Digital Trends

Creative Labs Zen Micro 5GB January 23rd, 2005 | by Ian Bell

Setup and Use

If you purchase the Zen Micro, the first thing we recommend you do is to go to Creative Labs website and download the latest firmware update. If you decide to update your players firmware at a later time, be forewarned, at this time doing so will erase the entire hard drive, including your stored songs and data files.  We believe this to be a current bug that will hopefully be fixed with later firmware updates.

We were impressed with the size of the player; it is about a ¼-inch shorter than the Apple iPod mini, although it is a tad bit thicker and wider. And with its rounded corners, the player fits comfortably in your hand. After initially unpacking the unit, we charged its battery overnight before trying the unit out. After charging our Zen Micro, we updated the player's firmware and proceeded to transfer music over to it. We are a big fan of Microsoft's Windows Media Player 10 and were excited to see how the Zen Micro interfaced with it. We also installed Creative's own MediaSource software to see how the two programs compared to each other. When using Windows Media Player 10 (WMP) we noticed that Microsoft's program would delete the music files previously stored on our unit before synchronizing with its Auto sync feature. Fortunately there is a setting in WMP that will allow you to turn this off, so you might want to do that before you synchronize the two.

Creative's own MediaSource software is adequate, but its interface and ease of use is not on par with Apple's iTunes or Windows Media Player; it feels incomplete and clunky after a while. If you prefer to bypass using software altogether, you can simply drag and drop the music files over to the player using Windows Explorer. A word of caution though, if you do this, your audio files will not be categorized by artist, album, genre etc like it would be using WMP 10 or Creative's Media Source. You must use one method of storing your music, you cannot do both otherwise the player will have trouble differentiating between the two.

We had a chance to use the player using Real Player and found that the Zen Micro had a tough time working correctly with this software. With RealPlayer running, connecting the Zen Micro would frequently cause RealPlayer to lock-up, ruining the overall experience with Real Player. Until Creative Labs or RealNetworks releases a fix, we recommend you stick with WMP 10. As of this writing the Zen Micro is not compatible with MusicMatch Jukebox, but we have been told that Creative is working with Musicmatch to get the Zen Micro supported.

The menu system on the Zen Micro is easy to use but follows a navigational pattern that may take a while to get used to. There is not a separate volume control, so you are forced to use the center slider touch pad which is also used for menu navigation, if you want to adjust the volume. This can get very frustrating at times. In the top level of the menu you can choose from Music Library, Play Mode, Now Playing, FM Radio, Extra and System options. You will use the same center touch pad to scroll up and down through the menu options and then you quickly tap the touch pad to make your selection. We were forced to lower the sensitivity of the touch pad to its lowest setting in order to navigate the menu, and even then we found ourselves accidentally making selections we did not want because the touch pad is just too sensitive. Putting the player in “hold” mode will lock the controls and make sure you do not accidentally hit a button while music is being played.