Microsoft’s Zune MP3 player has been on sale in the USA and Canada for a couple of years now but has still sadly not made it to Europe.  Lucky for us though the Zune Player software, a funky upgrade on Windows Media Player, is.

I can safely say I’ve never seen any media player sofware as pretty as this, from the customisable decorated background to the fantastic playback view (seen above), it takes the already excellent Windows Media Player and builds on it.  It takes from tricks from iTunes with it’s rival’s ubiquitous three pane Artists | Albums | Tracks view and also neatly integrates all your music, video, pictures and podcasts with out any need to buy a Zune and without iTunes’ annoying nagging to buy stuff from its store.  Brilliant. 

If you need an improvement on that, Zune Player is significantly faster at searching through your music library when you first install it than Windows Media Player, taking only a fraction of the time and the main view when you start it up shows the albums you’ve added most recently.

The video and picture viewers are also excellent.  The video player for instance plays the video right to the edges of the window, which is seomthing that I’ve been wanting media centre to do for years.  Also the picture viewer has a very helpful facility of telling you how many pictures and photos are in your images folders.

You can view the screenshot full size by clicking the icon below.