Creative Zen Xtra 30GB
Out of context: Reply #20
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1) You cannot drag'n'drop music onto it. Although USB2.0, it doesn't show as a drive, it shows as a portable device. You have to use Creative's "MediaSource" software or WMP "Copy to Device". This is horribly clunky, and unforgivable these days. But with two ways to get music onto it, shouldn't be too much of a problem, right? Wrong.
(2) WMP "Copy to Device" wants to re-encode down to 128kbps, thus losing quality. (Encodes of encodes are doubly bad; better off ripping at 128kbps in the first place.) MediaSource will transfer any bitrate without re-encoding, however it will only transfer things that are in its own music library. The big gotcha -- you cannot add things to MusicSource library if they have non-ASCII characters, ie, anything not on an American typewriter. This means if you have a library of foreign music (much of mine has titles in Cyrillic) you cannot add them to MediaSource, and therefore you cannot transfer them to the device.
These days, when your CDs and tracks can be instantly titled by CDDB or WMP9, and a 2.0+ ghz computer can rip songs in a matter of seconds allowing you to rip a CD every couple minutes, who wants to spend weeks and weeks retitling CDs just so a xenophobic MusicMatch can import them?
By definition, if you want a 60GB portable music player, you have thousands of CDs and tens of thousands of songs. No, renaming them won't kill you, but it'd be months before you'd finally get to listen to your music...
I talked to Creative Labs about this. The answer: "Perhaps you may wish to download some english songs and play it[sic]. Hope that solves your issue."
There's no good reason to manufacture a media player that cannot have music simply drag'n'dropped onto it through the normal Windows XP (or Mac OSX) interface. There's even less reason to manufacture a media player that cannot have foreign titled music transferred to it.
It's just dumb, and I'm returning this one. Too bad, because it's an otherwise nice device (even if you can't find a "stop" button, only "pause").
Thats what a fellow cheap is better freind said.... again BUY IT BUY IT BUY IT -