Thursday Thoughts: The Creative Zen

My iPod was a good companion. I was able to take 2 Gigabytes worth of my music wherever I wanted. It was easy to use and held up pretty well. However, three years into the life of it, the battery was starting to go and would drain itself even when not in use. Also, 2 gigs of music just isn't enough considering my music collection is well over 40 gigs.

So I decided it was time to get a new MP3 player. There were two I was looking at, the iPod touch, and the Zune. However, based upon a suggestion by our good friend Mike Arne, I investigated the Zen by Creative Labs. After some research, I decided this was the MP3 player I wanted. It has the following features.

• 16 Gigabytes of storage
• SD card slot for added memory.
• Mp3, AAC, WMA, Mpeg, and wmv support
• 30 hour battery life
• Software with easy sorting options

Quite nifty. I also like that it recharges with a standard mini USB port. Meaning i can use my phone charger or any standard usb cord to recharge it. No need for a specific cord like with the iPod. I also love that I can just put in an SD card with the files on it and it will read them just fine. There's no need for computer software to load songs. Just plug it in, drop your files and you're good to go. I also like its price tag. The 16 gig model is $179.99. Which is about $50 less than the same storage space models of the Zune and iPod. (iPod touch 16gig is $400, though it also does a hell of a lot more) The battery life is quite nice. It does seem to last about 30 hours playing just music. Though the backlight stays on for video, so video will drain the battery much faster. Though based on my tests, it still lasted about 12 hours playing video. Not bad at all.

There are a few cons. The software does take a little getting used to, and it's hard to scroll though songs really quickly. You can jump right to the letter, but if you have 1,000 songs starting with the letter S, it can take a while to get to the one you want. Also, it does not support .avi files, which about 90% of my video files are coded as. Luckily the software it comes with (which is handy, small, easy to use and not even necessary for use of the zen) is able to convert files into the right format. Takes a while, but that's to be expected for recoding video.

The Zen is great, but it has also given me quite a chore with my music. You see, the Zen makes organizing very easy, IF your mp3s are properly tagged. It relies on ID3 tags to sort. So if your mp3 files aren't tagged correctly, it wont be able to sort properly. Well, many of my songs were tagged correctly, but many more were not.

Almost every song had artist and song correct. Which is the most important of course. However very few had album and year correct. THere's also the issue of different spellings of artist names, so it would label Bare Naked Ladies different than Barenaked ladies. Even worse, I had "Weird Al" Yankovic, Weird Al Yankovic, Weird-Al Yankovic, Al Yankovic, etc... But, thanks to a handy ID3 tag editor, I have made great progress on unifying my mp3s. I'm going through every folder of music and making sure everything is properly labeled. Luckily it has the feature to say "Make every file in this folder have ___ for ___ tag." So I can take my whole Weird Al folder and label every song as having the same artist, with the same genre. Makes things a lot faster.

The big process though is looking up year and album for songs that are not labeled. Wikipedia is my friend in this endeavor. I'm just about done with the whole process. Most of the music I have left is already labeled correctly and just requires a few more tweaks. Soon I will be in a calm, relaxed state of music harmony. An odd state of mind where everything is perfect... if only I could think of a word to describe it.