Customizing your Zune Software

The new Zune Software is nice and all, but wouldn’t it be nice to use your own images as backgrounds, change the color of some of the fonts, or customize it to your liking? Well you can do all of those things, but it takes a little work.

The new Zune Software uses a new framework created by Microsoft called the Microsoft Iris UI Framework or UIX. This framework is basically an updated version of their Media Center Markup Language with one important change, the inclusion of scripting logic. It’s not really a complex language and it is pretty easy to pickup.

Before you begin customizing the Zune Software, theres a couple of tools I’d recommend downloading:

• Resource Hacker – This will be used to make changes to the Zune Software. (Note: If you are using the x64 version of the Zune software, this editor will not work. The best one I could find for editing x64 dll’s is XN Resource Editor. However, you can also simply replace the x64 dll with the 32 bit ones as they contain no differences)
• Reflector for .Net – This will allow you to view, search, decompile, and analyze the .Net assemblies used by the Zune software.

With Resource Hacker you can modify the ZuneShellResources.dll which is pretty much the Model portion of the ZuneSoftware. A small warning is that by modifying the Zune Software you could potentially break it, so make sure to backup the ZuneShellResources.dll file. To get you started using Resource Hacker to add custom backgrounds or change font colors here are some guides of sorts:

• http://www.gotzune.com/2007/11/make-the-zune-software-you
• http://www.zunescene.mobi/forums/index.php?topic=23868.0

I use Reflector in order to view the .Net assemblies. Simply open up Reflector and it should open up some standard files for .Net. You’ll also want to add UIX.dll, ZuneShell.dll, and ZuneDBApi.dll which are all found in the Zune Program folder, in order to view the methods/classes/etc available to you.