Creative Zen

Creative ZEN is a highly acclaimed series of digital audio players and portable media players designed and manufactured by Creative Technology Limited, Singapore. The brand line-up is a successor to the Creative NOMAD JukeBox series of personal media players that plays a wide variety of audio compression formats. When Creative launched the ZEN, it was aimed at replacing the current line-up of audio and video players from the NOMAD series. The ZEN was designed for playback of digital audio as well video content, whereas the MuVo was aimed at the audiophile segment of the market.

Both the series support playback of WMA, MP3 and WAV audio files. Latest editions of the player allow playback of the recently developed Audible digital audio compression format. Most of the players in the series feature an inbuilt hard disk drive of sizes 1.8 and 2.5 inches. The Nano V and Neeon players from the same range feature flash memory instead of hard drives. The Micro series and the original ZEN Neeon used microdrives for storing digital content.

Most ZEN players launched recently feature colour displays sporting an 18-bit (262,144 colours) depth for true-to-life colours and vibrancy. The Creative ZEN player package includes device drivers and MediaSource, a media player that features file transfer capabilities. Other variants of the Creative ZEN include the Creative ZEN Stone and Creative ZEN Vision. The players are compatible with Windows Media Player via Media Transfer Protocol and the Janus DRM and most versions of Windows. For using the players with Linux or Mac OS X operating systems, third party software for transferring files is required.