THE ONE AND ONLY MP3 JUKEBOX! (Creative Jukebox Zen 20 GB)

Member Name: mdstone

Product:	Creative Jukebox Zen 20 GB
Date:	17/10/03 (1211 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of storage space, Good accessories, Good battery life

Disadvantages: Quite expensive

Before going out and buying this product I decided to do a lot of research on similar ones on the market.

I wanted an MP3 player that could hold at least 20GB of data that was under £250, but there is a high price to pay for such facilities.
There are 3 types of MP3 players on the market:

1) Ones that are similar to Personal CD players, although they could play MP3 data that was recorded to a CD-R. These players were the same size as a standard personal CD player. The only thing is, would you really want to write a CD every time you wanted to listen to your latest MP3s?

2) Ones that require flash memory that was merely 64MB,128MB, 256MB and 512MB. These players were very small indeed, which were designed more for putting in your pocket. However, we are talking Mega Bytes here and not Giga Bytes, this would hardly be enough for storing lots of MP3s.

3) Ones that have internal hard drives (Jukebox), just like a PC, that ranged from 10GB to 40GB or more. These players were bigger than that of the flash memory players, but slightly smaller than the personal CD players. Depending on the model you bought, some of these are quite small, but the bigger the hard drives, the bigger the player. This was the ideal MP3 player that I was looking for, as it had enough space for my MP3s and they weren't too big.

Having looked at a lot of these MP3 players it seemed that Creative were one of the market leaders, and by looking more closely at their products, you could see why.

I originally had my heart set on the Jukebox 2 or 3, as a mate of mine had one and they looked really good. However, the design of these Jukeboxes' were quite 'chunky' and looked like a thick CD player.

After looking at reviews on the Creative Zen and what they had to offer, I was amazed. They were £290 to buy, but they did included the following:

* English/United Kingdom Localisation

* Stereo Sound Outp
ut Mode

* EAX Sound Effects

* Digital Graphic - 4-band Equaliser

* Built-in LCD Display

* WAV, WMA, MP3 Supported Digital Audio Standards

* 20 GB Hard Disc Drive Digital Storage Media

* Binaural Stereo Headphones

* Hi-Speed USB PC Interface Supported

* 1 x Rechargeable Lithium Ion Battery

* 2 Years Manufacturer Warranty

* Creative PlayCentre Software & Drivers

* USB cable

* Battery Charger/Mains Adaptor

* Leather Protective/Carry Case


Characteristics:
----------------

* Product Type - Digital player

* Colour - Silver

* Dimensions (WxDxH) - 7.6 cm x 2.5 cm x 11.3 cm

* Weight - 268 g

* Display Resolution - 132 x 64


So how many songs is 20GB's worth? Well, depending on the file format, you can store 8000 WMA files and 5000 MP3 files at 128kbps (128 is normally MP3 standard). This will probably be more than enough for most users and the need for an upgrade would be highly unlikely.

The Lithium Ion battery has the advantage of 14 hours continuous play and it can be charged in two ways. Either it can be plugged into the USB port of your computer, or it can be plugged into the mains, using the supplied adaptor.

Using the player
----------------

The firs thing I wanted to do when I got the player, was to upload some of my MP3s to it and test it out (we all like to rip open our new gadgets and give them a go don't we).

After installing the driver and the PlayCentre software, I was supprised at how easy it was to upload MP3s. You simply connect the USB cable to your PC, plug in the player and up pops the PlayCentre software instantly.

This software gives a menu system with your PC files situated on the left-hand side, and your MP3 player files on the menu on the right. It takes less than 2 minutes to upload
an album of 17 tracks, which is reasonably fast.

There is a clear indication of the available space left on the player, listed in MB, and how much data has been used up. During uploads, there is also a status meter to show the upload progress.

The only tricky thing to understand about the player, is where the MP3s are situated once they are uploaded. This will be highly dependent on the way they are named with both the file name and the ID3 tag (this is the part of the file that contains additional information such as the album name, year, artist, track number etc.) It is important that you include an album name in the ID3 tag of each MP3, because this way, you can identify an MP3 by both the artist and album name.

There are 7 main menu listings once you turn on the MP3 player when it has been disconnected from your PC.

Music Library - browses to playlists, albums, artists, genres, all tracks and recordings.

Now playing - shows details of the current MP3 that is playing idependently or as part of a playlist.

Find Music - search facility to locate MP3s on the player by track, album, artist, genre and playlist.

EAX Audio - various sound option settings.

W.Remote Recording - records voice recordings once the player is connected to a PC (I've never tried this).

Jukebox Settings - contains a whole host of your players settings, from personalisation to power and language settings.


MP3 Player Buttons
------------------

The buttons on the MP3 are what makes it so simple to use. There is a volume up and down button, forward and backward track buttons, menu button to bring you back to the main menu, power button to turn the player on or off (believe it or not!), playlist button to jump to the current playlist and a scroll wheel to scroll up and down track listings and albums etc.

Clicking the scroll button executes other menus when clicked on MP3's
, where there are options to play, add to playlsit, remove from playlist and edit info etc. By clicking the button twice on an MP3, it is instantly played.

The menu system of the player take a bit of getting used to, but once you've had a play with it and used it a lot, it becomes rather easy.

What a lot of people fail to realise is that you can also use the player as a form of removeable hard drive, because you can upload any file to its hard disk and transfer it to another PC or keep it for backup. This includes files such as .doc, .exe, .jpg etc, but naturally you wouldn't be able to play them (sounds dumb I know!)

Although this player is rather expensive, you will certainly not be disappointed with the product and its accessories.

However, at the time of this review there were newer models coming out for roughly the same price or less, so you should check them out first before you buy.

The Creative website is listed below, although you may want to try the other online retailers that I have listed for cheaper prices.

Creative website:

http://uk.europe.creative.com

Other licensed online retailers:

http://www.dabs.com
http://www.komplett.co.uk
http://amazon.co.uk

Summary: