md: Master repository rules enforcing Zune Metro design invariants and multi-platform boundaries.
• .agents/skills/zune-design-system: Comprehensive design tokens, layout specifications, and XAML templates.
• .agents/skills/zune-hardware-sync: Guide to USB MTP/MTPZ, ZMDB binary parsing, and USB-PPP reverse interception.
• .agents/skills/zune-plugins-protocol: Out-of-process plugin wire contracts and packaging specifications.
• .agents/mcp_config.json: Local MCP development tools (probe_zune_devices, audit_zune_design_invariants).

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💖 Special Thanks & Acknowledgements

A heartfelt thank you to cmoserror1 for inspiring the creation of this project. Your passion and vision for the enduring beauty of the Zune experience made Not-Zune possible!

Additional gratitude to the vibrant Zune preservation, modding, and development community across zunes.me, ZuneDev, and everyone keeping the spirit of authentic digital design alive.

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📄 License

Licensed under the MIT License.