Creative Zen MX 16GB MP3 and Video Player with SD Card Slot

Amazon Price: £69.99
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Customer Reviews

Make a cup of tea while the SD card turns on

This is a great MP3 player in ways other people have ably described. However, it has a major drawback, which, depending how you intend to use the player, may make it a poor choice for you.

This is the way the SD card is used. Unlike the player's predecessor, the Creative Zen, you can no longer browse the file structure of the SD card in order to play its contents. Instead, the player builds a library of the SD card content each time you go to use the SD card. This is fine - even great - if the content on there has been as carefully tagged as the stuff on the player itself. But it's a pain if, as I do, you used the SD card specifically for content that is easy to order by folder but tiresome to tag. (It also uses the 'Artist' tag rather than 'Album Artist', which can be very annoying as it gets easily cluttered if you have many compilation albums.)

The main problem though is how long it takes. Bear in mind that my 16GB player takes 25 seconds to boot up anyway. Then, after I have selected the Memory Card item and agreed to let it build the library, it takes another 60 seconds before the SD card content is ready to play. (That is for a 2GB SD card with music on it. I read on the Creative forum that someone with a 32GB SD card waits for 22 minutes before they can play the content!)

If you don't mind this, go ahead and get the Zen MX, because in other ways it's a good MP4 player. But if you want to use the SD card much, find a different product.

Zen MX and windows vista

THE zen MX is a very easy to use MP3 player, with good quality sound. However since Aug 10 mine cannt get transfers from either Creative or Windows Media player since Vista does not recognise creatives software.
I have two Zen MX which at present are unusable, unless it appears that I upgrade to Windows 7, at a cost!!! Dont buy if your windows is Vista!!!

Zen MX sense

This is the third Zen I own. I find them excellent in use, easy to download and transfer my own collection, great on the ear and a really good standard of replay. I just wish they made a 160 gig one but with the SD card slot it is infinitely expandable.

Nice product - but WATCH OUT FOR MALICIOUS SOFTWARE

Bought this item to replace previous mp3 player. Looks very sharp, excellent sound, and battery charge lasts for ages - controls are a bit fiddly but reasonably intuitive once you get the hang of it. Basically it does everything I was looking for, didn't cost the earth and uses flash drive technology rather than hard disk (which I am - possibly unfairly - nervous about from the point of view of product life). All good so far. Not so good is the supplied software for installing music etc on your player. I am not a fan of the Artists/Albums/Genre menus which are in vogue - I'd much prefer the device to be transparently drag and drop with nested folders - my previous machine worked that way, and it was great. Unfortunately the control menu forces you to use the software supplied - you can drag and drop if you like, but the menus won't find the tracks and you won't be able to play them!

Worst of all is Creative's accursed product registration software. I have bad experience of Creative's bulldozer approach in the past - with the exception of Real Player and one or two nasty viruses, there is nothing worse for trying to take control of your operating system. I bought the item just before I went on holiday. When I got home from holiday, my first boot-up of the PC fired up a pop-up from Creative (headed "gentle reminder"!) inviting me to register my new product. No way I could stop it, it then started searching for my new product, which was not connected (it was at my mother's house) - whole system locked up - nothing would stop it. If I attempted to stop the task using Task Manager then it fired up the Gentle Warning all over again. Eventually whole system crashed. I went and got the Zen machine from my mother's, booted up, registered the flaming thing, and used RegCure to remove a job called TCRegRun from my start-up listing. All quiet again, but WATCH OUT! I would be very wary in future of purchasing any product which required me to use Creative's support software - very dodgy indeed.

NOT intuitive to use

I read lots of reviews of this product (and others) before buying. My main interest was sound quality, but I was not prepared to pay a great deal. I am not interested in video or photo display. On balance this product seemed the best for my needs.

I have now used it for over six months and, although the sound quality is acceptable, I have often felt like throwing it in the bin. The reason for my frustration are the totally illogical and confusing controls. I am very tech literate and have used computers and other digital gadgets for decades, but I still haven't got the hang of this gadget. My initial read of the instruction book left me bemused, but I thought that with use I would get the hang of it, but the menu structures are totally non-intuitive. What's worse, the same sequence of actions seems to give different results from one time to the next.

One other thing. One of my reasons for choosing the Zen MX is that it has an SDHD card slot. As one of the reviews I read said, this SHOULD effectively double the capacity to 16GB. But what the review did not mention is that every time you select the SD card from the menu the library has to be rebuilt, which with a 2GB card takes the best part of a minute (I haven't tried it with an 8GB, but presumably this would take four times as long). You then have to make your music selection - which is lost when you switch it off, and the next time you switch on you have to go through this all over again. As a result, I very rarely use the SD card facility.