Upon my various ventures into checking out the Zune Software I’ve learnt a few things. For example, those 4 new Zune HD colours, or the fact that “Smart DJ”s original, and frankly more accurate name is “QuickMix”. But something far more interesting is a little something that I skipped over through my initial search, until I came across this “Radio” entry in the registry under the Zune tree.

As you can see, listed under the Radio tree are three radio stations, and in each entry? Why a link to their Internet Stream of course! Now obviously the only reason you would actively save a radio stream is if you were going to use it… for say streaming Internet Radio!! So uhh where is it? Well lets take a looksie shall we? Also listed is what we’d naturally assume to the Image source for the station logo in side the ZuneShellResources.dll, unfortunately however as you can see on the left of the image above, such files aren’t actually present. However, there is a NEW resource not found in previous Zune Software’s, simply called “RADIOPANEL.UIX”. I wonder what this is for…? (To avoid any confusion here, RADIOBUTTONS are those little circular checkbox-like buttons, not buttons for a radio!)

Now see if this were the previous Zune software we could easily see that this “panel” did, as before all UIX files followed basic XML structure, unfortunately now Microsoft seem to have decided to compile them (probably in an effort to boost GUI speed… or to stop nosy people from freely customising the software UI) and now all we’re left with is a lot of hex. Bugger.

But it’s saved Internet Radio streams on our computer, and there’s a mysterious new resource with Radio in the title, and the station logos are missing. So this could mean either:

1. They cut the feature earlier on, and removed the logo images, but forgot to remove the creation of registry keys?
2. They didn’t have enough time to finish the feature, and it’ll be implemented in a future release.

Personally I’d like to believe the latter, but only time will tell. In the meantime however, I’m going to crackdown and try and see what this RADIOPANEL does…