© Creative Labs

Say “media player” to most people and they reply - “Oh, you mean an iPod”. Yes, such has been Apple’s marketing skill, that iPod has come to mean MP3 player or media player in the same way that Hoover has come to mean vacuum cleaner. And it really is a great pity as to my mind there are much better products on the market.

The thing about iPods is that everybody else seems to have one and their software does it all for you - including taking your money on the iTunes site and limiting where and when you can play your video and music. But if it’s playback quality and value for money you’re looking for, then you’d do as well looking elsewhere before parting with your cash.

Creative are one of the market leaders in non-iPod media players under the Creative Zen brand name. Music players are simply Creative Zen, whereas music and video players come into the Creative Zen Vision family.

Zen mozaic © Creative Labs

If you want to plug your player into your PC and simply drag and drop your music and videos, then look at the Zen family.

Creative Zen players play your music in all the major formats, including top quality lossless FLAC where your music sounds exactly the same as on the CD. Other “lossy” formats like MP3 take up less space, but the better your player the worse they sound. You don’t get FLAC with iPods or iTunes where you have to make do with lower quality.

Choose the largest storage you can afford, as 20GB or even 30GB disk storage is now quite common in even small players. They advertise “holds 15000 songs” but that’s only in poor quality with small file sizes. Decent recordings and video take up a lot more room, so the bigger the better.

And finally, go and listen to it before you buy. Take a few tracks you know well on a memory stick and have the shop load them on to the player for you to listen to. And listen through your own headphones, as the ones supplied are never very good.

Rob

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