Creative Zen - Very nice functionality in a small package

PROS:
- Bright TFT 16.7 million color display in a 32Gb compact flash player that’s expandable to 64Gb
- Easy to use controls for a very useful (and customizable) user interface
- Rate Songs and create playlists on the fly
- Browse Photos, create playlists etc. while listening to music
- Sleep timer, Alarm Clock, and a Calendar that syncs with Outlook
- Power charging is via a standard mini-USB plug
- Supplied Video converter works well (but conversion is slow)
- Up to 10 bookmarks for any type of media file (think Audio books or movies)
- FM Stereo Radio with Auto-scan to set station presets


CONS:
- Big Con: Requires Creative SW be installed on any computer used to access the player (does not show up as a media drive in Windows w/o installing creative SW first)
- Big Con #2: Software does not install under Windows 2000 – only XP and Vista
- Won’t play WMA 9.1 Lossless files
- Only 4-5 hrs battery life unless you manually turn the screen off. (20+ hours life w. screen off)
- Can’t see or browse folders / filenames for media in main memory, and can’t utilize file-tags the add-on memory.
- Album art pics are kept in same directory as your family photos, thus navigating for YOUR photos means wading through hundreds of folders of album art.
- Media on the memory card is not integrated w. player. Very limited functionality.

Overall, I like my Creative Zen, but like any player, getting it set up right has taken a lot of time.

After being spoiled for several years with an iRiver Hard-Drive player, I ordered the Zen for its 32Gb + expandable Flash memory architecture. iPOD’s are overpriced and won’t play the half of my 140Gb in music that is in WMA format. (and after struggling with iTUNES in support of my kids, I don’t want anything to do with iTUNES.)

I’m used to the iRiver’s capability to:
- Connect to any Windows machine as a new disc drive w/o special software
- Record voice, or FM broadcasts off of the built-in radio. (Zen will record voice, not FM)
- Navigate by either folder/file name structure or the ID3 tags in each music file.

To really use the Zen’s best features, you have to have consistent, clean and complete Track, Title, Artist and Genre tags in your music files. That said, Zen plays tracks in file-name order, not by the “track number” field – so to play an album in track order, you still have to name your files so they sort by track number. You will need a good Music-file tagging program and software that will re-name your files from the information in the completed Tag fields. Neither comes with the Zen. I also used dbPoweramp to convert many gigs of WMA 9.1 Lossless files to the compressed WMA 9.1 format so the Zen would play them. The converted Classical and opera music files still sound great on the Zen.


The Player
The form factor of the player is well thought out. Even my big fingers can handle the controls easily. The screen is bright and beautiful, and the sound is clear. The equalization works well (tho buried deep in the menus with no shortcut key), and the ability to select Albums, Artists, Genres etc. works very well if your file tags are clean and complete. A “DJ” feature makes it easy to create playlists from your marked favorites, or will select a random “Album of the Day”

The expandable memory option is a disappointment. It is not really integrated into the player, it just permits one to carry around more stuff and play in file-name order. You navigate it by the folder and file-name structure on the card, which is perfectly usable if you have your files organized into folders (by artist or album for example), however you can only play or shuffle one folder at a time. You must transfer files from the removable memory to the player memory if you want to use the “advanced features”. The Creative support site gives little hope for a fix in future firmware upgrades, stating only that:

“As the SD card is accessed as a removable drive, advanced features of the player such as; playlists, searching by artist, album, etc., will not be available.”
I believe the Memory card feature is intended for users who plan to watch movies (large files) on their Zen. Would work well for that.

Like some other Creative players, the screen won’t blank-out unless you “lock” the unit after it starts playing. This is a poorly designed “feature” as Volume adjustments, skipping songs or marking favorites requires un-locking and re-locking each time -- very distracting if listening while driving. The tiny Lock switch will surely fail after a lot of this. If I don’t lock it, my battery dies in 4-5 hours due to the power requirement of the screen. (screen set at 40% brightness) Creative needs to implement a firmware change to blank the screen after “X” seconds w/o locking, similar to Zune or your cell phone.

The Zen is not packaged with any power chargers, only a short USB cable. Rather than pay $30 for a Creative wall charger, I use the wall & car chargers from my old Motorola RAZR phone. It works beautifully. There’s a thread on www.anythingbutipod.com discussing alternative chargers.

The Supporting Software

These comments apply to the Zen Media Explorer v5.70.15 that is the latest for Windows XP as of July 2008.

I have 140Gb of music files maintained on a household server running Windows 2000. Unlike iRiver or SanDisk products, the Creative SW requires Windows XP or Vista due to “integration” with Windows Media Player 10. So I was forced to install it on one of the XP machines on our home network. I can then use Zen software to load media files from the mapped network drives to the player.

Overall, the software is nicely integrated with Windows XP. When you plug in the Zen, XP offers to start up the Zen manager as one of the “detected new device” options. Loading the player is easy by right clicking a music folder or file and selecting the “Add to Media Library”. The Zen software will tell you if the file is in a format that the player can’t handle (like WMA 10 or WMA Lossless). The user is stuck with converting the file to a Zen-playable format before it will copy. On the plus side, unprotected iPOD AAC (M4a) files work fine. The Zen is one of very few non-iPOD players to include this codec. Converting my WMA Lossless files cost me a lot of time, but dbPoweramp works beautifully and the results use less player memory.

I am seriously disappointed that the player does not register as a disc drive on Windows. (the SDHC expansion card does however). To link the Zen with any computer, you must install the Zen SW, a real pain when looking to exchange medial files with others.

Because I can’t install the Creative SW on the computer that houses my music files, I did not even attempt to deal with Windows Media Player integration. (There is reportedly a Win2k driver for Creative Players. See http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/list/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.win2000.multimedia&tid=5be2ca5b-9dbc-46e1-9f36-d2f3d504ff37&p=1). This method purportedly enables WMP v9 (which runs under Win 2000) to manage your media library and move files to the Zen.

The supplied “sync” software pkg is useless unless you keep a mirror of your player files on your computer. It has no apparent ability to handle multiple directories or select a sub-set of files out of a very large collection. It does sync the MS Outlook calendar to the player if you wish to use the Zen as a calendar reminder device.

Ability to change/update “Tags” in Zen player files is one-at-a-time, and it only changes the Zen database, not the embedded tags in the file. You can’t take an album full of files and update the Album name or Genre tags in one operation. The supplied software doesn’t offer on-line tag lookup with GraceNote™ or similar services. Creative upsells their $30 Media Toolbox SW to do this. You may already have SW Tagging automation in Roxio, MediaMonkey, dbPoweramp or Yahoo Musicmatch etc. You’ll definitely need something to get all of your files tagged with real titles (vs “Track 01, Track 02 etc. left by many CD rippers), and re-name the files in a consistent manner so they sort (and thus play) by Track number.

Converting digital video files for playing on the Zen is simple and works well, but is slow. On a 2.2GHz dual core Intel system, it runs at roughly 0.6x, (5 min. clip takes ~9 min. to convert) & load). Nice for short clips of the family, but I can’t imagine watching a long show on the tiny screen. Video folders or files can be password protected (hidden).

Loading your photos is drag and drop simple. The Zen software converts hi-res (large) jpg files to optimize for display on the Zen and save memory space. (a 3Mb photo file is often reduced to under 100K bytes for example). The photos on the Zen look very good given the quality of the screen.

I bought the hard acrylic case which is perfect for hanging on your belt or a lanyard when listening. I now love having this player and, I frequently plug it into our Home Theatre system for awesome sound. Unlike the other reviewer’s frustration, I invested $2.49 for a cable to hook the Zen up to anything you want, as opposed to investing $90 or more in a tinny speaker system with the iPod’s proprietary connector.