Creative Zen

The Creative Zen is a media player that supports audio and video files. It took me a while but I finally have figured out how to get movies into it.

ID3 tags

It looks like the songs are not recognized unless tagged with v2.3 tags. How to do that?

Use mp3diags to examine mp3 files closely. Mpdiags has a GUI and can analyze all the files in a folder tree. It can change ID3 tags. Docs are here.

Movies

I used dvd::rip to convert the movie from DVD format to a format playable in the Zen.

The settings:

• Screen size: 320 x 240
• Audio: 48K
• Transcoded to AVI format
• BSS: 0.40 (this is the video quality, I think it was BSS)

After transcoding the movie, copy it to the Video folder on the Zen... which is of course another trial.

MTP protocol

The trick with using a Zen with Linux is that the Zen does not have a USB mass storage mode. It works using the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP). This means you can't just plug it in and copy files to it, you have to use an app that supports MTP.

I am using Kubuntu now, and the KDE people want me to use Amarok. I hate Amarok. I am not smart enough to use it. Amarok supports MTP but just laughs at me when I try to use it.

I also tried installing rhythmbox under Kubuntu which I used under Ubuntu but never really liked it much either.

I just Gnomad2 and it worked just fine. The only trick was to plug in the Zen first and then start Gnomad2. Then I was able to move my movie file over to the Zen and play it.

The problem with Gnomad2 is that I recorded an audiobook on 11 CD's into 11 folders, and Gnomad2 does not let me treat the folders as a collection.