MP3 Players

I recently purchased a portable MP3 player, specifically Creative Nomad Zen. It looks like this:



It has a 20Gb hard disk on which so far -- using variable bit rate .wma which is more space efficient than MP3 -- I have 297 albums in about 8Gb (ie less than half full) at a quality roughly equivalent to 128k MP3. I cannot begin to tell you how fantastic it is being able to more or less permanently carry around so much music in something a little bigger than a cigarrette packet. Anyone regularly using a portable music player really should get one of these.

If you can buy in or via the US street/internat price is about $250 USD. In the UK the best street price is about £290 (inc. VAT). They no longer seem to sell the Firewire version and it now comes with USB 2.0 as standard (a bit faster than Firewire) for which you may well need to buy a card (about £20 for a 5 port PCI card).

Sound quality is very good for this sort of device. Compared to my mates iPod it sounds cleaner, more dynamic and goes significantly louder (often a problem with MP3 players on noisy tubes and the like). With lossless .wma files and decent headphones it sounds about as good as my Sony Discman. Obviously with lower bitrate wma or mp3 its not as good but perfectly acceptable for mobile listening IMHO. If your portable listening involves a Headroom amp and HD580s its probably not for you though.

On the downside the interface is not the slickest. It has a little scroll wheel that also acts as a button which works well but the LCD is quite small (although it holds as much info as the iPod screen its harder to read. There is a large font option which sacrifices info for readability). The secondary buttons are quite small and fiddly but usuable in practice.





As this is made by Creative the supplied PC software is absolutely terrible. Like all their stuff it will install a stupid splash screen that puts up a Creative logo and pumps 100db of Dolby 5.1 sounds effects through your speakers each time you boot up and will try its very best to get you to tell them your e-mail so they can spam you forever. The software itself (Creative PlayCenter 3) is also typical of Creative Labs -- its lacking in features, poorly designed and is quite possibly the single most hideous piece of software ever designed. This picture doesn't really convey the true disgustingness of its interface.



It does basically work if you can put up with all its foibles but it does insist on taking over your whole life in ripping terms and unless you are prepared to use it as your main player/ripper on your PC it is going to be a pain. All my stuff was already ripped in Windows Media Player and although I could import this into PlayCenter without re-ripping it was very clunky and you wouldn't want to do it on a permanent basis.

You will therefore almost certianly want to budget another $20 for Notmad Explorer which is much, much better. It happily catalogued and transferred all my existing rips with no fuss and has a decent enough "One Touch Syncho" for future uploads. There will probably be support for MusicMatch before to long as this currently supports the previouce Creative Nomad models.

Also the supplied headphones are pretty average and are those on top of the ear with a band round the back of your head type which I really don't like. Most people will probably already have some better earbuds/headphones from an existing CD walkman or such.

Compared to an iPod the obvious differences are that its much, much cheaper (like £100 less for a 20Gb model), sounds better and supports more formats. The latter was crucial for me as a .wma user since that effectively doubles the capacity compared to an iPod with only MP3 support until better non-MS formats get going. The Zen looks pretty smart but its not nearly as stylish as an iPod if that important to you. No doubt for Mac users iTunes compatabiliy will be a major factor as well (iPod on Windows uses a specific version of MusicMatch rather than iTunes). I think its really a case of are you willing to pay an extra £100 for the sexyness and usability of the iPod over the Zen.

There are other Createive players and similar specced models from Archos but they tend to be significantly more bulky than the Zen or iPod and so I didn't really consider them.

Matthew

Pictures borrowed from http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/creative-zen/