Product Reviews

You may have noticed recently that many of your fellow citizens have been wearing little white earphones and humming vacantly. Do not be alarmed! These people have not fallen victim to a race of ear-dwelling aliens. They are simply using the Apple iPod MP3 players they got for Christmas.

But Apple isn't the only company to make MP3 players. Creative has been at it for ages. Last month, we were wowed by Creative's Zen NX, with its whopping 30GB hard disk. The Zen Xtra doubles that to an even more impressive 60GB.

The Xtra is housed in the same silver/white chassis as its predecessor. The only external difference is the Xtra's larger display window, which is lit by a swish purple backlight. This assists navigation around its stonkingly large hard disk - the Xtra's most notable internal improvement. With this much storage space, you can carry 16,000 songs around with you. That's over a month of continuous

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play. Phew.

With that many songs, you need a simple system to make sure you can find them. Creative's doesn't cut it. First, there's the way the jukebox stores tracks. You can't simply drag and drop music files and folders on to the Xtra's hard disk - all songs must be imported using Creative's software. This is a real pain if you're moving from one PC to another. What's more, tracks are organised by their 'meta-tags' (chunks of data attached to the MP3, containing things like the title and the artist's name). Often, the meta-tag attached to an MP3 track will be incomplete or just plain wrong. This could really scupper a search for a track. The problem is compounded by the search function, which can only look for the first letters of a track. If it starts with numbers, it'll never be found.

The process is made even more difficult by the fiddly jog dial that you have to use. It's far too easy to slip and go past the track you were looking for, or to play something you didn't want.

On the bright side, the Xtra uses a speedy USB 2 connection. Considering the number of songs it can hold, this is just as well - moving hundreds of files using USB 1.1 would have taken hours! We were also impressed by the player's audio quality, which is clear and sharp with decent bass.

With so much going for it, it's a shame that the Xtra is let down by its navigation system. But before we could think of giving this player an award, Creative will have to seriously rethink the fiddly controls.