Ya want "Windows" with that?
-
Artist:
-
Album:Tin Cup Music From The Motion Picture
-
Track:This Could Take All Night
A few years ago, a college pal dropped in for a visit in the winter of 2006. He wanted to add more files to his 1GB SanDisk MP3 player, but "1GB" is more like "700-800MB." So I did a local search for a more interesting unit, and found an 8GB SanDisk Sansa View. My Creative Zen Nano Plus 1GB had reached it's limit a while back, so I surfed over to CNET to find "Apple compatible MP3 players." Supposedly the Creative Zen pictured above met that criteria, so I bought one on sale from the local Wal-Mart. Things went South toot suite for me, though the SanDisk Sansa showed up as just another drive on the Mac PowerBook. Not so with the Creative Zen 4GB unit; I had to use my 3GHz P4 tower and Windows XP to load MP3s. I thought about another approach to the problem, and made a couple of "4.7GB" data DVDs of Ye Olde Pismo's MP3 collection. I copied some to the Windows tower, then used Creative's software to load up. Something strange popped up when I scrolled through the Creative Zen's collection: A number of albums/artists/tracks show up with Chinese characters and odd symbols instead of the "English" language selected in the System menu. As the song goes, it may take all night, but now it's direct file drag-and-drop from the data DVD to the Zen unit!
Comments (1)
Manually loading MP3 files into the Creative Zen didn't work. They showed up without data tags on XNJB, but were invisible to the Zen playback software AND likewise couldn't be deleted. Long story short, I went to Creative's website and found out how to recover/nuke the system. I started up the 3GHz P4 Windows XP tower, ripped MP3 files to a relocated iTunes folder, then used Zen Explorer to load the player. It works just fine, though getting album cover art to display is a function of attaching a not-too-big .JPG/.BMP to each MP3, which is a "feature" of the SanDisk Sansa Fuze, too.