We can’t let Michael Jackson’s passing go without paying our respects. He was a true musical and movement genius. There have been a LOT of videos tributes made. We like this one:

But perhaps even more astonishing and moving is the following tribute performed by CPDRC inmates in Cebu, Philippines - amazingly - only 10 hours after the world heard officially that Michael Jackson had died.  The choreography was reminiscent of MJ, and the execution was unbelievable. May Michael Jackson rest in peace.

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Apple are super aggressive in the market place and have done everything they can to reduce or eliminate competition. The “friendly” ads they run with PC (ie Microsoft) as the butt of their jokes are just the mild tip of the iceberg (we have done several blog posts about this in the past - this post, for example)

A recent addition to the Zune site shows us just why Apple is so determined to keep the MP3 market for itself - if it can. Just check out the following image and video to see just how much big bucks are involved here:

Zune have worked out that anyone that goes for the “buy each and every MP3″ way of getting music is going to have to spend a small fortune - even if they only fill up a small % of their MP3s GB!

Now this comes as no surprise to the Wowzune team as we have pointed this out in many blog posts in the past as we have reviewed lots of different ways to get free, or almost free, music - which BTW, also beat the Zune Pass deal). But its good to see it set out like this (just click the image to see more comparisons done).

In fact, we thought it would be fun to put the two recent “throwing down of the gauntlet” ads by these two IT giants. The first offering is from Zune and so (typically?) more serious in its approach. But the content is deadly for Apple iTunes.

The second continues Apple’s amusing  ridicule of “PC”. Less obviously damaging - but Apple aims to destroy the credibility of anything Microsoft - including Zune.

Well - while these guys are busy fighting, we suggest you take a look around our blog and check out the many alternatives to both Apple iTunes and Zune Marketplace before you even think of spending anything! You will be surprised just how much legal free music, videos and other downloads are out there and cheaper membership deals as well!

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In the previous post we provided links to some pretty good free music for Zune - and movies, TV shows etc. But we have since worked out how to more than double the amount of free music we can get from one of the sites. So are going to take you through how to do this.

First up, you still have to go to the site - link. Then, when the site opens, scroll down the page till you get to the bottom. There you will find a link to “free music downloads“. Click on that link and you will be taken to a page that offers you the opportunity to download a free music toolbar. We wanted to check out what this was about and report back in a blog post. But we were sure surprised when we downloaded the tool bar and found:

This is the same “free trial”offer that we linked you to in our previous post. But if we download the free toolbar then we get to keep 50 free songs - all our own choice and all ours to keep, even if we simply end the free trial (its only 25 free songs if we do the free trial without downloading the toolbar). In addition, to our surprise and delight, we found ….

…that we can potentially have another 365 songs for free. That’s because each day, we are offered a free MP3 to download and keep. Now, unlike to 50 freebies we refer to above,  these songs are not of our own choosing - they are selected for us by the “expert editorial staff (that) hand picks a fresh track every day for you. Totally Free!”

To be honest, we downloaded the free toolbar three days ago and have not so far wanted any of the free MP3s offered - but hey, there are another 362 free MP3s on offer. Bound to want some of them. And we also really like the free radio we discovered that can access from the tool bar! We recommend you check this out.

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We have been checking out ways to get movies onto our Zune.  As a result we have been testing out some of the software that allows us to download movies to our Zune. There is quite a lot of software out now, that will do this. But we have found - having downloaded about a dozen different products and tried them out - that most are hard to use. Mainly because they give poor guidelines on how to use their software. Do software developers even think like the rest of us?

Well, we finally found a program that is literally click, click, click done! So we are gonna tell you about it. First up - they have a free version - which is the one we tested, and are reporting on.  It is free free. By that we mean that you never have to pay for the free version. It does not have a time limit on its use. What it does have is a watermark in the middle of the screen - which can be annoying, but otherwise its great. If that bothers you, well its pretty cheap to upgrade. A lot of the other products whose free version we trialed - had worse limits. Like having to click “continue” every 60 seconds, or only being able to do 2 minute cuts etc.

So I have just put Ocean’s Thirteen on my Zune  - we’ll cover how we got the file onto our laptop in the next blog post.

But for now, using the free version of TransferMyVideo software, it was a case of clicking ‘browse’ to find the video file, clicking on the image provided in the software to choose Zune, clicking ’start converting’, and barely a few minutes later -  the video was ready to be synced to my Zune. It was GREAT! And it was free!!

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