Slashdot Mirror
Creative Zen Micro Ships Today
SpaFF writes "Today Amazon started shipping the shipping the Zen Micro, Creative's answer to the Ipod-mini and one of several touted 'ipod-killers' due out for the holiday season. Sporting 5GB of space, a form-factor similar to the Ipod-mini, built-in FM radio, and a REMOVABLE battery, the Zen Micro looks quite promising. Does anyone know if this thing will work with Linux?"
...at PCMag
Yes I know it's not the same product. :)
I do want to report that my Nomad Zen Xtra Jukebox works great with Linux if you use the the gnomad2 program.
Gnomad might work just as well with this product.
Whoops, forgot to mention this in my earlier post "Linux Support Confirmed". The device does support OGG and according to the docs, the KDE based utility that ships with it will do mp3 to OGG conversion when you copy to the device.
From your own link:
Any more questions?
They have all the older versions of the Creative software, back to Playcenter 2.x, drivers, and lots of other goodies.
And FWIW, I would suspect the new player will work with Gnomad, the free Nomad software for Linux.
Unless you were just wanting to rant on Creative for a while...
No sig, sorry.
Because you can't (legally) rip to MP3 with Free software?
Is there a Fraunhoffer blessed Open Source implementation of MP3 ripping?
From the article: and from the footnote:
Please mod the parent down, it's a troll.
I recently got a Creative Zen Touch (a present from my company; if I had to choose it'd be an iPod), and I've already spent an unsuccesfull day getting it to work under linux. There is no way that you would mount this device, since it is NOT an USB mass storage device but uses proprietary Creative protocols.
There is one open-source project (Gnomad2) that claims to do the job, but I haven't been able to get that working. If I had the C skills and the time, I would try writing a LUFS plugin. For now, I'm pondering buying an USB2 card, because gnomad2 refuses to work with usb1.1 it seems.
--
If code was hard to write, it should be hard to read
You should ask the slashdot crew for anyone that has this CD to send you a copy of it. It's not like you're the only person who bought the product, and there is this whole great super communication thing called the internet ;) ... You'll get that nomad back running in no time...
o ad2.asp?Product_ID=239&dlcentric=8069&Product_Name =JukeBox+2&OSName=Windows+XP
Also... Creative does offer downloadable applications. "Creative NOMAD Explorer (Version 3.01.10) (11.22 MB)"... http://www.nomadworld.com/downloads/drivers/downl
Not what you need?
Seamless integration?
Have a look here at the compatible music stores. It is drag and drop comptible with Windows Explorer and is Microsoft "Plays For Sure" compatible.
Well, in the English language we refer to that as a 'footnote':
Not only does it play music, the ZEN MICRO helps you keep your life organized too. The mini-organizer consists of a calendar, an address book and a to-do-list*4.
*4 Requires Microsoft Outlook.
And for everyone who still deals with space in terms of number of files (i.e. holds 1000 images! 2500 mp3s! whatever..), try doing the math instead to see what they are getting at, or you can just read the footnote:
*1 2500 songs at 64kbps WMA. 1250 songs at 128kbps MP3. 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes. Available capacity will be less. Reported capacity will vary.
And the rest of the footnotes, just for the hell of it:
*2 Actual battery life will vary with use.
*3 Additional Li-ion battery sold separately.
I have a Zen Xtra, so I assume that they work about the same. You have to use their software, but if you have some mp3s with id2/3 tags just drag them to the device and that's it. You don't have to move your library anywhere.
Why is everyone so excited about OGG? Just because it's free?
It's better in practice than MP3. But, yes, the main reason is because it's free. With something like MP3, you end up not being in control of content you paid for.
Convert the OGG to MP3 or to some other format that the player uses.
Both Ogg and MP3 are lossy formats; every time you convert, the quality goes down audibly.
and be done with it
No, it is companies that should just implement Ogg "and be done with it". It doesn't cost them anything to license, it works well, and they even get an integer codec for embdded systems.
I just can't believe that because the player is missing a basically unused format (for the non-geeks) that it is somehow "bad".
Well, you better believe it. If a player is Ogg-based, it also means that non-geeks get bette choices for converting their audio collections.
The early adopters had two ways to fill up their iPods:
p2p networks
CD collections
If you had 100 CDs, and 14 tracks a CD, and 1mb per minute, and about 3 minutes per song, so 3mb per track, or 42mb per CD, they would have roughly 4200mb of music.
That also translates to at $12 per CD, $1,200 of music. Not so far off from your iPod mini calculation.
If they bought all their CDs brand new at $19 a cd, that's $1,900 of music.
If they had 200 CDs...
Or compilations...
See, iPods are dirt cheap compared to music. Some people, they have hundreds of gbs of legit music. Imagine someone who bought 5 CDs a month for 10 years; that's 60 CDs a year, or 600 CDs in 10 years. If 100CDs is 4gb, then 600 CDs is 24gb easily. And if you bought more than 5CDs a year... well, the cost of an MP3 player doesn't really amount to much at all.
GPL Deconstructed
I wondered that too, and went with the iAudio M3 instead. It's usable as a removable USB storage device (no drivers needed for Win/Lin/Mac), comes with MP3, WMA, Ogg and FLAC support. Oh, and 40GB in a slim pack that looks better than the iPod. Works like a charm for me.
L-ViS
Need a Wiki? Check out DokuWiki
Okay, I promise this will be my last reply. I now have an iRiver iFP 790T and it's pretty much what I want. It doesn't have UMS firmware, but the iFP Linux driver works fine (it's not really just for Linux, it works on several platforms, including OpenBSD, which is what I'm using.
demi