(I should probably repeat that nothing on this site reflects the thoughts of my employer in any way.)

One of the features I’ve wanted in MP3 players for the past few years was the ability to wirelessly sync what they’re playing.

Here’s the fairly common scenario:

Yuppie couples & groups of friends replace their MP3 players often and usually at the same time with similiar models, and they’ll have a lot of overlap in the songs they have. Now they want to go for a run together.

So I’d like my Zune to allow me to try to negotiate a shared playlist with the closest zune (P1)

I’d go off signal strength at the time that we started to figure out who to sync with automatically, but if you want to give me a list ok — especially if there’s no clear signal winner. But I think that putting them beside each other is more intuitive. (P3)

Syncing the play/pause/ffwd buttons would be great, but I don’t know if there are timing issues that make this hard. I would even be ok if we had to both press play simultaneously to start. (P2)

Sync with more than two Zunes. This would be a great selling point of Zunes, imagine being the only person in your running group who can’t listen in — dude join the social already. (P3… and I realize it conflicts with the other P3)

My current solution:

I got myself a $5 Belkin FM transmitter off Woot ($12 on Amazon), and plugged it in. Reception past 2 metres is pretty bad. It’s funny, my mom was excited about the FM receiver on the Zune, I thought she was silly — who needs radio?

Pros:
-Syncs automagically
-works with many people at once (sort of, the range hinders it)
-works with non-zunes (only one device needs a FM reciever)
-don’t need the same playlist

Cons:
-bad recepetion over any real distance (a shared playlist would work even over great distances, though play/pause/ffwd wouldn’t)
-extra cost/hardware/weight, another set of batteries to worry about
-receiver doesn’t get the song information
-so much less elegant
-no control over who’s listening (I don’t really care)

In The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, (It’s a software design book, seriously), Alan Cooper argues that programmers are so different from users that they probably shouldn’t design for them. That’s my job (I’m a program manager) but I think I might be just as bad.

One of my teammates told me that we needed to do something one way, which caused a problem down the pipe that I have to solve right now. But why would you take his word for it, when you can spend hours analyzing the source code. I didn’t have an IDE or a compiler, but I had full text search and a fantastic editor that can handle C# syntax highlighting. So I unrolled the code by stepping through the code from the entry to the bug, replacing every call to a non-obvious function with the meat of the function and throwing out overhead code (things like error-handling, casting, serializing, etc) and adding comments because unlike real programmers, commenting code doesn’t make me break out in hives.

And after taking 2 megs of source code down to a mere few hundred lines (with comments) and I had my answers, he was right, we probably needed to do it that way and more importantly I think I know how to work around it.

In summary: Nerds probably are a little different than most people.

If it’s your first time doing something and the equipment comes in “standard” and “goofy” settings: choose standard.