- Visually and interface-wise, the Music app on WP8 is nearly identical to that of Zune / WP7. The underworkings are different however.
- While you can certainly continue to use Zune as a media player / manager on your computer, you will not be able to sync anything to your WP8 device using Zune. They are not in any way compatible.
- You have several options to get your local music onto a WP8 device (none of which work remotely as well as simply being able to sync from the Zune software): You can drag and drop the files onto the phone using file explorer. Or you can sync using the WP8 Desktop Sync App or WP8 Metro Sync App, both of which are rather bare-bones and not very intuitive.
- You may run into issues syncing playlists created in Zune if using either of the WP8 Sync Apps. For instance many of my Zune playlists will sync but come up with zero songs, or many of their songs missing. I have had to install iTunes and keep duplicates of all my Zune playlists in iTunes, because the sync apps (at least the Desktop Sync App) does not come up with these errors using iTunes playlists.
- There are options to stream from the cloud and sync playlists across your devices. However enabling these cloud options will also overwrite any user-generated metadata on your music with XBox Music's own metadata, which will often mean erroneous tracks names, artists, artwork, split albums, etc.
I also owned a Zune HD for many years, and was very sad when I realized how poorly XBox Music on WP8 performs in comparison. For a long time I carried around two devices - my WP8 device as my phone, and my old WP7 device as an MP3 player. After a while I just gave up and have settled for a much more inferior music experience with WP8. If you are coming from the same set up, you may be disappointed.
You may wish to check out the Master List Of Issues With XBox Music On WP8 thread on the Microsoft Community Forums, which covered many of these issues, and which was eventually shut down by Microsoft because it grew too large:
Master List Of Issues With XBox Music On WP8 - Microsoft Community