So I have, at last, completed my tour through portable audio players, and, in degrees of relative insanity of their creators and adherents, the results are:
1) Old Creative players: built by sane engineers concerned with creating a good product; not the greatest audio quality, but perfectly acceptable; built for the sane among us.
2) New Creative players: the engineers, alas, got a touch of the insanity, and forgot some of what made their older players work well; still acceptable but not great audio quality; you don't have to have a touch of the insanity yourself to use their product, but it will save on the frustration.
3) hp iPaq PocketPC: not actually built to be a player, and with severely limited capacity and not particularly good audio quality, but on the other hand, built by and can be operated by people without moderate to severe brain damage! (I got it as part of my job. It runs out of power staggeringly fast, so it wasn't a serious contender for an every day player.)
4) Microsoft Zune players: built by and for rabid audiophiles, but those without serious brain damage need not apply or purchase unless they are willing to deal with frustration in the
extreme (but, lord, the thing does sound glorious);
5) Apple iPod: built by and for rabid audiophiles, unfortunately without the least consideration of how people without the severest of brain damage could possibly operate the thing; it's quite clear that Apple engineers and the iPod adherents should all be locked up for the good of humanity. (And, yes, it sounds great, but actually, the Zune does sound a bit better; I say this having heard a Zune on a pair of Philips headphones that were seriously considering falling apart, and an iPod through one of the high-rent Bose headphones that they sell in the Apple Store downtown.)
Here's the thing: if you've never had any other player, or if you started out with a player with an even more difficult operating system (sanDisk Sansa with the swirly menu thing, I'm looking at you), then I can understand why you would like an iPod. This is especially true if audio quality is maybe
the most important thing to you, and you would prefer not to be bound to the House of Bill and its charming "all your music are belong to this computer, and we don't care if it wasn't DRMed before, because it sure as hell is now!" approach. However, if you're used to a player with a fairly intuitive operating system, and you've gotten used to doing things in a particular way -- such as, say, creating a list of selected music both without using the computer AND without having to listen to the music to put it into the list -- then the iPod is not the player for you, because it will make you crazy to try to use it.
The facts are these: As has been mentioned before, I purchased a Zune, on the strength of reviews that basically said, "The software and OS have been greatly improved, so they're not awful now! And it sounds glorious!" And it promptly proceeded to make me crazy, in part because it did things so differently from my late lamented Nomad Zen Xtra Jukebox (really, Creative needs to restrain themselves on the naming thing) and in part because the things it did were just ... odd. To recap: (1) The Zune doesn't work with either Windows Media Player 10 or 11, though it once did (and does require the detestable Microsoft Windows Media 11 SDK, which imposes their draconian DRM on your computer), but only with its own quite peculiar software; (2) the only way to delete files from the device is to
reformat the thing -- you cannot delete individual files from the player without being connected to the computer, and the computer only pretends to delete files, by removing them from the "Collection" listing, but not from the player. Of course, once you reformat, you need to reinstall the player's OS and firmware (which isn't firmware if it doesn't operate in ROM, but that's what they call it); (3) While the Zune will play Audible's audiobooks -- and quite nicely, too -- you can't put Audible audiobooks and music files into the same playlist. In fact, the Zune PC software can't even see the audiobooks, so you can have a huge amount of filespace on the player taken up by them, and it can't tell you what's going on. Moreover, despite the fact that music and audiobooks exist in exclusive and incompatible space, playing an audiobook wipes out any pre-existing Selected Music/Now Playing list you may create, unless you remember to save it as a playlist; (4) Connecting to the computer for an update wipes out the Selected Music/Now Playing list -- in fact, doing pretty much anything except sitting there and listening to it wipes out that playlist; (3) Microsoft's clickwheel implementation, while being a bit less aggravating than Apple's -- you just press the cardinal points for volume or for forward and back, rather than swirling your finger around -- is also very sensitive, as I discovered when it would jostle against something in my backpack, and the volume would suddenly go WAY WAY UP, or way way down. In short, between the software and the hardware, the Zune was a most frustrating machine, so I decided to return and replace it.
I ordered a Creative Zen, the low end of the range, in part because it wasn't hideously expensive, and in part because the higher end machines ... well,
were. There was also not a great deal of difference in storage capacity, though some had different capabilities than others. Creative has moved their entire line of players to flash memory and away from hard disks. It makes a type of sense, I guess; it certainly explains why the capacity of even their highest end players caps off at 32GB. Moving to flash memory for storage allows Creative to decrease the size of their player -- and make no mistake, the Zen is
wee, especially compared to the Nomad, which was the size and weight of a pack of cigarettes. The Zen is slightly smaller than a credit card in surface area, and about the thickness of two or three credit cards stacked together.
The Zen has, very technically, four buttons, although all but the central click button is divided so that they have more than one function each. The top button is the Back/Menu button, with the latter function being context-sensitive; you get the appropriate menu for wherever you are. Creative's implementation of a clickwheel-like function is a square surrounding the central OK/Go/Invoke/whatever they call it button. The square button surrounding that contains Volume Up, Rewind/Previous, Volume Down, and FastForward/Next. Unfortunately, the Zen's small form factor can make the Rewind/FastForward buttons a bit difficult. It's so very small that if you've got large fingers, it can be hard to touch the right spot; in addition, the player is so thin that if you press down hard (which you must do to invoke either FF or Rewind, instead of Next or Previous) and aren't holding it just so, the whole damn thing
flexes, and suddenly, your finger is moving around or easing up on the button, and you've pressed Next instead of FF, and you're in a different song entirely. The Zen also has a button on the bottom that invokes the execrable DJ mode. I do not understand why anyone sane would want this. It's essentially a shuffle/randomizer thing, that will throw you into the song of the day or album of the day or whatever random file it picks. And, if you press it by accident, you lose the list of items in your Now Playing list, as it has thoughtfully replaced those for you with its new selection. Seriously, is having your player surprise you with its choice in music something the masses were clamoring for? Really? Truly? If so, WHY, for heaven's sake? (Here's the other thing; that's a very half-assed implementation of randomization. The iPod shuffle did it all the time, but the Zen wants you to press a button to tell it to surprise you each time. Also, note for the sake of sanity that the Shuffle has, in fact, shuffled off this mortal coil, perhaps to Buffalo or points beyond.)
Compared to the Zune, operating the Zen is comparatively easy. The menu is very accessible, it's easy to go through the list of Artists, Albums, All Tracks, or Genres and select items to put on the "Now Playing" list (no longer called Selected Music, but whatever). That all works the way it used to on the Nomad ...
except. You can no longer see the list of selected music. You can add as many as you want, but there's no way to examine or verify that list. You used to be able to change the order of items in the list of selected music, but since you can no longer see the list, you can't do that. Moreover, the Zen is now plagued by the same vanishing Now Playing list demon that bedevils the Zune; if you connect it to your computer and start to import music, and you have not saved your Now Playing list as a formal playlist, the list will be gone when you disconnect. If you decide to listen to the (rather inferior) included FM radio, the list will be gone when you exit the radio section. If you decide to browse the SD card (and more about THAT lovely thing later), you lose the Now Playing list. If you do much of anything, you lose the Now Playing list. So not so different from a Zune on that count.
The Zen plays MP3, WMA and Audible's AA formats, as did the Nomad. Allegedly, it plays MP4/AAC/M4A/M4V files, but you couldn't prove it by me. I tried importing Coverville's M4A format files -- files that the Zune didn't have much difficulty handling -- and the Zen choked, big time. It insisted that they were video files, despite the files having M4A or MP4 extensions. Then it sat there, churned away trying to import them, and then reported that the import failed. From my point of view, it's not a major issue, but it would be interesting to know why it failed so badly. It handle's Audible's audiobooks just fine, integrated into the relevant sections by artists; strangely, where Audible used to be considered one album, with each individual recording as one track, each track is now considered its own album. You get a long list that says, for example, "Audible - The Graveyard Book", "Audible - Says You", etc. It's a peculiar regression. Also allegedly, it plays video, but I haven't tried it. According to everything I can find, transcoding video for the Zen takes an extraordinarily long time. Quite honestly, I can't imagine
wanting to watch video on it; the screen is small enough to make that difficult and painful.
The Zen has a bookmarking feature to help you mark your place in a file, but it may be the most impressively brain damaged implementation of a feature that worked very well on the Nomad. On the older player, telling it to bookmark a file would produce a little flag at the top of the display, indicating that it had been bookmarked, and leaving you in the file being played. Later, if you went back to that file and told the player to "Go to bookmark", it would start playing at that point with no effect on the Selected Music list or anything else. In the new implementation, when you tell the Zen to set a bookmark, it takes you to a completely separate bookmarks list, noting the track name and timestamp for that particular bookmark. If you then decide later to tell it to go to bookmark, you first have to choose the appropriate bookmark (if you have bookmarks in more than one file) and then you start playing. The Zen will then considerately wipe out your Selected Music/Now Playing list (yes, AGAIN), giving you a list of one and only one item, the one with the bookmark you selected. It's far easier to make a mental note of where you are in a file, and to deal with it if you forget.
The Zen also does one specific thing that the Nomad only ever did when malfunctioning. If it's turned off long enough, it forgets where in a given file you are. To be sure, this is true only for MP3 and WMA files; it has so far never once had problems remembering where I am in an Audible file. But, for example, if you're 20 minutes into a 40 minute podcast, and you turn off the player (or let it go to sleep) without bookmarking and leave it off, for example, for an entire work day, the next time you turn it on, it'll start back at the beginning of the podcast.
The Zen Organizer software is familiar to anyone who used the old Creative Music Source. For some reason, Creative removed the intermediate step in importing files into the player that allowed you to verify the tags on a given file, so you need to make sure everything is correct before you start the import process. However, the defining quality of the Zen Organizer is that it is studiously, impressively, nearly majestically
sloooooow Slow to start, slow to import, slow to exit, just plain SLOOOOOOW. Music Source wasn't precisely a speed demon, but it's damn near a world record setter compared to Zen Organizer. You can also do a certain amount of Drag-and-drop into the player directly, but that's not really any less slow. That said, Zen Organizer lets you also delete files from the player, quite easily. It also comes with an automatic sync mode that puts everything in a given directory onto the machine; I used this mode precisely once, and then turned it off. Now, granted, if I'd realized that the My Music directory had 1800 files in it, I might have handled it differently. Nonetheless, it took Zen Organizer 28 hours to work its way through all that; by comparison, it took the Zune approximately two hours import the same directory. (The Nomad never had to handle the whole thing at once, so there's no fair comparison there.)
Creative added an SD card slot to allow you to expand the device's available storage at a reasonable cost. This is, to put it mildly,
laughable. The SD card isn't integrated into the main menu, so the device can't even see the thing until you tell it to browse the card. As soon as you do (a) you lose your Now Playing list (of course), and the rest of the player becomes inaccessable. You can't integrate items on the SD card into a playlist, because you have to play from the list of files on the SD card while you're on the card. Both Windows Media Player and Audible's Manager can work with the Zen, and again, neither of them can see the card, so as far as they're concerned, that extra capacity doesn't exist. It's a truly dreadfully conceived implementation from top to bottom. (According to various reviews, this problem exists across all of Creative's lines.)
On the whole, the Zen is a decent enough player. If I were coming to it having never had a Nomad, I would probably love it to death. (Except for the sound, which is ... eh. Very AM radio, sometimes.) Having had a Nomad, I just want to know why Creative's engineers decided that people wanted a
less capable player. Lower capacity, options nobody sane wants, options that don't work as advertised ... seriously, I can't remember the last time I was so disappointed. I'll still keep it -- apart from anything else, it's packaged in such a way that you have to completely destroy the packaging to get it out, making it unreturnable for anything other than gross malfunction. But in a way, I was less disappointed with the Zune. After all, I was expecting something completely different there; I just wasn't expecting something completely
stupid. With the Zen, I was expecting something that was as good as before, with better hardware, and it fails on both counts.
I did actually try the iPod recently, despite my dislike of the clickwheel concept. (...Hush, you.) I didn't get very far, though, because one of the lacks was so glaring that I just couldn't deal with it. You can't create a list of selected music without actually listening to the item you want to add to the list, because of the way the iPod menus work. I did in fact ask one of the Apple store hovering helpers about this, because it was such an obvious thing -- I mean, even the Zune has it, for heaven's sake! -- that I thought that I must be doing something wrong. But no, the player just plain doesn't do that. It really does depend on iTunes for most of its music management. And with that, I was pretty much outta there. After all, if I wanted a player that incapable, I could just stick with the Zune.
What would really be nice is if Microsoft would just buy out Creative and/or pick their brains. (Or if Apple would; I'm not particular.) As reduced as it is from what it once was, the Zen's OS is still far better than either Microsoft's or Apple's. The Zen hardware, however, bites, comparatively speaking. If you could combine Creative's OS with Microsoft's hardware, you'd come up with a really very solid player. It would still lack one or two things, but it would be far better than either of them is alone.
(For what it's worth, I'm guessing that the iPod software looks, in part, the way it does because
Apple effectively lost a lawsuit to Creative; you do not, after all, settle for $100 million if you think you're going to win. At a guess, I'm betting that one of the things Apple needed to do was to rework the iPod OS so that it was more easily distinguished from Creative's, and you certainly can't see that they ever had anything in common now.)
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