The Incredible Bulk

Life

The Jukebox Zen is Creative’s latest generation hard disk-based portable digital music player. And portable is not really the best way to describe this product: it is quite bulky, weighing in at 268g. It looks more like an external hard disk than a slick piece of digital lifestyle technology. It is much larger than the flagship Apple iPod player and is in no way as beautiful, with a hard metallic case and grey rubber band that arrests any progress PC technology has made in becoming more fashionable.

The storage capacity is impressive at 20Gbyte, certainly more than enough space to store most users’ entire music collections (500 songs in MP3 format and 8000 in Windows Media format). The navigation controls are tricky and take a little time to get used to, with a large scrolling wheel on the right hand side of the device, similar in many ways to the scrolling wheel Sony uses on its electronic organisers. The LCD is quite small and the backlighting is poor, unlike the bright, lucent orange backlighting you will find with the iPod.

The player connects to a Windows PC via a high speed USB 2.0 connection, which can transfer songs and audio files at over 600Kbit/s between the player and the computer.

The software applications that bundle with the player are easy to use and feature-rich. The PlayCenter is the key application: it allows you to ‘rip’ or record music in MP3 format from a music CD to a folder on your hard disk. Impressively I ripped 11 music tracks from Leftfield’s Leftism in 11 minutes. Considering that this selection of music amounted to nearly 64Mbyte of data, and two of the tracks were at least 7Mbyte in size, that was a great performance by the software. Transfer (music taken from personal purchased collection for personal listening) to the player of these MP3 files took less than 2 minutes.

Other cool features on the player include EAX enhancements: controls that allow you to reduce sudden changes in volume in musical pieces; a time scaling control that allows you to slow down a piece of music so that you can hear every note; and an ‘environments’ control that allows you to add greater acoustic realism to music tracks.

Firmware upgrades, driver updates and song and artist labelling courtesy of the CD DB are also available directly from the PlayCenter software interface.

Specs:

• Size WxHxD (mm):   75.9 x 112.6 x 24.5mm
• Weight:   268g
• Capacity:   20Gbyte
• LCD display:    132 x 64 pixel resolution blue EL backlit display    
• Audio codec support:   MP3, WMA, .WAV
• Battery:   Built-in rechargeable lithium-ion
• Memory:   16Mbyte SD RAM

Live! Verdict: 60 per cent

A bulky portable player that unfortunately amounts to no more than a poor man’s Apple iPod. We say buy an iPod instead and use it with Musicmatch software on your PC. Creative need to get the Zen 2 to market as quickly as possible to keep up.

20/10/2003

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