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Creative Zen Nano Plus Is Apple losing creativity or did I miss some division getting bought by someone else?

The iPod nano is very light (less than 1/10 lb ... 1.5 ounces = 3 / 32 lbs), which the Shuffle has, but the iPod nano also lets you see what you are selecting/doing and modify things on the fly, which the iPod solves.

I am not sure what the difference between the nano and the mini is, but I am guessing it must have been weight. My friend had an iPod Mini and his brother had an iPod, and I honestly could not feel a difference.

Basically, I resisted buying an iPod because I knew eventually I would break the little hard drive inside and I did not like the Shuffle because I could not see what I was playing (unlike my existing Shuffle size player). I only really use an MP3 player when I bike, run, or work out and I like to do them all often.

For those curious, I had this: Creative MuVo TX FM before I gave it to my brother in Iraq (USMC). It worked GREAT before then, but I never really wanted to buy another one (did not really impress me that much). It weighs about 0.4 ounces less than the iPod nano (1.13 oz versus 1.5 oz) and the maximum size is 1 GB ($150) versus the 4 GB ($250) on the iPod nano for $100 more. 2 GB iPod nano is $200. All in all, without ever having touched an iPod nano (but having touched plenty of iPod's/iPod Mini's) I would say the nano is a much better drive since it uses flash memory too. The MuVo also took AAA batteries and I remember going through 2 of them relatively quickly. I actually might have just talked myself into buying an iPod nano (the arm band is $29 though!).

Creative included the news about the granted patent http://creative.com/press/releases/welcome.asp?pid =12175, but it doesn't have the guts to include the news about the virus they shipped with the Creative Neon MP3 player on their website.

Hey guys. I wanted to send a little note to Creative about how stupid this action is but look! You can't even submit a query because the form is broken!

http://developer.creative.com/contactus/feedback.a sp

Quite ironic that I now need to send them an email that their email form is broken. :/

We could help Apple by hosting a DDOS against Creative!

Slashdotters away: Creative

Don't know how that would help, but it gives us something to do till the next article.

Re: Problem with Creative Zen Neeon Digital Audio Player
Notice to Customers and Advice on Dealing With The Problem

Creative has confirmed that there is a possibility that W32.Wullik.B@mm, a low-risk destructive worm virus, has infected the Creative Zen Neeon digital music players which were shipped from manufacture from the latter part of July onwards, some of which are still being prepared for shipping [?].

The issue concerns a specific factory line which was producing new units, and the Creative Zen Neeons which may have been infected by the worm (which were shipped from manufacture from the latter part of July and some of which are still awaiting shipment) number less than 1% of those shipped - of the roughly 3,700 units from this line that were shipped to Japan, less than 5% are affected.

It has already been confirmed that this issue affects no other Creative products.

The company offers its sincerest apologies for any inconvenience this will cause to its customers.

According to an internal company investigation, the cause has been identified as being in one of the various offline systems which form part of the final packing stage of the manufacturing process. The company can confirm that the problem has been rectified - it will have no effect on new units being manufactured at the factory in question.

Furthermore, in order to minimise the effect on customers and the market [for these devices], the company has currently halted shipping of all Zen Neeon units, and is working with its partners to arrange the return of units which may be affected.

Customers who have purchased Creative Zen Neeons with a corresponding line number and who have concerns about the safety of using their unit are requested to consult this special support page for more information.

Any mistakes/corrections, would be glad to hear!

iqu :)

If your complaints against the grammar come from the second link in the blurb, it is machine translation from Japanese to English via Babelfish. On the contrary, the original Japanese was written well enough.

For any Japanophiles in the house, for the translation It regards the problem of the Creative Zen Neeon digital audio player, the original was Creative Zen Neeon Digital Audio Player [dejitaru o-d'io pure-ya-] no mondai ni kan suru, which is better translated as regarding the problem with the Creative Zen Neoon DAP.

Come on, Creative, where was marketing on this?

"Yeah, our players have virii, but they're removable...like our batteries!"

"Sure you'll get your computer hopelessly infected with a virus, but as you're reinstalling Windows, you'll be able to listen to FM radio!"

"Don't worry, our Stik-On MP3 player stickers are totally virus-proof."

For those who, like me, prefer reading intelligible Japanese over machine translation, here.

Once upon a time I remembered that %2f was slash and %3f was question mark, etc.

Yeah I just wish that more portable music players would support Ogg. I have a Creative Muvo TX-FM player which does not support Ogg. Furthermore, I went searching for a player that does support Ogg but was disappointed with what I found. Does anyone know of any good music players that support Ogg?

Soundblaster Audigy 2 (in 4 channel mode)

As it turns out, there appears to be a serious problem with how DICE coded EAX handling, which is purported to be fixable by following the instructions in this thread.

There's also a beta Audigy 2 ZS driver which is supposed to improve BF2 performance. (It's the second "Download Now" link from the top.)

As for missing a lot with MP5 at short range, I've come to the conclusion that the game can have a lot of packet loss, even while the ping time is low. Mostly due to people trying to run servers on inferior hardware, and the game's problematic memory management.

Essentially, don't think "Britney Spears' new video", or "Sin City", but "the latest Smallville episode".

Beats me. As far as I can tell, you don't. Not with an Audigy 2, anyway. You've gotta have analog speakers connected directly to the card.

Here's the official word (look under Digital Speakers).

Yahoo! Music Unlimited

Actually, it's my wife's subscription. She first started buying music from iTunes because she was afraid I'd get busted for downloading music illegally (I have a security clearance, and for the record, the polygraphers don't care. I fessed up to all my digital crimes: downloading music, copying software...yeah, that's about it. I told my polygrapher and he said, "great, now let's talk about real crimes"). At $0.99 a pop it gets expensive and she likes a lot of music.

For her birthday I got her a Creative Zen Micro and a subscription to Yahoo Music Unlimited. Sure, it's an annual payment but for $60/year she has access to a growing catalog of music. None of the tracks are fake either, like you find elsewhere these days. She has no need to burn CDs (I also got her an FM transmitter for the car) and the Zen Micro comes in chick-friendly colors.

I may subscribe to the service myself in fact...there's a lot of good music I wouldn't mind having easy access to. Unfortunately I can't bring the player into work...only store-bought pre-burned music CDs can be brought in.

"Imagine using your iPod and a regular old microphone to record studio-quality audio."

Or I could just buy this mp3 player instead, which has built in voice recording, instead of having to hack an iPod.

Great idea! We can dedicate chips to graphics coprocessing, sound tasks, network relating things, input/output. I hope they build this soon!

My MP3 Player does this.

Better than an iPod for way less (plus the battery is exchangeable).

Compare that with the Creative muvo n200 1gb version for £109 on amazon.co.uk .

Based on creative's pricing, I would pay £140 for the NW-E507. Anything more than that would not seem like a reasonable purchase.

this is what happen when they try not to copy the colors.... http://www.creative.com/iss/images/inline/products /zenmicro/feature_connectivity.jpg

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

If you live in the states you could get a Creative SBWM.

I'm still trying to work out a way to get one outside the states.

It has a RF remote that lets you build playlists on it. Creative says you can have 4 running at once. I don't know if you can have them all playing in sync. Would love to find out though.

If the Zen Touch supports Vorbis they're keeping quiet about it

what i think creative is missing is that nobody i know really gives a crap about *any* major online retailer of music. most folks i know just want to listen to the music they bought on cd's on their portable player.

itunes store is a nice extra to have for the ipod, but i don't really think it is the clincher in why folks buy an ipod. i know it wasn't for me. i dig the itunes store but i honestly would rather buy a cd than buy online music (i like the packaging you get with a cd and the openness of a cd).

if creative is focusing on being a major force in the online music store biz, i think they are missing the bigger problem. only recently with the zen micro have their players not look like crap. they don't know how to market themselves as "being cool" and the cool thing to have. much of their product line looks like stuff that would have been cool in the mid 90's.

creative pushes microsoft's drm laden crap which doesn't sit as well with many folks as apple's drm laden crap...

correct me if i'm wrong, but it wasn't that long ago that creative's players only played drm'd windows media files and transcoded mp3's into wma files.

lastly and most importantly creative doesn't have brand recognition with the general public.

what i think creative is missing is that nobody i know really gives a crap about *any* major online retailer of music. most folks i know just want to listen to the music they bought on cd's on their portable player.

itunes store is a nice extra to have for the ipod, but i don't really think it is the clincher in why folks buy an ipod. i know it wasn't for me. i dig the itunes store but i honestly would rather buy a cd than buy online music (i like the packaging you get with a cd and the openness of a cd).

if creative is focusing on being a major force in the online music store biz, i think they are missing the bigger problem. only recently with the zen micro have their players not look like crap. they don't know how to market themselves as "being cool" and the cool thing to have. much of their product line looks like stuff that would have been cool in the mid 90's.

creative pushes microsoft's drm laden crap which doesn't sit as well with many folks as apple's drm laden crap...

correct me if i'm wrong, but it wasn't that long ago that creative's players only played drm'd windows media files and transcoded mp3's into wma files.

lastly and most importantly creative doesn't have brand recognition with the general public.

Playing music is fun with the Creative Zen Touch's easy navigation. Built to hold 10,000(1) songs with an incredible 24 hour(2) battery life at 128kbps MP3 or 32 hour(2) at 48kbps.
(1) Based on 4 minutes per song at 128kbps MP3 encoding and 64kbps WMA encoding
(2) 24 hours battery life at 128kbps MP3 or 32 hours at 48kbps MP3
From Creative's own site.

From this one would expect that it holds 10,000 128 kbps MP3s, right? No. It'll only hold 5,000 of those, nevermind the second half of footnote one or the fact that one might easily assume that the 128 kbps MP3 in the advertisment applies to both the battery life and the capacity, the capacity is entirely based on 64 kbps WMA encoding. Finally, they claim 32 hours of battery life at 48kbps MP3. WTF? Who listens to 48kbps MP3?

I refuse to buy a Creative Player if for no other reason than their misleading advertising. The goal is not to see how small one can make the bitrate to fit more 4 minute songs on the same size drive. Use 128 kbps like everyone else please.

I recently got an iPod (for Christmas) and all I have to say is that I am very pleased. It's battery is supposed to last 12 hours with 128 kbps (AAC) encoded files and when I decided to test it to see how long it would last, it lasted over 15 hours on 192 kbps MP3s, well above its advertised capacity especially when one takes into account that 192 kbps encoding requires more reading from the hard drive than 128 kbps encoding.

How much did Creative pay you to write that ad?

Creative is scared out of their collective minds. Have you seen the giant piece of FUD the Creative CEO is trying to spread?

If Creative still *exists* in 18 months, I'll be surprised. Then where will your precious Zen users go for support? (Hint: they'll just buy an iPod if something goes wrong.)

Quite frankly, if this is a design that isn't "stuck in 2002", uh, I'll remain stuck in 2002 for as long as possible, thanks. It's really hard to go wrong with a piece of white/chrome computer gear. As someone else said, the souped-up ricer-dashboard motif gets old fast.

p

Let us not compare Apples to Oranges.

Sorry, couldn't resist :-)

Whenever anybody says their product is really similar to iPod or Tivo except for a few tiny differences, I can guarantee you what the differences are.

Usability, physical beauty, and simplicity.

News flash: those little things are the reason people are buying a an iPod, buying a Tivo, etc, and not your product, Creative. My girlfriend didn't want to carry around something that looked like an angry PDA, so I got her an iPod and she's happy, and her friends are buying them now. My parents didn't want a home media center computer in their living room because they can barely handle their current computer, so I got them a Tivo and they're happy, and their friends are buying them now.

Are there cheaper products out that do the same dang thing? Sure. But they're not as usable, not as attractive, and not as simple. And sorry, Creative, but putting a "Mesmerizing Blue LED Back Light" isn't going to cut it. Those were "Mesmerizing" back in 2002. You're not going to get money out of my pocket by looking like a rice-boy's Civic dashboard.

And as long as the Zen Micro has a blatant pair of nipples on the touchpad, my girlfriend's not going to use it either.

check out the zen micro. 5GB, FM Tuner, better looking, cheaper.

Creative recently released a patch for their Zen series of HD MP3 players that will allow playback of the audible format for audio books.

actually thats a bad comparison. The muvo wasn't designed to take on the ipod mini at all http://www.creative.com/zenmicro/ the zen micro is what's meant to take it on. pretty close specwise and the only thing i find that is a problem with the creative MP3 players is the lack of support for any non windows OS outta the box(well there is a 3rd party driver but still...).. oh and the /. crouwd will certainly complain about the lack of ogg vorbis :) as for sony? they basically lost track of the game and are playing catchup.You could prolly build a better MP3 player yourself

It's possible to find.

Good luck. You'll have to check the specs from PortalPlayer and whichever DAC you're using for analog output, and even then there's a fudge factor based on Apple's alterations to their spec design.

The new Zen is, apparently Signal-to-Noise Ratio : up to 97dB, # Channel Separation : up to 74dB, Frequency Response : 20Hz - 20kHz, Harmonic Distortion Output : less than 0.1%. The older Zen did SNR up to 98dB.

Apple has used a variety of Wolfson DACs with nominal SNRs ranging from 90dB to 100dB. There are significant differences in audio quality between some of the iPod generations and models.

It's possible to find.

Good luck. You'll have to check the specs from PortalPlayer and whichever DAC you're using for analog output, and even then there's a fudge factor based on Apple's alterations to their spec design.

The new Zen is, apparently Signal-to-Noise Ratio : up to 97dB, # Channel Separation : up to 74dB, Frequency Response : 20Hz - 20kHz, Harmonic Distortion Output : less than 0.1%. The older Zen did SNR up to 98dB.

Apple has used a variety of Wolfson DACs with nominal SNRs ranging from 90dB to 100dB. There are significant differences in audio quality between some of the iPod generations and models.

Considering, "The worldwide corporate headquarters is located in Singapore" (Creative's Corporate Site) you can't really call it outsourcing (unless they outsourced management as well).

I have a Creative MuVo TX 256MB flash player. I've had it for about 3 weeks and I am very happy with it.

My only complaint is: no ogg support.

I like the way it doubles as a "pen drive" without needing a seperate usb cable. I also like that it's teeny-teeny-tiny and has no moving parts. It lasts forever on a single AAA and is skip proof. I plan to take it skiing with me, so a HD player may have been a little too fragile.

Here's a link to Creative's portable audio product line: http://www.creative.com/products/welcome.asp?categ ory=213

I think Creative's problem and the problem of all manufacturers is going to be the click wheel. I have used a lot of MP3 players over the years dating back to the Rio 500 and I have never seen a superior user interface. As long as Apple holds the patent on the touch wheel idea I don't think they are in any danger.

I have looked at the Zen Touch and Zen Micro and they might rate a distant second place but the click wheel is still by far superior. The Rio Karma is fine but not in the same class as either product. My advice to anyone looking to purchase an MP3 player; borrow a friend's G4 iPod for a day. If you are still able to consider another MP3 player after that I will be very surprised.

Are all these "innovations" a sign that iPod is in need of a breakthrough? There are more portable players out there with more functions, and I wonder how long will Apple fans stick to it?

For example, the new Creative's Zen Micro has FM, is someone going to pre-record some radio talk shows and put it into iPod pretending that it's doing radio too?

Creative seems to imply it does behave as a mass storage device:

"Functions as an external hard drive for backup of computer files"

From the bullet point list on their features page.

Microsoft has had this recent trend to push a stripped down version of Windows XP on all "Media Devices." I was at the National Youth Leadership Forum on Technology were M$ launched the Windows Media Center or what ever its called for devices like this. While linux might do it better M$ has done all the hard work for these companies and made it intigrated into Win XP so its "easier for users." Ive played with a few of these and found it anything but easy. This is just M$s way of competing with the iPod.

What on earth are you talking about and what kind of crack are you smoking? The emu10k1 is one of the (if not THE) best supported sound card in the world of Linux. I still use it instead of the 25 million channel audio built onto my board because the audio quality is just better (as in no pops and skips).

Look here.

CMedia 8738 cards work very well too and I use one of those on my other box but please... don't knock emu10k1 cards in Linux because you've got to be complete retard not to get them working.

• Windows for mobile phones
  
• Windows for palm top PCs/PDAs
  
• Windows for tablet PCs
  
• Windows for handheld media players
  
• Windows for home theatre PCs
  

Has anyone tried setting up a harddrive based MP3-player without a PC?
It should be possible to use one of the USB harddrive-to-WiFi proxies out there, like this one: Linksys NSLU2 together with one of the MP3 players that plays from the network, like Creatives: Wireless Player (although that one requires a server running some software).
Then you'd have USB harddrive -> WiFi Proxy -> Mp3 player without the hassle, power consumption, noise and ugliness of a PC.

I'm holding out for the new Zen Micro that Creative will release soon. Same features as the Virgin player, but a better interface.

Regarding movie playback, I hope that they allow for portable storage attachments, allowing use of the PSP as a portable media center. I'd buy one if it did this.

Chris

I know, I'll start a new company called "Creative," because I just made that word up!

Sound Blaster Audigy 2NX
Echo Indigo

I have a humble Sound Blaster MP3+ (USB sound card) hooked up to a somewhat high-end stereo system (B&W Matrix 805 speakers, Meridian 501 preamp and 556 amp) and it actually sounds pretty great. That's a $40 sound card that can hang with a $4500 stereo!

Sound Blaster Audigy 2NX
Echo Indigo

I have a humble Sound Blaster MP3+ (USB sound card) hooked up to a somewhat high-end stereo system (B&W Matrix 805 speakers, Meridian 501 preamp and 556 amp) and it actually sounds pretty great. That's a $40 sound card that can hang with a $4500 stereo!

Quoth the FAQ:
These devices will play video, music and photos that are transferred from a PC running Windows XP. The devices will playback Windows Media® Video (.wmv), Windows Media Audio (.wma), MP3 and display JPG images. The device is also compatible with other file types including MPEG, MPEG2, DVR-MS, ASF, WAV and MIDI.

So we can stick to MPEG for no DRM.

Creative's mouse looks about the same and comes with a red AND blue LED w00t!

Mine cost me $9.95.

winamp, ogg vorbis and Creative have all helped, along with whoever coded the synths that Deep Dish use.