Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra 60GB MP3PORTABLE Audio Player with Headphones

Rating:
Summary: Great Device, Poor Software, Horrific Documentation
Review: I researched this device carefully, reading all reviews, and finally purchased it because I absolutely require 60 GB storage. My mammoth CD collection, when I converted it to MP3 files, was over 40 GB--and I have about 10 GB of data files I'd like to back up from my computer.

The little Creative hard drive device is neat, works well, plays music beautifully. The backlight is quite good. The combination Jog Dial/Press Selector functions fine. I have not yet had the headphone jack fail, but I am aware that this problem may crop up. Battery life is not great, but that's not an issue. Data file storage is wonderful! No, this is not a "drive" visible to Windows for use; you can't write a document with your word processor, and specify the "Save As" file location to be your Zen Xtra. It doesn't work like that. One must use the software, included, and transfer files to the device. It works very well, once a person understands this.

The software you use to manage the device, on your personal computer, is another story. In short, there are two applications. First, there is the Nomad Explorer. It's okay. I used this, when I needed to delete all of the files on my Zen Xtra. Any user of Windows can handle this application, intuitively. The second computer program included, Creative MediaSource Organizer, is poor. It does not work as described--perfunctorily--by the Getting Started manual. The user is instructed to select buttons which at times are not present on the screen, and at others are present BUT NOT LABELED! My job, incidentally, is to work with software products, and I feel I can "get the hang of" just about any computer program written. Not so, with the Creative MediaSource Organizer. It's so terrible, so poorly laid out, so incomprehensible, I had to use another program to transfer my MP3 files, from my computer, to the Zen Xtra. Happily, MusicMatch software recognizes the Zen Xtra player, and its portable device manager feature was able to send the files to the waiting player. The software also gets poor marks for inability to perform custom operations. An example: With over 40 GB of music files, my computer's hard drive (the C: drive) is too small to house it all. So my MP3 files are on network-attached storage, another machine altogether. Well, the Creative MediaSource software assumes that your music -must- be on your C: drive, and it won't accept another lettered drive as the source of your music. Shabbily written, this may get better over iterations.

Unforgiveable, absolutely dreadful, is the documentation for both the Zen Xtra device, and the two above-mentioned software products. As the MediaSource Organizer is almost unusable without instructions, one turns expectantly to the documentation provided. What's provided is a Getting Started booklet, and the very same text in electronic form (a PDF file). It is insufficient to describe exactly what keys must be pressed, exactly which screens must be selected, to accomplish the various tasks even a casual user of the product will require. Since the documentation is so terribly incomplete, one turns to the last-available bit of information: The Help feature within the computer programs themselves. This, however, is awful; it appears to be a mere afterthought to the programs. Surprisingly, online help is even shorter and less descriptive than the Getting Started manual!

With all of this in mind: I am glad I bought this product. At its price point, The device is well worth the money. Problems with the software can be surmounted by using other music management programs. Would I recommend it to a person who is not completely familiar, totally at ease with computers? No way.


Rating:
Summary: An amazing player if you can live with the interface
Review: The Creative Nomad Zen Xtra MP3 Jukebox is actually an amazing MP3 player, if you can forgive its relatively large size (when compared to the iPod) and clunky user interface (again, when compared to the iPod). Not only does it have SUPERB sound quality, unmatched by iPod or Rio or iRiver, but it sports some features you won't find elsewhere:

- volume leveling, so all your tracks have the same volume
- time scaling, so you can adjust the playback speed fast or slow, a boon for people who have audiobooks in the MP3 format (the iPod can only adjust the speed of special Audible files)
- sleep timer
- alarm clock (!!!)
- profile settings that remember your preferences, great for sharing with other family members
- pretty decent playlist management
- works as an external drive in Windows

These features are all the more amazing because all recent Creative products (Zen Micro, Zen Touch, ...) do NOT have these features. It's sad to me that Creative has taken a step or two back in all these convenience features, which would have made their products compete better against iPod and others. Just sad.

In short, if size and jog dial don't turn you off, the Zen Xtra is the best hard drive-based MP3 player.

Rating:
Summary: Electronic Faults & fundamental Firmware Prob's - Don't Buy!
Review: I bought the 60 GB Zen Nomad, and had nothing but disappointments. I took it back to the store after two weeks. Don't get me wrong - I think a large capacity HDD music player is a very nice thing, and I loved the idea of it. Creative broke down in their execution of that idea for me in two main ways:

1.) Electronics - on my player, the headphone jack did not fail in the two weeks that I had it, but the USB connection was poor the very first time I plugged the unit into my computer. It would be 'found' then 'lost' by Windows with any movement whatever. Volume is inadequate for my taste as well.

2.) Firmware, and design problems.

Here I had a long laundry list of problems:
- The Software is abysmal for loading music onto the player. I practically leapt to buy the 'NOTMAD' software for $25 from REDCHAIR, which helped, but it crapped out too, before my player was even half full.
- The worst problem besides not being able to fill the drive was the way the player organizes files. It organized all the files by Artist, so when you drop an album on the player with songs by various artists, the album kind of disappears, and the artists are all added to the artist list. Now, instead of David Bowie and Dave Matthews, I had 23 artists named Dave or David to scroll through, in order to find an album. Very irritating.
The player also sorts the tracks alphabetically, so you apparently can't play an album in it's regular track order.

On top of this, I found the features to be pretty scant, I found the interface to be ungainly to use (adding one song to now playing takes 20 to 30 seconds).

I like the way the I-River player keeps the file and directory structure for every folder that you put on it. It doesn't require software to work. I have looked at the Dell player. It does use software to load music, and it appears to have some of the same issues as the Creative, but the User Interface is better.

Creative needs to get their act together. I would be pleased to hear that engineers were being fired for poor design work. This unit has all the physical charachteristics of a very good player, but it just does not live up to it's promise.

Rating:
Summary: Great player for the price and storage capacity.
Review: Well I've read alot of reviews and heard alot of whining. I decided to buy this anyways. I think people think that the portable MP3 world has been perfected, but it hasn't. This player has it's pros and cons.
First off, I-Pod costs a lot more. 4GB for $249, 20GB for $299 & 40GB for $340. Yes its smaller and lighter, but I wanted capacity and the 60GB Zen Extra has it. I have tons of CD's so I need the space.
If you have the money and need a player for jogging, then maybe this isn't what you want. If your at home, on vacation, on a plane or whatever, this is perfect. The sound is great. You may want to buy new headphones though. When you blast the headphones it came with everyone else can hear it.
The con that I have is the organizer it came with. Its easy to upload and super fast, but when you create a playlist you have to drag the songs to move them around. My songs are in order and they don't upload that way. You can't hit a tab to arrange the songs you have to drag it. Maybe I missed something. Oh well.
Navagating takes getting used to. Once you figure it out its fine.
It's not perfect like most people want it to be, but it does what I want it to do. If you want capacity and a great price, this is your device. If you want to be a conformist and do as everyone else, get an I-Pod.

Rating:
Summary: Zen Xtra - quality mp3 player
Review: First and foremost, the Zen Xtra is not a perfect item. I don't know why anyone would give it a five out of five.

I bought the Zen Xtra with the thought of storing all my music onto a single device, have room for the future, and save a few bucks. With the three options of Zens, I decided on the 60 gig version on the basis of 'go big, or don't go at all'.

The Player
The zen is a bit larger than the ipod in every direction, and heavier too. The button layout is mediocre compared to the iPod, but you can mainly get by using the scroll wheel, and the menu system is straight and to the point. There's a feature to 'play any track', which is a nice way to know what albums to delete from your zen because you'll never listen to them ^_^ , but more helpful in 'setting and forgetting' the zen. It also houses a replaceable battery, which is most certainly a plus. To replace an iPod battery, you have to pay apple 100 bucks for them to proboably swap your player out with a new one. You can buy Creative's zen battery here at Amazon for 30 dollars. The screen is nice and large, and the cool blue backlight makes the screen very clear in the dark. The power button (obviously) turns the zen on and off when held in, but just pressing it lets you enable the 'lock' function of the player, similar to the iPod's hold switch - though with the iPod, you just switch hold on and off, and with the Zen you press the power button, the screen asks if you want to 'lock the player' and you have to scroll to the check for 'yes'. There's a reset hole on the side if the player locks up, but I haven't yet encountered such a case.

Computer Interface
This is where things get tricky, but Before you do anything, be sure to install the latest drivers and firmware for the Zen from www.nomadworld.com . I found that when using Creative's 'Nomad explorer', as well as Windows Media player to transfer music from your computer to the zen, they mess with the music's information, such as labeling every track's track number on an album with '59' or other strange things like that. I'm too lazy to find a solution to this, so I looked elsewhere. Now you can just go out and buy the amazing, simple, jack-of-all-trades Zen helper program 'Notmad' for $25 [...] but If you're like me and you don't want to spend more money, I found that the best program to transfer music to the zen (and a good music player in general), is RealPlayer. If you pay ten dollars for the pro version, you can rip CDs in the WMA format at high quality (192 kbps), or if you don't want to spend a dime more than you paid for the zen, just use windows media player (remember to NOT copy-protect the music when ripped). RealPlayer transfers music to the zen a bit slower than Notmad, but it's fine. I transfered 168 albums over in little more than 2 hours. It uses a USB 2.0 cable by the way.

All in all, the Zen is a good option for a large capacity mp3 player, and a bargain too. It sounds great, and once you get your computer set up with RealPlayer to transfer music, it's a breeze. It's a little large (see my pictures in the customer shots section at the top of the page), not very feminine, and the user-interface is less than intuitive, but for the price being the same as the 20 gb. iPod for the 60 gb. Zen Xtra, it's definately a good deal. I'd highly reccomend it.

Rating:
Summary: MY NEW BEST FRIEND!!
Review: This 60MB unit is just the greatest!! I've had it for over 6 months and use it every day (heavy use) and it always delights me with its great sound and it's dependability. I've loaded mine with almost 12,000 songs and just love to hear all my favorite music played randomly. It's like the greatest radio station in the world except it sounds better, and only plays the music that I enjoy!! I would highly recommend this unit to anyone looking for a high capacity MP3 Juke Box. For any music lover this unit will become your new best friend who doesn't disappoint!