Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra 30GB Review
Page 3
Navigation system
We'll go into the navigation system now.
Upon powering up the player, this is the screen shown.
Going into Music Library...
As you can see, songs are sorted by Album, Artist or Genre. The player does not work like flash-based MP3 players that act like removeable drives. Instead, the filesystem used is unique to the Creative Nomad Jukebox. When a file is copied, the ID3 tags are extracted, and the file is renamed according to the tags. The relevant tags are also stored in an index file, which enables faster searching. The problem with this is that if your MP3s (or WMA) do not have such tags, you have to key them in. Or if the tags contain typos or just are not correct (as is the case with downloaded MP3s), then you would end up with a horrible time finding your songs.
Playlists can be created on the PC, using Creative MediaSource. This can be very useful, especially grouping music to cater to different moods. Too bad playlists cannot be created on the player itself.
Selecting Albums will show the albums in the player.
Selecting Artists and Genres would bring up songs grouped by Artist and Genre.
Below is the Find screen. If you select an artist, there will be an option to Find Artists. If you select an album, there will be an option to Find Album. You get the idea.
The next option in the Menu is Selected Music, which is just like WinAmp's Playlist. Basically it shows the current list of songs that the player is playing, queued up, or have been played.
The next option is Now Playing.
This screen can also be obtained by pressing and holding the Back button.
Now we come to the feature unique to Creative audio players: EAX.
The EAX menu comes with Environment (e.g. Concert Hall, Auditorium), Time-Scale (0.5x slower or up to 1.5x faster), Advanced EQ (e.g. Pop, Rock, Jazz plus 4-band Custom EQ), Spatialization and Smart Volume (adjust volume to prevent sudden volume changes).
You can also see the backlight in this picture. Nothing special about it, nothing bad either.
Other menu options are Play Mode (Repeat, Repeat All, Random etc.), Settings (Owner name, profiles, contrast level etc.) and Button Lock, which just prevents the buttons from being accidentally pressed. This last option doesn't seem much of an issue, especially if the travel pouch is used, since its hard to "accidentally" press the buttons. But its a nice option to have, and maybe there are people who need this function.
In Settings is an option called About, which will show the firmware version, as well as statistics like number of songs etc.
The navigation system is pretty intuitive, and it does the job. I would have preferred if I could search for albums in the format <Artist> - <Album>, rather than just the album name, since it can be hard to remember which artist the album belongs to, especially when you have many albums.
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