Creative Zen Vision:M 30GB
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Installing Software
The software installation hasn't changed much.
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The installation offers Windows Media Player 10 and Creative MediaSource, but both are optional, since you can do everything with the Zen Vision:M Media Explorer.
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Transferring Files
Unless you use Creative's MediaSource as your music organizer, most of the time, you would be using the Zen Vision:M Media Explorer to transfer your files. The Media Explorer offers a drag & drop interface and works just like the standard Windows Explorer. It supports Unicode file names as well (which MediaSource does not).
The Media Explorer lets you do anything that is possible with the Zen Vision:M. Most of the time, simply using "Browse Media" is enough, but the other options are there if you need them.
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"Browse Media" opens the Windows Explorer-style window. The various media types are separated into categories, such as Music, Video, Pictures etc.
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Transferring files is a simple matter of drag & drop, or copy & paste. For those who prefer to be guided by a wizard, the "Add Media" link on the Media Explorer provides that.
The Zen Vision:M comes with the Creative Media Toolbox, which contains some very useful programs.
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"Auto Tag Cleaner" is a nice idea. It connects to the Gracenote MusicID service to correct and update the tags. Useful if you have several misspelt or incorrect tags and are to lazy to edit them individually. For the power-user, though, a dedicated tag editor such as Mp3tag would provide greater control.
If you keep all your music in a single folder, or are just disorganised, the "Auto Organiser" renames and rearranges the music into folders.
"Audio Converter" has been included with MediaSource in the past, but it was somewhat hidden in the MediaSource program group. Now it is prominently shown in the Media Toolbox.
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What is useful about Audio Converter is that it allows you to batch convert your music into WAV, MP3 or WMA (including WMA Pro and WMA Lossless). While converting to WAV and MP3 isn't necessary since there are existing software to do that, batch converting to WMA is a big plus because there is no free software available that can easily convert several MP3 or WAV to WMA. If disk space is valued, then converting to WMA might be beneficial as WMA at 128kbps or lower can sound similar to MP3 at a higher bitrate. A 4MB file in MP3 128kbps would only be 2MB when converted to WMA 64kbps, and a WMA 64kbps would sound better than MP3 64kbps. Of course, considering the Zen Vision:M has a 30GB hard disk, this might not be that big an issue.
Unfortunately, like MediaSource, Audio Converter does not support Unicode filenames or tags. So far, only Windows Media Player can read and write Unicode filenames and tags.
"Video Converter" was included with the Zen Vision, and the one with the Zen Vision:M is the same. It takes in AVI, MPEG, WMV and DivX/XviD/MPEG-4 files and converts them to WMV.
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Video conversion is still limited to 320x240. Creative wasn't able to provide a satisfactory answer as to why video conversion was limited to 320x240, but I discovered through testing that the Zen Vision:M is unable to play WMV videos at 640x480. In fact, the Zen Vision:M is fussy when it comes to WMV files. When using Windows Media Encoder, I had to specifically choose the "Windows Media hardware profiles". Media Explorer refused to let me transfer WMV files created with other profiles.
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The software is smart enough to check if the file can already be played by the Zen Vision:M or not, and tells you accordingly.
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It then offers to transfer the converted files to the player.
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One thing to note is that neither Media Explorer nor Video Converter are able to detect if an XviD file has been encoded using Global Motion Compensation (GMC). That is, you can transfer such an XviD file to the Zen Vision:M, only to see an error that the file is not supported when you try to play it.
Finally, the biggest surprise is the "Tag Converter". Despite the lack of Unicode support in MediaSource and Audio Converter, Creative has at least taken a step forward. "Tag Converter" allows batch conversion of music files with non-English tags into Unicode format.
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Unfortunately, as you can see above, it isn't perfect for Chinese language tags. You are forced to choose the correct Traditional Chinese, or Simplified Chinese. In the above, I tried selecting "Simplified Chinese" and got rubbish.
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Selecting "Traditional Chinese" produces the correct tags.
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If you are working with other languages, Tag Converter does the job. However, if you are dealing with Chinese tags and want to be able to convert to Simplified or Traditional Chinese, then ConvertZ would be a better program.