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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?"
More importantly, does it work with OggVorbis? Apparently not. :-(
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
you forgot the most important part, at least to quasi-musicians like myself who are looking for an easy way to record band practices without having to set up my laptop- line-in recording! unlike the ipod's intentionally crippled recording features, the zen micro looks like it will record to any bitrate of mp3. i know people who are still buying minidisc recorders for this purpose at well over $200 / pop-- with the zen micro 512MB costing around $120 (last I checked) I am SERIOUSLY tempted to pick one up even though I already own a 40GB ipod!
iPod Mini killer. Minis have 4Gig, this has 5Gig.
I have an original iPod, the 5Gig model. At the time, it was sold as 1000 songs in your pocket. I can't help noticing that this same device is advertising 2,500 songs. So, err...bit rate? I think they're claiming a little too much for themselves.
To be fair, at 128kbps MP3 VBR I got more than 1k tracks on mine. But the 1k is realistic if you use 192 MP3 or AAC at 160.
The Zen thing looks ugly, but it does have an FM radio. I do wish Apple would do that instead of mucking about with photos. It's an audio device first - please concentrate on the audio.
Cheers,
Ian
REMOVABLE, rechargable battery.
It'd be cool to have two batteries on a long bike trip and just be able to pop in a fresh one when the first one died.
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To put my comment into perspective.
The current age of portable music devices and Apple's position at the moment resembles the early Windows age and PCs.
Apple had the best goods and they got stomped in the end. They got stomped because the other guys were available in more configurations, better pricing, and had greater overall compatibilities.
I use an iPod and I have spent a good share of money on iTMS but to discount new players because they cannot use iTMS isn't fair let alone brite.
What keeps me using my iPod is the fact it is very easy to use as a hard drive (3rd gen here). Now comes a player with features many of the iPod owners have been asking for and what do people do? Dis it for not being an iPod.
Well damn, I would have much prefered a swappable battery or FM over the ability to show pictures. If I want to view my pictures on a teeny tiny screen I would leave them on the camera.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Anyone else find it slightly ironic that the claimed number of songs that 5GB of storage can hold is growing? For instance, the Zen Micro claims to hold 2,500 songs on its drive. However, wasn't the original 5 gig iPod advertised as being able to hold "1000 songs in your pocket"? Is 5 gigs of capacity growing, or are our standards for music quality shrinking?
I purchased a Nomad Jukebox back in the day (6GB), the Nomad requried a proprietary software to copy songs to the device. I lost the CD with the software on it, Creative does not offer a downloadable version of the software on their website. Contacting customer support does not help either as they will not send you the software.
I now have a $300 paperweight. Maybe their practices have changed, but the experience has burned me badly. I will never purchase Creative again. I highly suggest to anyone considering their new product (or any product of theirs for that matter) that you make sure you can get into the device without proprietary software before making a purchase.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
1) I know this is Slashdot, but if you've ever been to a gym where they have TVs in front of the cardio machines, they broadcast the sound on low powered FM transmitters. FM is something that is quite useful to us geeks that work out.
2) A removable battery is great for travelling when you don't always have easy access to electricity. Just pop out one battery and put another one in. This feature alone has kept me from buying an iPod.
3) That's true so far.
Why would you pay $250 for this? I paid $230 for my Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Extra, which has 6 times the storage space.
The seamless intergration between reasonable prices and DMR and synching with the iPod is hard to beat.
iPod owners must be very wealthy. From the iTunes store it would cost on order of $1,000 to fill up an iPod mini, $5,000 and $10,000 for the iPod 20 and 40 giggers respectively.
You don't really need an SDK to convert an iTunes library. The folder structure is pretty simple -- iTunes Music > Artist > Album > music files. Better yet, the whole database is available in XML. iTunes keeps its own binary format too, but in the iTunes music folder you can parse iTunes Music Library.xml to your heart's content. It contains all the metadata, including the file location as a file:// url.
So there is really nothing stopping anyone from writing a simple conversion tool.
If you're like me, you've purchased over 100 of them, despite the fact that they cost >$10 each. I didn't buy them all at once, but if you look at the aggregate cost, it is pretty staggering.
Anyway, we have a 5G iPod from the first batch Apple released, and it's mostly full of dharma teachings, with a few albums, most of which I ripped from my CD collection. So it's actually pretty easy to fill these things up. I don't know how many people are using them to store Dharma teachings, but I can say that in my Dharma group there are a *ton* of iPods, despite the fact that most of us aren't exactly rolling in it.
I checked the FAQ's they had at Creative, and one of the questions was: Can I jog with my Nomad?, and the answer was: No, but you can take long leisurely walks with it.....
So I got an iPod instead, and except for Job's habit of keeping everything a secret: like the DRM (which Real reversed-engineered - thank god for sleazy companies...), I'm pretty happy with it.
I know this is going up against the mini-pod, but if this thing is as FRAGILE as the older disk based nomads, i'd stay away... Besides, you can get a a set of headphones with a built-in fm radio for like a buck -http://www.wholesaledirectonline.com/ec215.html uhoh- this poor guys gonna get /.ed now...
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
I have bought their earlier mp3 players, speakers and other products. All of these products had one thing in common. They were of extremely poor quality. The batteries on my 6GB Nomad Jukebox lasted what seemed like 20 minutes. When you were playing music scrolling around the menus became painfully slow. Their speakers make hissy noises when powered and not connected to anything. Their software is clunky at best. I am never ever buying another Creative product.
The problem that rivals are having is that whilst they can easily make a product that is technically superior, they can't make a product that is asthetically superior.
All the "iPod killers" i've seen look cheap, nasty and feel it too. Maybe if they stopped concentrating on bundling niche features and geting their price as low as possible and looked to using quality materials and a good design then people will buy it. Apple has clearly shown that people are prepared to pay more for something that looks it.
Finally, Sony got it almost right. Their HD based MP3 players look asthetically very good. It's a pity they then threw that all away by not making it support MP3 and only having 20 gig.
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...since my Nomad IIc died, and I discovered that it only came with a 3 month warantee, and it had only been (lightly) used for under a year. I might try another cheapo brand, but that's it for Creative in my book. You'd hope that a solid state device might last a bit longer than a cassette walkman, but I still have a late 80's boodoo kahn that's going strong. I'd like an iPod, but I really can't justify the price.
For everyone who is into Ogg and wants it to be included in a MP3 player I just want to ask a few questions.
Ogg is under continuous development where they go on a quality system and as they compress better and better the files of the same quality get smaller.
If this is true then if a player supported Ogg format would it need an upgrade to play an Ogg file created 2 years from now?
I'm just curious if this is true since I'm looking to rip my CDs but I'm not sure what to rip them to.