Be enlightened... albeit a little irritated! (Creative Jukebox Zen 20 GB)

Member Name: missbrowneyedgirl

Product:	Creative Jukebox Zen 20 GB
Date:	09/07/03 (1387 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: 20Gb Hard Drive, Will also play .wma files

Disadvantages: Expensive, Incompatible, Fidldy

Guess who's back... Back again... Missbrowneyedgirl's back... With her Jukebox Zen!

Hello everyone! I haven't been too far away and I've still been reading here, I just haven't been inspired enough to tell you any tales. Until now that is....

Now, those of you who remember will, will know well how much I love music in most way shapes or forms and particularly on MP3. Now imagine my delight at the thought of a portable MP3 player with a 20Gb hard drive on it. I could nearly fit my entire CD collection on it. OK, I couldn't but it's not their fault I'm a CD addict!

Hang on, I'll back track a bit. For those of you who need a basic explanation (I'm normally first in the queue for one of these) the Zen is kind of a walkman but instead of using a tape you load music into it's memory as .mp3 or .wma (Windows Media Audio) files. In Layman's term let's say an average mp3 track is 4Mb in size. That means that you can fit approximately 5000 tracks on a 20Gb hard drive!

Can you see why I was getting excited now? That's over 400 albums in my pocket, at all times. I nearly wet myself thinking about it! So now you're wondering what am I going to do with it aren't you? Well as I said you can use it as a Walkman, just plug in the headphones that come with it and off you go.

And there we hit the first problem. The headphones that come with it really aren't very good. They are the sort that cover your whole ear, with a bar that goes around the back of your head, hooking over the top of your ears for support. Personally I find it a bit uncomfortable and the bar isn't adjustable so where the headphone are too large stick off the back of my head (very uncomfortable if you try to lean against something), the barely fit on Mrblueeyedboyfriend's shall we say larger head.

However, this is a minor problem as I rarely use the Zen as a walkman. More often than not it

's plugged straight into my car stereo via a dummy tape (around £15 from Dixon's along with a car charger) and this is where is really comes into it's own, that is unless you are. To use the Zen, you use the screen on the front of the player and a small scrolling wheel on the top right which also clicks in as a button. This lets you navigate through a set of menus which go a little something like this:

Main Menu
~~~~~~~~
Music Library - your stored MP3s
Now Playing - the current playlist
Find Music - a poor search function
EAX Audio - equaliser settings
W. Remote Recording - you need additional hardware to use this
Jukebox Settings - machine settings
Button Lock - stops you from hitting stop whilst it's in your pocket

Now to be honest with you I don't use any of these options except for Music Library and Now Playing. Predictably enough, selecting 'Now Playing' displays the list of tracks currently playing on the screen. You can toggle between a full list or the current track details by pushing a small button on the left side of the player.

Now just imagine you're driving and switch it on with the button on the left. You have to hold it down but not for too long or else it will switch itself back off. Watch the road, don't stare at the screen! Now scroll down twice and click on 'Now Playing'. Oh no, the wheel slipped as you clicked, you're in 'Find Music' now. Do you get the picture? It's fiddly, annoying and almost impossible to work with one hand, and that's just to see what you're listening to, never mind choose something!

To be fair though you shouldn't be using it like that whilst driving, and generally I don't. I have a playlist (I'm coming to that) and that starts up automatically when I switch it on (usually before I start the engine). You can set it up to automatically show the track playing within the Juke
box S
ettings option.

The other main function is the Music Library which is where your tracks are stored. Clicking this gives you the Music Library menu which allows you to browse music via:

Music Library Menu
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Playlists
Albums
Artists
Genres
All Tracks
Recordings

Entering any of these options gives you an alphabetical list of everything within that section. To play it you scroll through, click on what you want then you are presented further options of Play Now, Add To Play (adds to the end of your current playlist), Open (e.g. to browse through the tracks on an album) or Delete.

Now lets go back to that 5000 track figure. Can you imagine opening All Tracks then scrolling through a list of 5000 to choose a few you want to listen to? Time consuming could be an understatement! Luckily you don't have to. Zen comes with the Creative PlayCenter - software which allows you to add, remove, and organise your mp3s from your PC.

And therein lies the next problem. The software is almost as clumsy as using the player and the jukebox can only be managed using the software. This roughly translates as you can't use it on a Mac, or even on other people's PCs unless you carry the install CD around with you!

Why they couldn't make the Zen an external plug and play drive, I will never know. If Apple's iPod can be used on a PC.... And that's what it comes down to. The Zen is an expensive but poor version of iPod and at nearly £100 more than it's Apple equivalent, it isn't even half as good. If I had paid for it, I'd have been very disappointed. As it was, I won it so I'm not quite so miffed!

Don't get me wrong, there are really good points to the player. It's about the size of a cassette box and weighs less than my cassette walkman! It also comes with a black plastic protective case which looks very cheap and tacky but has a usefu
l Velcro b
it on the back which allows me to stick the player to my passenger seat (this is essential if you drive like me and want the player to last more than 5 minutes!).

It comes with a mains charger (as expected) but also, cleverly, will charge up through the USB port on your PC. Again this is only after you've installed the software though. On the plus side it does have around 12 hours playback time but it doesn't give you any audible warning that the battery is low until it simply stops playing the tracks! Come on Creative, if our mobile phones can do it I'm sure it wouldn't take too much technology to sort the Zen out.

For those of you who need the technical nitty gritty, the full specifications can be found on Firebox.com: www.firebox.com/index.html?dir=firebox&action=prod uct&pid=497
There is also a user forum. offering support and additional software, at Www.nomadness.net

Zen = enlightenment by meditation.
God only knows where they got the idea of naming it Zen!

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