The 3.0 enhancements are mostly about music discovery – and the Zune team has brought some enticing new features to help users find new music and other content.

Channels.

Channels are playlists that automatically update with new content for you. Some example channels are Most Popular Marketplace Downloads, Billboard Top 100, or a variety of workout music channels.

Others are personalized, such as “new releases for me”, which pulls in new album/track releases from your favorite artists. You can also get personalized picks, such as “Rock Picks For You”. These are recommendations for you based on what you’ve been playing, and what others who have played those songs are also playing! If you’re a Zune Pass holder, you can get all the music automatically; otherwise it’s flagged for download and purchase.

Mixview.

Select an artist in your collection, and click on Mixview. Zune software brings up a cloud showing related artists, top listeners, friend listeners, and more. Click on any part of the cloud, and you can drill down and explore, and play songs that appear elsewhere in the cloud. It’s addicting – and looks like a really well-implemented feature.

Now Playing.

This feature has been enhanced and now brings up dynamic, full-screen artist graphics, with floating text of artist and album information. Really well executed.

Manual Sync.

With Version 3.0, Zune software supports true manual sync, as an alternative from ‘Smart Sync’. Smart sync uses sync groups to set up rules for the types of content you want to automatically sync with your player.

Some other 3.0 software changes:

Search fields now auto-completes with suggested search terms, based on the contents of your collection.

You can now have separate track ratings for each member of your Zune Social account in your household.

When you remove a folder from the Monitored Folders list, you now have the option of removing that content from your collection.

You can now control whether Zune software shows duplicates tracks or not. The “Remove Duplicates” feature (for removing dup’s from playlists) is still there as well.

Now Playing will start automatically when software is idle

Now you can manage your account, including buying Microsoft Points, buying Zune Pass, directly from the software.

Click a topic below to see more of our Zune 3.0 Guide:

Zune 3.0 Guide: Players | Firmware | Software | Marketplace | Zune Social