Home > Consumer Reviews > Creative Zen 32 GB Portable Media Player (Black)

I bought this in June of 2008. I was listening to it a week ago, but today I tried to turn it on and it WOULD NOT BE TURNED ON. It is not even recognized by my computer. This piece of crap just died on me like this. I am contacting creative to receive a full refund. It is defective garbage.

The Zen 32gb has the largest flash capacity currently available. (Bigger than Sony, Samsung and Toshiba in the same size and memory category), and it's small size and tactile controls for blind operation make it perfect for workouts. The 32gb is currently priced about the same as the Sony 16gb. The sound quality is audibly superior to the Sansa Fuze. If you want ear fatigue within 20 minutes, buy the Sansa Fuze. Album of the day feature is like random play with the benefit of being able to immediately listen to the rest of the songs by the same artist which I find useful. If you want to control it and get the best quality sound in the car letting the head unit decode the music, buy the alpine iDA-X200 (see my review). Biggest drawback is not being able to switch between MTP and UMS mode. You're stuck with MTP only. MTP is great because it allows playlists (which you can make in windows media player). UMS is great if you use a Mac or have a car stereo with a usb port (other than the Alpine iDA-X200) but you give up playlists. Some final thoughts, upgrade your firmware. If I didn't have a collection of wma music tracks, I would consider the iPod because you have a wider choice of accessories like compatible car stereos. Isn't it strange how the car stereo has become the accessory to mp3 player? With the iPod I would have to convert my wma tracks to mp3 which is like taking a picture through a screen door. I don't want to end on a sour note, this is a great player and perfect for my needs. (Except for listening to podcasts in the car see my iDA-X200 review)

I ordered the Creative Zen over an iPod Nano because it was cheaper, and said it would work with my iTunes library and Napster. Once I received it i discovered iTunes would not recognize the device, and I had to manually transfer my iTunes music files over to the device using their special creative software, and everytime I tried to sync with Napster, I received an Internal Clock Not Set error. Due to the internal clock not setting, Napster would never sync, even though both Creative and Napster say that the Zen 4GB is a supported Napster device. It was fairly light, and I liked the radio feature, but the buttons felt cheap. Creative included their own software for downloading podcasts, and even their own software would not convert the podcasts they provide and sync it with the device.

All in all this was a major hasstle. When I owned my iPod I just plugged it in and it worked. This had to many issues.

Being highly interested in purchasing this player I did some more research. I find out that the SD expansion slot is designed poorly. Consumer beware! You think you are going to just pop in an SD card and jack up the memory of this unit.....sort of.

All data stored on the SD is kept separate from the main on-board memory. So all those extra songs you put on the SD will be hidden away in their own lists and not integrated seamlessly.

Pray for a firmware update to make the data on the SD expansion seamlessly integrated with all your other data.

This was a great mp3 player out of the box, but after less than a week of having it, it stopped working. I was no longer able to reset it or recharge it. I bought this mp3 player specifically for an upcoming trip. I called Amazon to see if they could expedite shipment of a replacement so that I would still have the Zen to use on my trip, but they would not do this. This is very poor customer service in my opinion. In short, this is a really cool mp3 player when it is working. Just keep in mind that you're rolling the dice here with the reliability of this product, and don't expect above average customer service from Amazon either.