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?"

Comments

OggVorbis Support?

[dfn5]

Does anyone know if this thing will work with Linux?

More importantly, does it work with OggVorbis? Apparently not. :-(

Re:OggVorbis Support?

[diakka]

Convert the OGG to MP3 or to some other format that the player uses and be done with it. 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, belive it. I personally encode all my CDs as ogg or flac and so support for ogg format is the first thing I check for when I look at these types of products. If a company doesn't support ogg, then they're writing off me and others like me who aren't willing to compromise. It doesn't really matter if you understand why all us crazy geeks like ogg, but if you're a company making portable music devices and want our business, you damn well better know that we do in fact want it.

recording!

[redherring22]

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!

Re:iPod killer?

[mccalli]

So it's an iPod killer with, at most, one-third the storage space.

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

One thing it has that I wish my iPod did:

[blueZ3]

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.

5GB growing?

[dotslashconfig]

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'll never buy Creative again

[bigtangringo]

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.

Re:One of the reasons

[hackstraw]

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.

How many CDs do you have?

[mellon]

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.

No thanks....

[Monf]

I bought a Nomad Jukebox Zen NX 20 GB Digital Audio Player last Xmas, and the hard drive in it crashed while my kid was flying back to his mom's.

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...

Re:iTMS isn't going to save Apple in the long run

[Anonym1ty]

You don't think Apple would let this amazing situation they've worked so hard to create slip through their fingers do you?

Apple only has to flip the switch and open Music Store up to other players, formats and DRM, and the game goes on.

But that's just it... that's all Apple has to do. But this is Apple you are talking about. And that's just it. I don't wanna get all about the Apple zealots, but this just comes down to it.... Do you think Apple is gunna just flip the switch, or will this be another case of "We're Apple and we're better than you!" syndrome?