Jukebox Zen

[Fischerbot]

What do you think about that? It will still can't hold all my mp3s.

the page is in german, sorry.
http://www.chip.de/news/c_news_10452852.html

question to everyone: what do you want with 300 houres music, when you have to recharche the batterie every hour?

[Doom9]

I own the original Jukebox Zen. I meant to write a detailed review one day but here's a short version:
MP3 capabilities: Why can't I create playlists with winamp and copy files to the Zen in Explorer?
Using the Zen as a HD: You have to install special drivers to access the drive. And on my XPC I have serious performance issues when transfering files... speed is ok on my other PC though.
I also miss a stop button.
And why can Mac users recharge the Ipod via Firewire cable but I have to use the USB cable when I don't have the power adaptor available?
Firmware update was a major pain in the ass when I installed the first new firmware... took me hours and I don't know how many reboots and switching cable attempts till it first worked. The 2nd update was flawlessly then.

Customer support is terrible, I gave them a really detailed description and by the time I got an automated reply I had already solved my initial driver problem (the drivers can't be installed if your system drive isn't c:). And no human being ever got back to my support request.

And you don't have to recharge the battery every hour.. but of course you'll never be able to listen to all MP3s before the battery runs out. But that's the case with all harddisk MP3 players.

Last bu

[auenf]

Originally posted by Fischerbot
What do you think about that? It will still can't hold all my mp3s.

im guessing your trying to say that your music collection wont fit onto a jukebox zen, but the hdd is easily upgradeable, and there is a 60GB version now.

you say you have 300hrs of music, i have a 20gb nomad jukebox 3, and it is half full with 120hrs of music, so you *should* be able to fit your 300hrs onto a 40 or 60gb Zen (i use 192kbps mainly, not the recommended 128kbps).

as for the battery time, you say 1 hr, but i thought the zen was supposed to last ~10hrs on a battery charge, the jukebox3 will last 11hrs on one battery, or 22hrs on two.

Enf...

[hakko504]

Originally posted by Doom9
MP3 capabilities: Why can't I create playlists with winamp and copy files to the Zen in Explorer?
Notmad explorer (http://www.redchairsoftware.com/notmad/support/history.php#6.8.0) will let you import winamp playlists into the jukebox.

I must say I bought the original Jukebox 1 and upgraded it to 30GB (mostly OTR) and it's been a pleasure using it, even though playback time on the first version was only 3~4h. But usually that's enough for me. After trying it once I would never recommend a non-HD based MP3 player.

[Doom9]

I have some more feedback. I think I've finally identified the problematic operations on my XPC. Moving files TO the Zen over Firewire is fast for the first couple of MBs then comes down to a crawl. Reading from the ZEN is as fast as it should be. On my 2nd computer both reading from and to are no problem. Today I tried to put an entire DVD-R project after encoding to my Zen to take it with me to the place where I live during the week. Unfortunately, the Zen software crapped out on my with an unexplainable error at some point. When I manually tried to copy the rest of the files (major pain in the ass btw.. you can't just skip files that are already there so you either have to copy a full directory or find out manually which files to copy with is rather hard because the zen software doesn't have the same sorting mechanisms as explorer) I got stopped by a "file too large" error. So there you have it.. the Zen is unusable as a portable harddisk. One day when I have some time I'll write a very bad review about that hardware.. I definitely wasted my money with it, having bought it as a portable HD with MP3 playback as a bonus.

[hakko504]

I tried once to use my Jukebox as portable HD, but also had some problems with it. Turned out that even though Creative claims it can be used in this way, files shuoldn't be larger than a 1/100th of the free space in order for it to work. The real problem is of course defragmentation. Files must be in one chunk so when the disk becomes fragmented, it can even be hard to transfer mp3's to the disk. Files should obviously not be deleted from the disk.

And if you haven't found it, nomadness.net (http://www.nomadness.net) is the major source for independant information on Creative's MP3 players.

[Doom9]

thanks for the links btw.. I'm gonna get a portable HD that really behaves just like a regular HD, so no drivers or custom apps.. that way I can format my drive using NTFS and take care of degragmenting and such.

[auenf]

Originally posted by Doom9
I have some more feedback. I think I've finally identified the problematic operations on my XPC. Moving files TO the Zen over Firewire is fast for the first couple of MBs then comes down to a crawl. Reading from the ZEN is as fast as it should be. On my 2nd computer both reading from and to are no problem.

if your talking about a nForce2 basec 1394, then its a known problem

disable the APU Dolby Digital Decoder, and it becomes fast again :)

last check was create and nvidia are trying to work out a better way around it.

http://nomadness.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=579

http://uk.europe.creative.com/support/forums/thread.asp?thre=30986

Enf...