The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #98060   Message #1937024
Posted By: Scrump
15-Jan-07 - 05:50 AM
Thread Name: Tech: Creative Zen mp3 player user queries
Subject: Tech: Creative Zen mp3 player user queries
Thanks to Mrs Scrump, I am the owner of a 'Creative Zen Vision M' 30GB mp3 player, since Christmas. I've been busy transferring CDs onto it and it seems pretty good overall, but I have a few problems in manipulating the files on it, that I hope someone here might be able to advise me on.

So far I've managed to load in lots of albums and get it to retrieve the artist and track titles from the web (apart from any home-made CDs from vinyl records, of course, where I had to enter the details manually). To do this I use the software provided with it, i.e. Zen Vision M Media Explorer.

It normally stores the files in folders, with artist at the top level, and folders for each album by the artist at the next level, with the album tracks in each album folder.

Seems sensible, but I found that if I load in a compilation CD with tracks by different artists, it creates a folder for each artist, and a folder below that for the 'album' by that artist, with maybe only one track on it. Also, I had some albums by the same artist that had a fair amount of overlap (e.g. two different hits compilations) where I wanted to delete the duplicate tracks, and have them all in the same folder.

The problem is, once I've loaded the tracks into the player, I don't seem to be able to move them between folders. In some cases, an artist name has been splet slightly wrongly, which results in two separate folders. I'd like to be able to put the album by the wrongly spelt artist into the correct folder, and delete the 'wrong' one.

The interface allows you to delete folders and files, but seemingly not to move them between folders. I don't know whether there's something I'm missing, but I can't understand why it won't let me move tracks from one folder to another.

The 'various artists' problem is the worst, because if you navigate the list of arists you get a huge list, many of which are just for an artist with a single track on the player. What I'd prefer is to have all these stored in a 'Various Artists' folder, so they don't appear in the albums list, which is so long it is tedious to navigate using the (what I find) slightly dodgy touchpad interface.

If anyone has one of these and can provide any advice I'd be grateful.