{"id":2168,"date":"2010-02-02T21:18:47","date_gmt":"2010-02-03T05:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=2168"},"modified":"2011-02-21T08:10:56","modified_gmt":"2011-02-21T16:10:56","slug":"creative-nomad-zen-reflections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/creative-nomad-zen-reflections\/","title":{"rendered":"Creative Nomad Zen Reflections"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the middle of 2004 I purchased a Creative Nomad Zen Xtra portable MP3 player<\/a>. “MP3 player” was not quite a commonplace concept yet but the word “iPod” was beginning to catch on. When describing this new toy to people, I usually described it as “about the same as an iPod but about 1\/2 the price” which was absolutely true when I purchased it.<\/p>\n

Here is my Nomad compared to a 1st generation Apple iPod Touch, my current MP3 player (and more):<\/p>\n


\n\"Creative
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

The Nomad Zen Xtra served me well for 3 solid years until I finally got a proper iPod in summer of 2007. I have kept the unit around since then for no particular reason. I decided to disassemble and photograph it before I send the battery and electronics off to their respective recycling destinations.<\/p>\n


\n\"Creative
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

The Nomad Zen Xtra was highly user-servicable and upgradeable. At the time I put it out of service, the battery could barely run for 5 hours (whereas, 10-12 hours was no problem when it was new). A replacement battery would be easy enough to order from assorted battery shops on the internet.<\/p>\n


\n\"Creative
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

Have more than 40 GB of songs? Take off the back of the unit, remove the 2.5″ 40 GB IDE HD and replace with a larger one. That never proved to be necessary for me; in fact, I soon realized after I bought it that the lower-end 30 GB model would have been well more than enough.<\/p>\n

The 40 GB HD from the unit is still perfectly good. I decided to hook it up to a Linux computer and see if there is anything I could work out about the filesystem. Before I got too far into it, a little Googling led me to a Python utility called zenrecover.py<\/a>. Works famously:<\/p>\n

\r\n$ python zenrecover.py \/dev\/sdc songs \/home\/melanson\/mnt\/zen\r\n0% 3.6MB\/s \"Bizet_Intermezzo_from_Carmen.mp3\" (6.8MB)\r\n<\/pre>\n
Just for fun, I dumped all the songs from the unit. I discovered a few things I had long forgotten and had never made the transition into my iPod. Curiously, the very first items that the utility dumped (likely because they occupied the first parts of the filesystem) were a selection of classical tunes as played by the “Beijing Central Phil Orchestra”. These songs came with the unit. It’s notable that the software transferred them off because the packaged software did not allow the user to do so (I’m pretty sure it allowed all music that was downloaded to be transferred off).<\/p>\n
Ugh, that packaged software had to be the worst part about the Nomad Zen Xtra. I know lots of users like to chastise iTunes over a range of pet peeves. I think such people have simply never been exposed to anything worse, like this software.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Remembering my Creative Nomad Zen Xtra MP3 player<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2168"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3176,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2168\/revisions\/3176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}