Using the player
When you first start up the player, you will see that it comes loaded with classical music. I think this was to let you test the sound quality of the player, which is incredible. It sounds better than my computer. You can also enable the built in equalizer, which has presets you can use to fit your kind of music. Also, if you are an audiophile and want to use custom equalizer settings, then you can do that too. Again, as I already mentioned, if you want to really do it justice you will want some better earphones.
On the front of the player are six buttons, and a touchpad. Yes, that’s right a touchpad. Never would have guessed that by the name of the player right? A first for Creative’s MP3 players, but now it seems pretty much every new player they make has a touchpad built in so it must have caught on. The touchpad is used to move about the menus and your tracklist, with the buttons being used to bring up the main menu, play/pause, next track, previous track, random button, and another button to go back when navigating the menus.
Out of all the buttons though, I would have to say the random button is the most useless. Press it, and your current playlist is abandoned and the player queues up all the tracks on the player instead, and plays them randomly. If you want to play one playlist randomly, then the only way I have found to do this is to press the menu button, go to play mode, and choose shuffle.
On the left side of the player are the volume buttons and the power button. Nothing much to say about them except the power button has a bright blue LED.
Navigating around the player is a bit of a mixed bag in my opinion. You simply press menu and from there you can choose Music Library, where you can choose your music by Album, Artist, Genre, or you can choose a pre made Playlist. In Play Mode you can choose how you want your music to play, all the shuffle and repeat settings can be found here. In Settings, you can change the time the backlight stays on for, contrast, date & time, time until the player shuts down from inactivity, and language.
But the most important setting to me is the ability to change the sensitivity of the touchpad. This is the source of a lot of frustration for me with this player. No matter what sensitivity I use, I always end up skipping past what I want to select. It gets easier to use the more you use it, but I can’t help but feel that even on the lower setting it is still hard to use. I would appreciate a traditional up/down button in this situation, but I think Creative was looking to break tradition here and have the least amount of buttons as possible, like the iPod. A lot of people like the iPod because of its ease of use; Creative appears to be trying the same.
At the top of the player is the headphone jack, a hold switch so you don’t press all the buttons while it is in your pocket, and the USB port. The player has USB 2.0 support, so a whole album of music transfers quickly. The headphone jack also has a connector for a remote control attachment you can buy from Creative. The remote control also has an FM radio built in, in case you forget to put that new album on your player. On the right side of the player is the DC port for charging the player. When charging the player gets a little warm to the touch, and in the quick start guide Creative say you should unplug the player right after it has finished charging since heat doesn’t do the player any good.
Software
On the driver disk are two programs, NOMAD Explorer and Creative Mediasource. NOMAD Explorer runs in Windows Explorer, and is a simple drag and drop interface for moving music tracks to your Zen Touch. The only thing you need to keep an eye out for with this is the ID3 tags. If these are blank, then the software will simply put everything under
Creative Mediasource is a lot more complex on the other hand. It has more features, but in my opinion there are other programs that can do the job just as well, such as Windows Media player. Creative Mediasource does the same as NOMAD Explorer, but with more features thrown in. It has Audiosync, which can synchronise the music on your PC to the Zen Touch and vice versa. You can also create playlists to put on your Zen Touch, and burn CD’s too. But, again, Windows Media Player can do all these things in a less complicated manner. I didn’t use Mediasource for long, since I was much more used to Windows Media Player anyway, and since Mediasource does nothing extra than WMP I couldn’t see any reason to continue using the software.
Conclusion
Apart from a few minor niggles, I was impressed with this player. Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same about the accessories or the software. Average could explain the accessories while below average could explain the software. If Creative would only put as much thought into these areas I could say outright this is a player you should buy right away. Of course, the software side of things can be sorted by using Windows Media Player, but the accessories will cost you.
