Day One...
I ordered
the player late on Sunday from Buy.com, and it
arrived today around 11am. I unpacked the box and got it charging. I had to run some
errands, so I left it alone. Of course, one of the errands that I needed to run was
going to Fry's and picking up a USB 2.0 controller
and hub so that I could use the full bandwidth of the device (transfer rates on my
old Rio Riot where abysmal through USB 1.1).
Upon returning I installed the USB 2.0 controller (Adaptec 4 port for $29.99 after
rebate, and a Micro Plus 4 port hub for $24.99), got the machine back up and running,
and jacked the Zen in.
The "Creative MediaSource Organizer" appears to be relatively acceptable. Again I
found myself annoyed that yet another audio device required yet another desktop software
program that created yet another database of the music I have on my machine (oh, WinFS,
please save me in the future!). Songs copied down to the device rather quickly (looks
like it will take about 60 minutes to transfer my current 14GB collection). A big
plus about the software - it supports a "sync" mode that will update only the new
songs onto the device (a feature the Rio lacked). A (maybe) big minus - it seems that
songs with duplicate names aren't allowed... but I need to research this one more.
Using the device as a portable hard drive seems a little out of the question, as you
have to have the custom software installed on both ends.
The playback on the device seemed great, and so far I haven't experienced the re-indexing
bug that Jeff had (basically the player would take 15 minutes to cold boot due to
reindexing the entire drive).
The form factor of the device is nice. I like the removable battery, although I'd
like it more if I could find out where to buy a spare (I haven't looked that hard
<G>). The case for the player that comes with it basically sucks (too big, too
stiff, etc.). The headphones seem adequate.
The New York trip will be the real test of the player, so I'll writeup more when we
return. So far the player gets an B+...