If you've only got a few hundred MP3s in your music collection, an expensive multi-gigabyte hard disk-based MP3 player like an Apple iPod is overkill. Instead, you're better off with a flash memory-based player - just like the Creative MuVo NX, in fact.
An update of the MuVo Creative launched last year, the NX adds a small backlit screen that lets you see what you're playing and there's a built-in microphone for voice recording too. Little else has changed - there's 128Mb of memory that you fill by pulling the player out of its AAA battery pod and plugging it into a USB port, which is where it all goes horribly wrong.
Creative supplies an application called MediaSource that enables you to manage your music library, rip CDs and transfer music onto the MuVo. Unfortunately, MediaSource's six mini-windows make it far from easy to figure out what's going on and the only way to copy tracks to the MuVo is by selecting them individually. Worse still, the MuVo then ignores the track numbers stored in the ID3 tags and instead plays tracks back in a random order of its own devising.
Computeractive
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