Now ZEN, Vot's Diss I Hear That You've Defected From iPod! (Creative Zen Vision:M 60 GB)

Member Name: Nibelung

Product:	Creative Zen Vision:M 60 GB
Date:	20/08/07 (890 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Huge capacity for many types of media files. Radio built-in, acts as a back-up for digital camera

Disadvantages: Radio no longer recordable. Easy to scratch

There’s a curious correlation between home computing hardware and personal music players – I’m trying to avoid calling them mp3 players, because they don’t all use mp3 files.

In the first instance, you got staunch Apple Mac users versus the conglomeration of other PC users whose machines come under the banner of IBM-compatibles.

The personal stereo market is somewhat similar. Everyone’s heard of an iPod, the Apple offering, but the rest just fall into some sort of generic mp3 category.

Like Macs, iPods tend to win on the cosmetic front too, but of course, being the ‘Bang & Olufsen’ of the personal stereo set doesn’t make you technically the best, in the same way that B&O isn’t the best hi-fi by a mile.

I’ve got no specific axe to grind vis-à-vis iPods. My wife’s got one, or rather somehow ‘mine’ became ‘ours’ became ‘hers’ and she loves it. She also loves the after-market add-ons that owning a market leader gets you access to, like the Kensington hi-fi docking station which allows our Nano to rattle the windows courtesy of a Yamaha home cinema system.

AND ZEN VE GET TO ZEE POINT

However, I’ve gotten a little fed up with everything rotating around the iTunes software, where all roads lead inexorably not to Rome but to the iTunes store, perchance to SPEND. I also got fed up with Apple’s non-standard AAC file format.

All I really wanted was a dinky external disc drive, with the means to drag’n’drop files of all types to it, with the ability to navigate the file system and listen to, or watch, appropriate multi-media files, all of which are possible to do with an iPod but ONLY if you do it Apple’s way mostly through their own software. OK, the loading of ‘other’ files is done via Windows Explorer.

ZEN AND ITS PART IN MEDIA STORAGE

This is where the hunt for the ‘best of the rest’ comes in.

The Creative Zen won’t win so many ‘pretty boy’ awards as an iPod, and its finish is just as much of a scratch-magnet as its obvious competitor, it being easy to pick up marks to the front plate within days of buying one. However, it has received several magazine awards during its launch year of 2006.

In hindsight, I’d seek out a leather case for it pronto, possibly from e-bay, font of all add-ons, before it all starts to look decidedly second-hand. It’s a pity that the satin chrome of a previous generation of Zens wasn’t retained, but zen, zat’s progress for you. It’s true to say that it comes with a suede-finished pouch in cream which wipes the finger marks off the screen nicely, but the bag itself is destined to look very filthy, very quickly.

Being 60gigabyte in capacity also means that the Zen is a reversion to running from a tiny hard disk drive rather than from ‘solid state’ memory. I wonder how long it will be before the capacity of non-volatile memory i.e.the kind that stores data even with the power off, catches up with disk sizes like this. It wasn’t so long ago that iPod Minis with a 4 ‘gig’ disk drive were replaced by iPod Nanos without one, and all without losing memory capacity, which has since doubled.

I chose the 60gigabyte version over its half-sized brother, not for its ability to carry my entire CD collection in its head (15,000 songs), but for its ability to ‘dock’ directly with my Nikon D70 and Canon Ixus 700 digital cameras, so I can offload some of my pictures for further insurance against loss whilst away from home.

This only requires the special USB lead which is supplied and no recourse to a PC. For some reason best known to Creative they’ve produced the 30gigabyte version without the ability to do this. This does of course give me a much nicer screen to looks at my pictures, being some 2.5” across the diagonal, and very sharply detailed. The photos then go into separate ‘Imported’ sections so they don’t get mixed up with photos ‘synced’ from your PC hard drive.

Being hard-disk driven carries a higher battery overhead, but fortunately, the extra bulk required to house a ‘real’ disk drive brings with it the space to house a more generous battery, so overall, battery life of ‘up to’ 16 hours when playing music is pretty good, although as with the Nano, I do know that you have to take such figures with a pinch of salt..

Size-wise, the Zen weighs 160 grammes and is 105 mm tall, 60 mm wide and 18 mm thick so it’s a healthy chunk of "Mum’s bread pudd’n" compared to the iPod Nano’s dainty "biscotti Amaretti". Joggers who like strapping their music to their biceps had better take note otherwise they’ll end up with one arm stronger than the other! Seriously, since this is a hard-drive affair, I wouldn’t recommend constantly jarring it anyway.

NOW ZEN, DUZ IT SOUND OK?

Well yes, it does sound ‘OK’, but like many gadgets in the ‘personal stereo’ arena, it’s let down a bit by the ear-bud (Zen Buddism?) headphones supplied. I can’t seem to get them anywhere near the entrance to my inner ear, although holding them there does reveal the Zen’s bass capability. Playing it through some decent phones with a head-band raises its game considerably, and it’s sound quality when fed into a hi-fi is near perfect, depending on the compression rate you chose for your mp3 files – I’ll call them mp3, but in reality, this machine can handle many file formats; just not Apple ones!

In addition to mp3 files, it handles WMA files from Windows Media Player both in their free and copyright formats and WAV files, although why you’d want the latter is anyone’s guess as they are as large as an audio CD’s files and take up 10-times more room. Both the mp3 and wma options are capable of being recording in sampling rates of 320 kilobytes per second although the accepted wisdom is to use 128 kilobytes per second as a happy medium between quality and disk economy.

UZING IT

At first, having gotten used to iPod’s ‘thumb-wheel’ which has to be just about the best joystick control to be invented since Pontius was a pilot, a certain amount of re-education is needed, but if this was your first player, it wouldn’t bother you. You only really get an up-down movement from this thumb-pad, and it’s circled by more separate buttons. Tapping the centre of the pad’s slide area selects whatever menu item you are hovering over.

The top-end menu splits your music from videos and pictures plus several other sub-categories.

For instance, you have a built-in FM radio, which like a car radio is easy to set hunting for local stations wherever you are – on holiday in Andalusia, I managed to pull in Moroccan French-language stations in stereo . Not only that, but the Zen can also be used as a voice-recorder, say at meetings. It is not a DAB radio, but if you travel a lot this may not be a bad thing. Listening solely to the radio no doubt lengthens battery life no end, but I’m unable to quantify this.

Photos can be scrolled through as a slide show with no more battery drain than listening to music.

Movies are something else – you’ll be lucky to watch two full length DVD-equivalents before searching for a mains outlet to charge it. I’m still looking for a means to condense whole DVDs into .avi, .wmv or .mpeg files, but the samples on the machine already are pretty impressive and well worthy of the title ‘videos’ having smooth action and good sound.

ZEN YOU UNINSTALL ZEIR SOFTWARE

Loading your multi-media files to the Zen can be done in one of several ways including using the purpose made and supplied software. This splits down into three or four mini packages, one to ‘help’ you buy audiobooks, another to manage ‘Zencasts’, of which there are so few, and so US-biased as to be useless (to me at least) and a final package to manage the content of your Zen including synchronising it with your PCs media files.

However, there’s no real need - those of us used to Windows Media Player will have noticed a ‘SYNC’ button looking for something to do. This asks you to nominate a device from amongst your USB connections and then it’s off, like a rat up a drainpipe, loading new additions to your library, and deleting old ones. Even ‘album art’ makes the transfer safely. Don’t make my mistake and let it upload every bloody picture on your disk too! No wonder the first ‘sync’ took hours!

This approach means that for Windows users at least, there’s no need to learn a whole new load of software – it’s been sitting on your PC under-utilised for ages. Likewise, the standardised format for directory structures applies, with music files held on your C:\drive being filed under My Music in My Documents.

You can also designate an area of your choosing to set aside as ‘flash drive’ leaving you with a mass storage area for the transportation of any kind of file.

Their own software is useful for at least one purpose, and that’s to load your MS Outlook (or Outlook Express) address book into the Zen’s Contacts section, thereby absolving you of the need to do a load more repetitive typing. It you’re using the ‘big boy’s’ Outlook rather than the Express version, you can also download scheduled tasks and the calendar. Now’s the time to start filling it out that address book with more than just e-mail addresses! These options are buried pretty deep so you have to look hard in the Creative Sync manager software.

PUZZLEMENTS

After first downloading my Windows Media Player lists to the Zen, I was amazed to find a whole stack of artists I’d never heard of, which when pursued as far as playing them, seemed to emanate from albums I knew about by artists I’d heard of. On inspecting the WMP listings, I find that the Zen shows both artists and contributing artist. Therefore if Joe Bloggs is credited with either jamming on, or writing some of a mainstream track, they’ll appear as an artist. The solution is to scroll down all of your track listings changing the ‘Contributing Artist’ column to be the same as the actual Artist. With a bit of CTRL-C here and CTRL-V there it doesn’t actually take too long. In future, I’ll be scrutinising every CD that gets ripped, BEFORE it gets ripped. The changes then show up on your Zen next time you ‘sync’ it.

The official Creative Docking Station (approx. £20) for the Zen Vision M would appear to be merely a means of holding it upright whilst still needing a separate power supply and audio-visual lead, and can therefore be regarded as an expensive block of plastic that does nothing the existing port connector can’t do.

REGRETZ?

One thing I really do miss about iTunes, and I really never thought I’d be saying this, is its ability to quickly list duplicates so that they can be deleted thus saving disk space. This is particularly important if you rip a load of compilation albums, as, inevitably you get ‘crossover’ of content. I couldn’t find anywhere in the official Zen suite that you could do this, nor in Windows Media Player, unless you scour an alphabetical list of all tracks.

Creative have, for some economy reason omitted to supply any means of charging this except via its USB link to a PC (which takes around 5 hours from ‘empty’), which is fine until you come to take it on holiday for two weeks. They do make a separate charger, but if they can be cheapskate so can I. I did manage to sneak it into an internet café in Spain and used the PC to give it a quick burst of 5 volts whilst sorting through my 893 (!) e-mails.

Older firmware versions of the 30gb model USED to be able to record from radio, but bowing to pressure from the RIAA (Recording Industry Association Of America), this aspect has been ‘written out’ of the firmware. Yet again, a US authority prevents me from doing something which is legal (and worth doing) in the UK. The powers that be here don’t seem to be half as anal as their transatlantic counterparts about the making of radio recordings. After all, lots of people now have a Freeview set-top box possibly with a built-in recorder; no-one’s stopping them from recording digitally from the radio. It makes you wonder whether it’d be possible to revert it to older firmware. I can’t help thinking that there’s a nerd’s forum* somewhere just waiting to have me sign up!

(*Aha, there is, and it’s called www.anythingbutipod.com so I’ve joined it)

NOW I’VE HAD A CHANCE TO USE IT

Having just returned from southern Spain, I can report that it put in sterling work, both on the outward flight and during the first week. It was at this point that I found out the hard way that my wife’s mini-USB charger, intended for her cell-phone was not man enough for charging the Zen, although by all accounts it should have been. This then led me to believe that the Zen was a dud. But on connecting it back up to my PC, it seems that all is OK, and after an anxious first hour, when my PC couldn’t ‘see’ it, it’s charged back up normally – panic over.

The first things I’ve bought since getting back are a separate dedicated mains adapter and the audio/visual lead, thereby solving my charging problem and buying my way via the back door into the wonderful world of using the Zen as a feed for music, slide shows and movies (that’s when I find out how to put the latter on the damned thing!)

Summary: Music player with video and photo capabilites

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