Super sound, idiot interface
Written: Jul 08 '06 (Updated Jul 09 '06)
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Pros: Sound quality, replaceable battery, earphones, capacity, simple design, updateable HDD
Cons: Navigation, size, weight
The Bottom Line: Good sound, good price, but bulky, heavy and difficult to operate.
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| imreasztar's Full Review: Creative Technology Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra (60 GB)... |
Here's my experience of 6 months with the Creative Jukebox Zen Xtra 60 GB. In summary: I love the sound quality and dislike the interface.
In the box:
- The player
- Li-ion Battery
- Earphones (white)
- USB cable
- AC/DC adapter (bulky)
- Driver CD
- Leather case (black)
- Instruction booklet
Size
60 GB is plenty of storage; however it's still not my preference. I have about 120 GB of music altogether, so my whole collection doesn't fit on the player. So, I have to copy, and if I have to copy anyway, I don't care if it's 4-6 GB only or 60 GB. I cannot avoid keeping a second copy on my computer, so that's it. I would say, if your collection fits onto 60 GB of space, happy for you, if not, probably you go better with a smaller mp3 player of less bulk.
Sound
Sound quality is the best I've heard on a portable player. The Creative Zen became my first choice among my music equipment to playback music. I just hook it up the HiFi and go.
The earphones are also of very good quality. Unfortunately, the earphones cable broke near the earphone after a couple of months, so I had to buy a new set of earphones. I also missed a rewinder box for the earphones. The earphones are of big size, at least they were not comfortable to my ears ¡V and man, I have a big head!
Size and Weight
The shortcoming with the large hard drive is the bulk and weight of the player; it's a price I had to pay in exchange for the storage space. It's almost as heavy and bulky like my old Sony cassette tape walkman ¡V I need a strong pocket or a hand to carry the player. No chance to jog or bike without strong pockets. What is more, I store the player in the black leather case, which came with the unit. With the case, it doesn't even fit in my trouser pocket. To store it on my belt, the weight is at the limit, it pulls my trouser to the side. For my next mp3 player I will buy something super light, which I would use more often.
Buttons
All the buttons are easy to operate with one hand. There is a dial-like button on the right, which is used to scroll up and down in the lists and to select. Nice shortcut: a long press on BACK brings up the Now Playing screen. Unfortunately, when in my pocket, I have trouble to distinguish between Vol +/- and Back/Forward ¡V it's annoying to skip to the next track in the middle of a song when I just want some extra volume.
There are two shortcomings of the Creative Zen that troubles my life every time I switch it on: navigation and data transfer.
Navigation
Browsing through the albums/songs takes a huge amount of clicks, click back, button presses and time waiting the cursor to jump. This interface is OK for some 1 GB player where you store 3-5 albums of music. However, for 60 GB... I ended up only using 10 GB of space for my music, because I just cannot browse through the space.
However, a nice feature is the possibility to create custom playlists on the player itself. I can add remove anything I want, even during playback.
Data Transfer
Unfortunately, the Creative Zen uses a proprietary program, Creative Nomad Explorer, to transfer music onto the player (like iPod uses iTunes). For every single album, I have to load the program, find my music in the small Explorer window of it, select titles, and step through the windows of the transfer process. What is more, all ID3 tags have to be in perfect shape of every single mp3 file, otherwise I cannot find my music back on the player. This is because during file transfer, Creative fills up the music in its own 'music catalogue' on the player and music can be selected only by 'Artist', 'Album', 'Genre', etc., which information is either taken from mp3 tags, or guessed from folder/file names during transfer.
However, although my collection is organized properly in folders on my computer, I didn't have energy to fill all the mp3 tags. It's super time consuming, even with dedicated applications and using CDDB. This is why I don't use iTunes, Windows Media Player and such to catalogue my music. I simply set up a logical folder structure and I add music to my collection with a simple file-copy when it comes along.
I would prefer a player which simply connects to my PC as an external hard drive, so I can simply copy music via Windows Explorer or Total Commander. Then on the player I could just select the files/folders to play. It would be fast and simple.
In fact, I never wanted to play music 'from the 60s', play 'random jazz' or play 'random from Queen' (correct ID3 tags would allow this to be done), instead, I want to play specific CDs. In case I wanted to play random jazz, I would just quickly build a playlist with a lot of jazz cds and set random play.
My Sony MPD-AP20U can play back mp3 from DVD discs and it works by folder/file access. And almost all desktop divx players can do this, so I don't see why they cannot include such a feature in a HDD mp3 player. The proprietary software also means you have to install it before you can access it on a friend's computer.
Firmware 2.10.03 updates the ZEN Xtra into a PlaysForSure device, which can connect to Windows Media Player (even on a friends PC). But it complicated thing for me, as I had to update all the Creative PC applications as well.
In the end, I use the following workaround: I organized all my music into folders genre.subgenre/artist - album title/01. song title.mp3 format. Like jazz.vocal.man/frank sinatra ¡V greatest hits. When I transfer the music with the software, I set it up to guess ID3 tags from the folder structure. It puts the first folder level into 'GENRE' and the second level into 'ALBUM'. This way, I can find all my collection under ALBUMS, in alphabetical order.
File storage
I can set up the player to split space and use one part for music and the other part as an external HDD. Even though I only use max. 10 GB of the space on the player, I would never use it as an external HDD. I don't want to crack it, drop it, or amortize it, it's for music playback.
Some reported that the HDD failed after 6 months of use. The good news is that the HDD inside the ZEN Xtra is a standard Fujitsu 2.5 laptop hard drive, which you can simply change. The device just needs a firmware update to be run. Maybe when a 150 GB laptop hard drives will be available I will update for that, so a copy of all my music collection can reside on the ZEN.
Battery life
The Li-ion battery lasts for more than 10h, pretty good. I also have a second battery, but in fact, there's not much use of it, because I never ran out of one battery before I reached a wall outlet. Note that the battery can be charged only in the player, so charging up two batteries requires you to swap them once the first one is up.
Unfortunately, the case covers the AC port on the player, so the leather case has to be opened for charge up. The charger is super bulky; I would never take it for the daily go.
Line-in and out
There's no line out, or line-in for recording, in fact, it's not possible to record with the ZEN. At the beginning I missed this feature, but after some time I like that the designers kept it simple. It's for listening to mp3 music with your earphones and it does that well.
Fortunately, the USB plug is the standard USB mini B plug, so I can have the same cable for the Zen, digital camera and external HDD. Makes life cable-jungle free.
Usage habits
Although I thought to use the Zen on the go, I rarely take it with me because of the size and weight. However, I use it a lot at home. I hooked it up with a jack-jack cable to my Tivoli Audio P.A.L. portable radio/speaker and it is a wonderful music playback setup. To playback music from my computer is not so comfortable, because it has to be always on then, and heavy cpu loads can result in skips in music. However, from the ZEN, the music plays always smoothly.
Features I will look for in my next mp3 player
- sound quality
- easy to use interface
- light weight, small size
- can copy music without proprietary software
- 10h playback time
- charges through USB cable when connected to the computer
- 4-6 GB of space
- flash based: silent, no wait for HDD to spin up
- standard USB mini plug
Should you buy it or not?
If your music collection fits onto 60 GB and you're the type who just copies the music over and just listens, it can be good for you.
However, if you are like me and cannot fit all your collection onto 60 GB, or often want to change/update the collection as music arrives, I would go for something smaller and more user-friendly. I got it as a present, so I'm happy with it, but it wouldn't be my first choice to shop.
A few links about the ZEN Xtra
Nomadworld from Crative
http://www.nomadworld.com/
Foxpop Review - from my friend Elisa, with screenshots:
http://www.foxpop.co.uk/elisa/general/zen.htm
Notmad Explorer - A super 3rd party app to browse the Zen as a HDD and to stream music:
http://www.redchairsoftware.com/notmad/
Microsoft Plus! Portable Audio Devices Power Toy - let's you copy music with drag&drop
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/plus/dme/PortableDevices.asp
Gnomad2 for Linux
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=65573
Update the Hard Drive
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1186572,00.asp
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 350
Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection
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Epinions.com ID:
imreasztar
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Location: Budapest, Hungary
Reviews written: 28
Trusted by: 6 members
About Me:
Bio/chemical engineer who loves mobile tech
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