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Why even bother comparing a portable video player to the iPod? Oranges and Apples really.

In reality there is nothing special about the PMC OS. The Creative Zen PMC Player looks like a cheap version of the upcoming Sony PSP.

Either way you can't really call the Creative player portable ... its as thick as a brick.

I think he means devices which are not under the brand name Creative (a la Creative SoundBlaster, Zen Touch)

see Creative for an expansive list

Here's a picture of my webcam.

When I'm not using it, I just bend the part with the lens down so it points at my desk. If someone *really* wants to look at my desk, they can go right ahead.

ND

The suggestion was to have the game deliberately sandbag the performance if it detected a card made by Creative. I assumed the original poster meant sound cards not knowing CL makes video cards (I only found one on their site, doesn't look very impressive), so I guess I misunderstood completely. I guess it pays to RTEA.
(entire)

btw, is your nick a q3 reference? I have to confess I still play it.

Pointing to Creative's Nomad line as iPod knockoffs is far from accurate.

Whatever you think of the quality of either iPod or Creative's Zen Touch, it's hard to debate that the Zen Touch is a "cheaper knockoff" of the iPod. It's obviously cheaper (i.e. less expensive) and a look at it's picture shows clearly that it's a knockoff, (i.e a copy of something popular). The UI as depicted looks quite like that of the iPod, and the form is about the same. Really, the only thing it appears to be missing is Apple's scroll wheel interface, and Apple probably has a patent on that.

So if you prefer the phrase "uncostly imitation" to "cheaper knockoff," that's fine with me.

But heck, the Zen can't even play AAC files! You can't use it with the world's most popular online music store! And it's not even all that much less expensive. I think I'll stick with "cheaper knockoff," thanks.

They're slowly catching up with the Creative Zen then.

This entire article should be modded -1, redundant. Several Portable Media Center devices were shown months ago, e.g. Creative and Samsung.

I guarantee you that a small MD player with a disc in it is MUCH smaller than any HD-based player (at the moment).

*cough*MuVo2*cough*

sorry, did you say something?

Have you seen the Creative Labs Zen Touch? It looks so similar to the iPod and also has a touch-sensitive scrolling interface navigation method. Even the screen looks nearly identical. It seems Creative Labs has done just what you said.

Or,
"You mean I have to trade in my Creative Zen Xtra 60gb and pay so much more for a basically equivilant device?" (pros and cons exist for both, but, I'd say low cost is a major pro-side)

Hehe.. Actually, I did just get one for a b-day present. They are good overall, I'd rate it as about a 8/10 or so, only because of a few firmware quirks that could be nicer, and the case is designed poorly. (I.e. no window, and strap covers the port you need to charge it.)

But, for far less $ than the Trendy(TM) equivilant, you can have a device which performs the same if not better, has a user-replacable battery, and looks sexy to boot.

Link to the Zen Xtra

Sure I'm arguing the patent is stupid - the rest is irrelevant ;) Go to creative driver downloads and take a look at how that (3 pane) page is organised. Go to ATI driver downloads and see the same (3 pane) thing. See Windows Explorer folder view (2 pane) and old MUI stuff on the Amiga (x pane) for other examples. Are they all ripping off the iTunes interface (doubtful as two came before iTunes) or are they merely employing a rather obvious method of UI design?

Creative has also released official drivers as well here. Unfortunately, the damn trolls will get modded up, but our comments wont.

How your tiny brain couldn't find this Windows 2000 Soundblaster Audigy Platinum on the Creatives site?

It's roughly the same size as the iPod accounting for difference in hard drive sizes.

iPod: 2.4" x 4.1" x 0.62"

Zen Xtra: 3" x 4.4" x 0.86"

That's an increase of 25% x 7.3% x 38.7%, or 86.1% in volume. That's almost twice the volume, far more than you think.

And that percentual increase in volume is huge: the white iPod is only 69.5% bigger than the iPod Mini (2" x 3.6" x 0.5"), and clearly the Mini has been such a success due to it's size (not so much for it's colors).

Since Creative Labs don't make and open source drivers for Linux, the audio area is lacking. I have to use drivers from http://opensource.creative.com for basic sound. I would like to have EAX for games to get those sound effects like reverbs, directional sound for 4.1 speakers setup, etc.

> I always [hated] it when I couldn't read my...

Actually, the 2.0 firmware used a battery indicator that consisted of the familiar battery outline with three bars inside it. As the battery became depleted, the bars would change from black to gray. I hated that, because it took a lot of effort to discern that. The 2.1 firmware changed it to a more granular sliding scale inside the outline, where each column of pixels changes from black to white as the battery depletes. Much better, in my opinion.

> Night blindness!...White display at night? How much of a worse idea can you get?

Actually, it's not a problem for me at all; it looks fine day or night. I've never had the slightest problem, and you can bet I'd complain as bad as my eyes are, if there was a problem. Have you ever even used an iPod? Okay then. Moving on.

> And I'd go for the lighter product. Which isn't the iPod.

iPod weight (40GB model): 6.2 oz (176 g)

Zen weight (30GB model): 7.9 oz with battery; 7.2 oz without battery

You're right, if by "lighter" you mean "27% heavier."
I like how they list the weight without the battery, too, as in "I'm going to travel light this time. I'll just take the Zen without its battery."

They don't actually have to make more profit to make the prospect attractive - they just have to make around the same profit and produce fewer minis.

Then again, I could be completely wrong. I'm open to that concept as well. :)

But isn't Dolby Pro Logic IIx for creating natural surround from stereo for music/movies while EAX allows game developers to create surround sound reflections for 3d enviroments?

And Creative has breakout boxes, multiple inputs, surround emulation software, accelerated audio, EAX# and A3D compatible, support for most games, etc. (And DRM)

I don't see this killing off creative, but will hurt its marketshare from non-gamers.

On the flip side, Creative labs have been quite stale, only minor updates to its Audio card line. They have been adding many other products, they even have mini-pc's, gfx, burners, mice, keyboards, etc..
-
Secondlife

iRiver's 512 meg solid state device, is probably about 1.95 cubic inches (I halved the volume of the rectangular prism, 3.9 cubic inches, formed by the dimensions, since it's closer to a triangular prism), or 68% smaller than the iPod.

The Rio Nitrus which is probably closest in terms of capacity, is 4.32 cubic inches, or 29% smaller than the iPod.

Surprisingly, the Rio Chiba, they're flash based 256 meg product is larger at 5.18 cubic inches, or only 15% smaller than an iPod.

Creative's got a player that's pretty comprable at 4 gigs but it's $300 and 5.4 cubic inches, or only 11% smaller than the iPod.

I could go on and on, but the point is that you're not going to get much smaller than the iPod mini for the capacity, nor the pricepoint . . . whether the extra $50 for 11 gigs is worth it is going to depend upon how you use it. Like I said earlier, for me docking and changing my playlists wouldn't be a big deal, and with 4 gigs, I imagine this wouldn't be necessary more than weekly (even at 256 kB/s, you'd have over 4 days of music). So for me, what someone else may consider a marginally smaller size, is something that I'd be much more likely to use, rather than leave on my desk because it doesn't fit in my pocket well.

As others have said, it's a matter of what you value (physical size vs. capacity), but the mini would meet my usage patterns much better than a standard iPod (which I feel is too big to add to my pockets)

Notice that the copy even suggests why you would want replaceable batteries as a standard feature - road trips. Also notice that they aren't dinging you for $100, plus shipping, to replace a battery.

Don't be surprised when Apple finally caves and makes iPod batteries easily replaceable. They'll claim it's a great new feature.

i didn't think so either.
Yep, I agree. You didn't think.

If apple is guilty of anything it's making the battery not easy to replace. You know, when you buy the thing there's no easy battery door, and you know batteries don't last forever.

Amusingly, compare and contrast with the Nomad Zen NX. The entire front fascia comes off, and there's a battery compartment in there.

Replacement Batteries? - $49.99.

Yet again, Creative come up with a wonderful product that works great. About the only thing the iPod has on it is the rotary controller on the front of the thing. (Creative, in their favor, have price, functionality, and the rather cool rugged case that comes with it).

Is this a bad time to mention that the Nomad Zen has a battery that you can replace without having take a hot scalpel to the case?

It also doesn't have the distinctive "mug me" white headphone cord, plus the slight advantage of having twice as much hard disk as an iPod for 2/3 the cost. (or optionally 3 times the disk space for equal cost)

I think they still lie about the disk size though. Does anyone have a comparaison chart of which MP3-player manufacturers redefine the GB to their own convenience, and which use the correct value?

I think that programming requires a lot of expertise. I'd like to find someone else to do some programming for me, but I find that there are too many decisions that affect the quality of the product each hour that I program. I have not been able to find someone else capable and interested in making those decisions.

In my whole life, I haven't seen even one perfectly designed program. I haven't seen even one perfectly designed web site. For example, I was just looking at the Creative Labs web site. There is no large photo available of the products! Creative Labs says, "With over 200 million sound cards sold, Sound Blaster is the world's most trusted PC audio brand." (Under the heading "UPGRADE to Superior Stereo Audio Quality".) After all that business experience, Creative Labs doesn't even provide useable photos of their products.

What will be the result of the work of bored Indian programmers, who are bored because they have to follow some poorly developed specifications, and have no control over the design of the program, and no way to talk to the customer? Eventually the code will be a tangled mess, and will be thrown away.

In the 70s, hiring PhDs was very popular. Then companies found the drawbacks. PhDs were not willing to do the tedious work that exists in every project. Hiring offshore programmers is popular now, but I think companies will slowly begin to realize that good programming requires a high proportion of extensive thought.

or $249 for the Sound Blaster Wireless Music which is a similar "wireless DAC," but the display is on the remote.

I really wish Slim had moved in this direction because I'd much rather use their open source server than Creative's Mediasource.

I don't see well enough and rooms in my house are big enough that I won't be able to read a Squeezebox across a room, but I don't want a TV-output option (CRT warm up time, power consumption, size, home theater video routing nightmare, etc.)

The reason other manufacturers of HD based players don't get it is because they think they can compete and win on price and features. Which is true, they can do pretty well - but in their desire to push the price down lower than an iPod they end up using cheaper materials which means that what they end up with:

1. Looks cheap and nasty
2. Feels cheap and nasty

For many people, if you're going to pony up several hunded quid for a HD based MP3 player - it better not look like something made by Fischer Price.

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel, Toshiba might come up with the goods (and also Panasonic, but I can't find the product I was thinking of) ...

I'm not so sure there's support for the Archos, but there's some interesting information out there if you look around...

Does the Nomad II MG support the MAC operating system?

Keywords
support, operating, system, mac, iTones

Applies to Nomad II MG

Our Advice
Yes, the Nomad II MG has been designed to support the MAC platform.

Click here to download the latest MAC drivers.

The Creative Nomad II, IIc, and MG has only limited supported on the Macintosh OS X. Creative Labs currently only support the usage of the Nomad players whereas iTunes supports the connectivity to the Macintosh. Please make sure that you have the most up to date version of iTunes. You can find the most up to date version of iTunes at http://www.apple.com/itunes.

Once iTunes is installed and the Nomad connected, there should be an icon of the Nomad player displayed in the source section of the iTunes software. Simply drag and drop files onto the icon to transfer music.

As a general tip, make sure that you have the Nomad player plugged directly into the computer and not through a peripheral USB port like the ones on the iMac's keyboard.

If you're still not able to see an icon of the Nomad player, please contact iTunes support at http://www.info.apple.com/usen/itunes for further assistance.

Bloody hell, it's different alright. It looks different, it has a remote control doovy with a screen on the headphone band, it has a different UI... IT'S DIFFERENT!
Apple didn't create everything for god's sake, there were hard-drive based MP3 players around before the iPod...
let me refresh your memory

No direct experience, but a quick search came up with Creative's official open source site as well as (from that page) an extigy driver

Too bad Creative killed off Aureal.

I've compared the 3D-sound of an SBLive! and an Aureal Vortex, barring CPU cycle-chomping, Aureal's solution wins hands down because it mimics reality. (uses a method similar to raytracing to bounce sound off walls realistically).

I can track oponents simply by ear on Unreal Tournament.

I haven't tried the SB Audigy though.

Dang Creative... now there aren't decent drivers for Diamond MX300's on Win2k/XP...

I checked and for WAV recoding the sample rates are 11.025KHz, 22.05KHz, 44.1KHz, and 48.0KHz. For recording as MP3, the bit rates range from 64Kbps to 320Kbps. It also has an adjustable gain setting(+/- 12db). The product page for it is here

The new MuVo NX also has a backlit LCD screen.

This is very suspicious. Unless there is an RMA agreement between Creative and Avant-Tech, opening the case by anyone will void the warranty. Period. The site says: Items are also warranted ... for 1 year by Creative ... items outside our 90-day guarantee should be sent to Creative for service.
Creative Zens only have a 3-month warranty. Creative's own customers don't even get a one-year warranty!

Strangely enough, I have run windows and Soundblaster cards since either have been available, and have never had a problem with the drivers...

SB16 on Win 3.1x & Win9x
SB Live on Win9x/2k/XP
SB Audigy2 on Win2k/XP

I'm not sure why Creative has been getting so much bad press about their drivers... What problems have people been experiencing?

Unfortunately, I have been having a few problems getting the Audigy2 working in BeOS or Linux, heh :) (before someone points me to the link for the audigy drivers, the problem is I don't have internet at home)

They did.

Beware, though, that Creative doesn't open-source drivers for all of their products. I bought their very inexpensive Webcam, for instance. I was only able to find this independently produced driver, which I haven't been able to get working.

The drivers (alsa, OSS, or Creative's own) for the Audigy don't support EAX processing or easy configuration of surround output.

Your Name is SatanicPuppy, and you're an idiot.

Jon.

Not only do they create drivers for their chips (SBLive! and Audigy series, OpenAL), they release the code as Open Source. The driver sin the Linux kernel came from Creative, not some 3rd party. Another reason to support Creative (as if having the best stuff wasn't enough of a reason)

http://opensource.creative.com

Creative are actually pretty good about supporting their soundcards under Linux (http://opensource.creative.com/) with their EMU10K1 project. I have an Audigy running in Mandrake 9.0 and it sounds pretty good (not much difference to an Audigy Platinum EX I've got running in a Windoze PC - both run through a decent amp and good speakers). All it takes is a bit of compilation (of the driver) and a change to /etc/modules.conf. I even use an Audigy in a custom "suitcase PC" running Mandrake to do the occasional disco (line up a few tracks and head for the bar :-). It has been frustrating though that it's taken *sooo* long just to get to this point though...

Uhh...you realize that you just described a DVD decoder card, right? They've been around for at least 5 years. try Creative's DxR3 or Sigma Designs' Hollywood cards.

It's a great card, but I've had it for months already - and it wasn't just released when I bought it either.

A couple of linux notes:

* support was added in early January in the opensource driver
* the newest beta of Red Hat Linux supports the card out of the box.

I would like to see EAX support in Linux. I know Creative Labs has an opensource project, but I don't think their emu10k1 driver has EAX support. I don't think any of the Linux native games support it, even Unreal Tournament 2003. :(

I'd say that $199 is overpriced for a CD-MP3 player. I'd rather just fork out the extra $100 and get a nice 5 gig iPod, complete with near-instantaneous (esp. compared to CD burning) file transfer and complete integration with my music software. That, or there are plenty of other jukeboxes available right in your price range.

You can go with the basic drivers that ship with the OS, but in my experience they're rather subpar compared with the Creative ones. Output capabilities really do change, especially if you're using EAX or 5.1. Assuming your machine is fine, etc. you should be able to download the latest and greatest from here depending on whether you have the Live! or the Live! basic and have everything work OK. If anything, make sure you DO NOT install the OS drivers over the OEM ones - the other way around should work (if you already did).

[Hey... instead of 'Ask Slashdot', now it's just 'Ask a Slashdot user' :)]

*grin*. You know, if you ever need more help, head out to news://msnews.microsoft.com/, subscribe to the OS-specific newsgroups and ask around. Look for the MVP folks in there. You won't be disappointed.

This little thing is what I use to merge A/V with my computer. Of course, I have a 24 inch monitor, so I don't suffer from having to play ps2 and vhs movies on a tiny little awful computer screen.

As for tivo capabilities, I don't know if there are open source drivers/software for it, but this little thing seems to be all you would need.

Audio Stream Recorder 2, bundled with the Creative Audigy 2 allows you to record any WMP or Real audio stream, plus it gives free access to iM Networks radio stations. As a Windows app, it's a far cry from a stand-alone solution, but I find it immensely useful for the automated recording of streams that cannot be conveniently saved locally.

First lets clear up the specs of the Nomad IIc mp3 player (sorry, sign says "No oggs allowed"). The II designates this as the Creative's second effort to sucker users into paying good money for a player with some problems. The c means that you're not get the fm radio tuner present on the normal model II (don't worry, commercial radio is ass anyway). The IIc comes with an internal memory capacity of either 32, 64, or 128mb. Every model is also blessed/cursed to have a smartmedia expansion slot on the rear of the unit, tucked up under the battery cover. The unit has one Line Out/Headphone jack a built in microphone and a USB connector. Various buttons are also present for tinkering with things like volume, voice recording, and accessing the internal memory. The LCD is mercifully backlit with a delay that can be adjusted in the internal settings menu.

One of the biggest shortcomings of the unit is the lack of file organisation. Files are present in one long list with no "search" or "jump" function. To go from song 5 to song 15 takes 10 clicks of the "skip right" button. Only while your nomad is connected to your computer are you able to sort this list of unhappiness. So connecting a 10Gig hard drive would give you an amazing amount of storage and an RSI of your index finger.

The IIc does have updatable firmware (available from Creative)which dictates the maximum size of the smartmedia card that the unit can take. Unfortunately there are no firmware updates for the 128mb version but the 64mb updates seem to work ok.

Also, not to be forgotten, is the pox on the house of every Nomad user; Playcenter! This packaged in garbage software from Creative is the only way out of the box to store files on the your IIc to internal memory or smartmedia cards. The Nomad doesn't even show up as an external device in explorer. I've experienced repeated hangs/crashes when reading from 128mb smartmedia cards and long waits while it updates the database containing songs on my computer. Any respectable program should be able to handle a 6Gb+ mp3 collection without choking. The quick solution to this is Notmad Explorer (the free version only allows the transfer of 1 file at a time $15 US for the single player version $35 for all nomad support).

That's about it, so I present to you two major hurdles to overcome in hacking this little wonder:

1) Powering the unit and an external HD on the go. The battery cover must be off to access the smartmedia slot so you run the risk of that AA battery popping out at inopportune times. Perhaps you could power both through a 12v cigarette lighter outlet of a car.

2) Firmware. You'll have to become a master of rewriting the firmware or know someone who is to overcome the 128mb barrier, find some way to skip to a certain song, and allow folder organization for easy browsing.

Perhaps some potential for expansion lies in the USB connection on the side of the player.

Maybe instead of hacking away looking for a big storage fix, save your pennies and order a Zen from another country.

This hits particularly close to home for me -- I developed a Linux game for a class this semester, and one thing I had to throw out was 3d audio, because there's piss-poor 3d audio support on Linux. Don't get me wrong -- I love Linux, and chose not to work on Windows -- but I had to throw out a feature that would have been relatively easy to do with DirectX.

The entire state of Linux sound support is somewhere between "bad" and "pathetic". Let's take a look:

* Sound servers. Sound servers are essentially the currently accepted way to do sound mixing on the local host. They are, however, simply awful from a performance standpoint -- high latency, CPU overhead, and inability to take advantage of hardware mixing capabilities are pretty much showstoppers.

Esd is probably the best general-purpose Linux sound server. It has an ugly hack for "giving up" the sound device -- a simple time delay. It's very inefficient and blows CPU time, and adds latency. The quality of its resampling sucks. It has notoriously poorly written internals, and the author (and maintainer) has been out of the picture for years. The GNOME Project adopted esd, but has done very little work on it.

Artsd is, impressively, even worse than esd. It is *extremely* heavyweight in RAM and CPU usage. It's a pain to get it to give up the audio device. It's even slower, and as most distros I've seen don't nice it to a negative value, it's frequently the cause of audio breakups. One of the ugliest parts of KDE, and a very ugly wart to new Linux users.

The only legitimate reason to have sound servers is to do network-transparent sound. And while I frequently use network-transparent graphics, I and the vast majority of people simply do not care about network transparent sound (other than beeps, which X does nicely). You can't reasonably stream a decoded sound stream over the network with sane performance.

Sound servers should be *much* less common than they are now. They give Linux awful media performance, are confusing to new users, and have almost no utility to most users.

* OSS/Free

OSS/Free is, well, free. It's also fairly reliable and simple. That's about it. It has only supports common sound cards. It doesn't do cards that require NDA, supports essentially no advanced features (wavetable MIDI, hardware mixing, bass/treble/reverb/etc on the DSPs). It doesn't manage sound requests at *all* -- basically, if you've got the device, you've got it, and if you don't have the device, you don't have it. End of story. The vast majority of Linux installations are still using OSS/Free.

* OSS/Linux
Supports some less common sound cards, since it can use information released only under NDA. Costs money, so very very few people use it. Fixes some of the failures of OSS/Free (like a lack of hardware mixing), but the pricetag pretty much kills it as a general solution. If you're doing hardware mixing, but all the channels on the card are currently being used, this thing simply fails. There's no "software mixing" fallback that starts being used if all the existing hardware channels are being occupied.

* ALSA
This is The Future. It has good support for many modern features. *Still* does not support major features for which commercial documentation is available for -- no treble and no bass on my SB Live, for instance. More than a little complex to set up, though most distros have patched over the ugly installation process by giving you a GUI that autogenerates necessary files. Supports hardware mixing, but again has *no software fallback* (which the ALSA coders have specifically said they will not support). I can't have an 8 channel soundcard, play 8 sounds at once, and then have the next sound be mixed in hardware. Half of the software out there is written to the incompatible and obsolete version .5 API instead of the .9 API. This is the best bet if you're willing to do some work -- xmms actually now has an ALSA plugin that *works*.

* Linux kernel SB driver
If you have an SB-compatible soundcard, you can probably use this. It has somewhat less than convenient hardware mixing support -- the series of dsp devices, each of which can only have a single program attached, may be technically accurate, but is incredibly annoying to use -- you have to arrange your applications to share your DSPs (in my case, only two -- and I wanted to be able to play snes games, play mp3s, and still get ICQ sounds.

Creative Opensource drivers:
Not pre-installed, so essentially not acceptable for a newbie. Even though this is from Creative, incredibly enough, it does not do MIDI synth OR have bass/treble/reverb/etc support.

I've poked around with the sound system on my box for quite some time, and have worked with a number of sound cards -- at the moment I have multiple ones installed. I'm fairly disappointed with the piss-poor functionality that users can expect from their audio hardware under Linux.

Have you tried the official drivers at http://opensource.creative.com?
The FAQ has "Rear speaker support" listed as one of the features.

I have one of the older Live! cards that only supports 2 speakers, so I couldn't tell you how well the rear speaker stuff works.

Not so long ago a musician friend of mine recommended I try the Creative Inspire 5.1 5200, which is only $80 something. These little babies are fantastic...the bass is amazing, plus EAX is always sexy sounding.