Creative launches Zen - 20 GB MP3 player 40% cheaper than iPod

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#1

I just posted the article Creative launches Zen - 20 GB MP3 player 40% cheaper than iPod.

Creative has announced their new product the NOMAD JukeBox Zen. They proudly market their product as 40% cheaper then Apple’s iPod and able to contain 60% more songs. The Zen has a hard drive of 20…

Read the full article here:  [http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/4667-Creative-launches-Zen---20-GB-MP3-player-40-cheaper-than-iPod.html](http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/4667-Creative-launches-Zen---20-GB-MP3-player-40-cheaper-than-iPod.html)

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#2

$300 is still too expensive!! Make it 99 cents :slight_smile:

#3

great deal, Creative. but i think i’ll pass. the WMA don’t appeal to me. if they incorporated it, then they’re bound to include the lovely Windows Media protection. also what about Creatives new “Audio Protection”’ we heard of in their latest Audigy cards?

#4

60% more songs? Bullcrap. Who cares about the number of songs you can cram onto your player? What matters is quality, and WMA files encoded at 80kbps is pretty far from anything even resembling quality IMHO. Sure it’s propably a sweet deal if there’s no copy protection but really… only supporting mp3, wma and wav is pretty lame. Also there’s no remote included so you have to buy one separate

#5

Kill WMA support… Get Ogg support and I’ll buy that sucker :slight_smile: WMA is bloated copy protected garbage. MP3 is the standard, and Ogg is its replacement. It will take a while for the adjustment from mp3 to OGG to complete, but it will happen so these companies might as well get a jump on the situation… They don’t even have to pay licensing fees to use the technology, its open source!

#6

thinking of getting one of these :slight_smile:

#7

the one from Apple is better IMO!

#8

“From my experience, the WMA format is superior to MP3 both in terms of quality and compression ratio, which means you can store more songs at better quality.” blablalblah blah… CRAAAAAPPP.

#9

Oooh… so shiny… makes me wanna touch myself! :g

#10

Go ahead… make your day!!! :d

#11

“The one from Apple is better” In what way? Apple only has firewire, this has USB2.0 too. Did you guys miss the part where it can be used as a portable hard drive? A 20GB portable firewire/USB2.0 drive would be nice.

#12

Except for iPod, I have never liked any of the Apple products. I was thinking of getting one but the “protection” thingie always prevented me from buying one. I like the looks and the design. It is perhaps the best MP3 player on the market. But now I will buy the Creative Zen, if it does not have the stupid “audio protection”.

#13

I can tell by listening that a song is WMA without even looking at the extension! I’ve seen this happen at 128kbps and even 192kbps!! It appears as 192 on Winamp and I say to myself ‘Somethings doesn’t sound right with the song’. OGG 1.0 final, from 96kbps up is very difficult for me to determine from the original. The same goes for MP3 at 192kbps up. :slight_smile:

#14

From what I heard, the protection (MP3 upload only) has been cracked on the Ipod; making it a good MP3 player, small portable hard drive and free up to 5/10/20GB (depends on version) of MP3 off your hard drive, i.e. plug in the Ipod to play music on the PC. The downside is both its price and the fact that it supports 1394/firewire only. Anway, I’m happy with my CD MP3 player; although a little bulky. ;9

#15

Yeah it will take some time, because I’m switching to Ogg from MP3 and it’s taking me a while. I don’t think a complete change will happen until someone makes a file sharing program that promotes the Ogg format.

#16

I do not know why you are all fixated with slagging the player off for supporting WMA it also plays MP3’s so what is the big deal. Also even though it does have USB it only supports version 1.1 not 2.0 so you are still limited to crappy download/upload speeds if you do not have a firewire card. It also uses 2.5" drives instead of the 1.3" (not to sure about the size but close enough) that are made by Toshiba and used by Apple in the IPods. This is how they can keep the price down as these drives are a lot more common and hence cheaper.

#17

its a bit bigger than an IPOD

#18

hell, i’m an uneducated consumer… i’ll buy anything with an “e-” or “i-” prefix on it! must mean it’s fancy! shucks!

#19

i swear some of you people can’t read, it ALSO supports WMA. if you dont’t like it (and neither do i) dont use it! doesnt mean you can’t still play mp3s does it?? any you expect players to support ogg when its been in development and only finalised recently - do you have any idea what implementing hardware decoding invloves. It is strange logistics to invest in a player to support a constantly changing format.