Zune Error Code: C00D1318

I am not much of a music person, so I never did quite get into the iPod craze. Although when I saw a Zune 30gig on Woot for the right price I figured why not? It's been decent, as MS has spent time providing upgrades, but every so often you hit an error that leaves you scratching your head.

This time it was when I tried to subscribe to some new podcasts. Simple enough it seemed, one of them even had a nice "1-click Zune Subscription" button.

It downloaded a couple of episodes but no matter which podcast I seemed to try the download would seemingly fail with a yellow exclamation point next to it. Clicking that gave the oh-so-useful error message :

"Error Code: C00D1318"

With some jibber jabber about corrupt file.

So, I went and downloaded the file directly, opened it in VLC. No problem there. RIght clicked and said to open with Zune. Same error. Tried to open it in Windows Media Player, similar message about an incompatible file type. Considering it was an MP3 file that VLC had no problem reading this seemed odd.

After some digging I came across this page describing, Why do I get the error 0xC00D0BB8 (or error 0xc00d1199) trying to play back a file in Windows Media Player 9 Series?. Turns out WMP can't read certain ID3 tags.

Now I had poked around some Zune boards and found people having problems with all sorts of podcasts and not some random ones, one guy mentioned Comedy Central.

This is just really poor, Windows can't handle an MP3 because of a ID3 tag problem? It couldn't play the file and give a warning instead?

So if you want to fix this problem you have to download your podcasts and then strip the id3 tags using Winamp or something like mp3tag. Once done Zune will pick it up and play no problem.

September 13th, 2008