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Interface
The Zen features a powerful icon-driven interface with Quick Scroller
Navigation. Like the IPOD, the Zen offers instant on access
to your music collection! While other hard drive players
suffer from "boot lag", you'll be happy to know that you can start
browsing and listening to your files at the push of a button. It's blue backlit display is 132x64pixels in size.
A larger display would have been nice, but it's big enough to easily
navigate through your files. While some find the
interface confusing, I find it extremely user friendly and quickly lets
you zip through your files with ease. The interface
heavily relies on ID3 tags so if you plan on getting a hard drive based
mp3 player, I strongly suggest you begin organizing your music collection.
Fill in missing tags, properly fill genre, artists, title and album
fields. It will help you find your tracks quickly and easily.
The following illustrations show the Zen's interface and some of it's many
features:
The jog dial acts as both a scroll wheel and
a button. Navigate through the many screens available and simply
push down on the wheel to select it. You can browse through your
music collection by Artist, Albums, Genre, Playlists or browse though all
tracks. There is even a handy find option which locates any song,
album, or artist with alphabetical input.
Unlike the Jukebox 3, the Zen does not have
any recording capabilities built-in. However, note the Recording
option above. Creative plans on releasing a wired remote that will
allow recording. The option is there to browse by recordings
as well.
The jukebox
settings menu has some great features! Let's take a closer look at
them:
Jukebox
Information
This screen
displays some useful information like firmware version, total space, free
space, track count, album count and playlist count.
Personalization
From here you can
enter your name as being the owner of the device and select your startup
menu.
Power Settings
From here you can set the backlight display
time, adjust the contrast and set the Idle shutdown time.
Language Settings
You can choose your preferred language for
the Menu, Input or both!
Additional Features
You can enable EAX audio technology on your
Zen to "customize" your audio playback. Let's take a look at
what EAX Technology offers:
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Advanced EQ: lets you customize your music playback with a variety of
Equalizer presents or you can set your own using the 4-band Custom
Equalizer.
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Smart Volume Management: This is personal favorite of mine! It
adjusts the playback volume of all the tracks on your playlist so they
will remain at the same volume or level without you having to reach for
the volume control between songs! This is one of the Zen's best
features. Your mp3's don't all come from one source. Because
of this, you'll have some mp3's that may be louder than others. This
option will playback ALL files at the same level. This is a great
feature and works quite well!
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Time Scaling: speeds up or slows down an audio track with no
distortion. A perfect feature for studying music note by note or
listening to spoken word recordings.
-
Environmental Effects: simulate audio environments such as "Concert
Hall" or "Arena" giving you audio realism.
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3D Spatialization Effects: expands your soundstage for a richer and
fuller listening experience.
Playback features
Another one of the Zen's best features is the ability to create playlists
"on the fly" from your device. You can even save them on your device
without even having the Zen connected to your PC.
You can also queue files while actually listening to a song. You
have full functionality of the interface while music is playing.
Good job Creative! You can not do this with the IPOD!
By pressing the "Now Playing" button on your Zen, you can switch between
the playlist and playing track screens as shown above.
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