Miles Comer: Creative MuVo TX FM MP3 Player Review
Product: Creative MuVo TX FM 1 GB MP3 Player
It's a removable hard drive first - Yay! 5 stars
The thing I love about this product is that it perfectly fits what I want to do because it is a jump drive first, and then a music player second. Provided you have Windows 2000 or Windows XP, you just plug it in and within 60 seconds a removable hard drive appears in "My Computer". Drag and Drop data or music files, create whatever folder you want, whatever.
Remove your drive, place it into the player, plug in some head phones and you are jamming. Run out of tunes? Switch over to FM and scan for a bearable station.
Just a little thing to watch out for, I wanted to cut and paste my whole podcast directory directly into the drive, but according to the directions it will only play 2 subfolders deep. My solution was to just create a set of directories named "1", "2", "3", etc, and then placed sets of files in these directories. I tend to load it with podcasts first in folders with names like 2006-10-30 for all the podcasts I downloaded on October 30th 2006, and then a folder named zMusic and put in a couple of new albums as mp3 files. This lets me listen to all my podcasts first, and then if I run out, it just rolls into some good albums.
Speaking of playing music, you can set up the "Play Mode" to either the default "Play all tracks once" (this is my prefered podcasts first, then music), or "Shuffle all songs just in this folder" or "Shuffle all tracks in all folders on repeat" which is a good setting if you just want to have random music tracks played over and over.
Another bonus, you can pause the player in the middle of a song/podcast, plug it into a computer, move, add, delete any file other than the one you were listening to, take it out of the computer and back into the player, start it up, and it will pick up right where you left off, down to the second.
To me this works great since I'll load it up at night, take it to work, delete what i've listened to, download new stuff at the end of the workday, and just keep rolling.
You can also play files directly from the removable drive (at least on a USB 2.0 connection) on your computer if you are so inclined.
And if you are out in the field and need to delete some files to free up some space to record stuff (I've not actually tried to record anything yet), there is an option while you are listening to a song to delete it.
Another thing I love is you don't have to carry around a cable with you to synch, and if you are running Windows 2000 or XP, you don't need to install any digital rights management, or media player software or anything, it just plays them in alphabetical order, then by subfolders in alphabetical order. If you want it to be in a specified order, move the files around in the folder to be in the order you want, select all the files, then press F2 (or right-click and choose rename) and then just type a new file name, and it will rename all the files in order as: newname.mp3, newname (1).mp3, newname (2).mp3, etc. And then they will just play in that order (although you need to rename newname.mp3 to newname (0).mp3).
FYI: I got a request through email about how to record FM radio:
1. Press the Scroller
2. Scroll Select the "FM Radio" icon
3. Turn the Scroller to select the preset channel you want
4. Press the Scroller
5. Scroll Select the "FM Recording" icon (looks like a microphone)
6. Press the Play/Pause button to end the recording.
It's covered on page 49 (Section 4, page 18) of the users manual at http://ccftp.creative.com/manualdn/Manuals/TSD/8282/0x93B22BC7/Muvo_FM_TX_English_Manual.pdf
Long as I'm here I should let everyone know, this is still an awesome player. but mine stopped working reliably, after a year of listening to it 8 hours a day and opening and closing it at least once a day, I had to have the usb connector halfway in and halfway out to get it to connect properly. I carry it around in my bag with a gig of music just in case my new player goes out.
My new player is the Creative Muvo V100, 2 gigs, no FM player (after they canceled FreeFM in Phoenix I no longer cared anyway), and the file transfer speed is slower than the Muvo TX FM oddly.