Detailed Creative Zen NX MP3 Player Description & Review

"8000 songs at the touch of a button!" All at once?

"The Creative Jukebox Zen NX is the digital audio player for music lovers on the move." Everything from creative seems to be for people on the move these days. Exclamation points and pithy jokes aside the Zen NX is a very good jukebox with a lot to recommend it. This is a jukebox that people will be happy with and it marks a big improvement on earlier models.

Congratulations to the Zen marketing team who have seen the light of day and correctly chosen 128kbps as the encode rate for both WMA and MP3, although we would have accepted slightly lower encode rate for WMA, as befits its capabilities. (The MuVo NX, also by Creative, claims 64kbps encoding rate for its WMA. Now thats what we call Creative Marketing).

The Creative Zen NX stores up to 8000* songs in MP3 or WMA on its 30GB hard disk - which is impressive by anyone's standards, but still only a function of the Hard Drive size really. A competitor's Jukebox with 30 GB hard disk space would be able to make the same claim. Other standard claims include USB 2.0 connection, which has a theoretical transfer rate between your PC and your jukebox of a song per second. Both of those are still pretty impressive though, you have to admit.

The Zen NX comes with a built-in playlist creator and editor, so you no longer have to be connected to your PC to swap tunes on/ off your favourite playlists, you can do it directly on your jukebox. This is the sort of obvious-in-retrospect development that people really look forward to in newer models. No more putting every song you might want to listen to on a play list and then skipping the ones you're not in the mood for. Nice.

Battery News:

Up to 14 hours is how much play time Creative are claiming for the Zen NX. Creative are not shy about trying new power options to boost the play life of their batteries as we saw with the crazy elongated 'stick of rock' style battery for the JB2, which claimed up to 16 hours. 14 hours is long enough for anyone in one day. We advise users to listen out every now and again for danger - total immersion for 14 hours could be hazardous to your health.

The Zens come with spanky new headphones. We can't stand pointless repetition in general, but since the headphones on the Zen NX and Zen Extra are essentially the same .... The geeks at dukebox.com are highly excited by the inclusion of Neodymium in the ingredients used to make the headphones. This rare earth metal is also used in the Koss range of head phones that we sell. They claim the excitement is due to the Neodymium being very strongly magnetic, which apparently gives a better sound, as the strength of the magnetic field determines the quality of the sound. We think that it may also be related to the fact that it's a rare earth metal that appears high-up on the periodic table and also as The Matrix has made Neo a bit of a buzz word for them. They can be excitable.

Ye olde Creative music software 'PlayCenter' is dead. Amen. What were creative thinking when they made that bulky, lumpy, hard to use memory hog? There is a new piece of software for these Zens. Its called MediaSource, which is an indication of which direction they plan to go with their jukebox hardware and software. Is it as good as it should be? Well, its not PlayCenter and that's a start!

Six individual profile settings do not really add much to the overall practicality of the Zen NX, but are worth a mention at least. Exactly how useful it is to be able to make it sound like you're in a concert hall is debatable, but the capability is there should the need suddenly arise.

New screen means that graphic/ file icons as well as text can now be viewed. Like the earlier Zen models, the Zen NX will also store photo files, but not display the photos on screen. Documents and other data files can also be easily stored, moved from computer to computer, backed-up etc. using your ZenNX.

The nice touches for the Zen NX include the built-in clock, with a sleep timer so that you can lull yourself off to sleep with your best sleepy tunes at night and a 'wake to music' alarm so that you can rock your ass out of bed in the morning. Top Jukebox.