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Replace Zen Micro's Hard Drive with CompactFlash

Over on the Nomadness forum, people are taking about their experiences with replacing the Zen Micro's hard drive with a CompactFlash memory card.

There's two reason's you'd wanna do this surgery:

1. The hard drive has died.
2. You want to increase the capacity of your Zen Micro. One user was able to upgrade the 5GB hard drive to an 8GB memory card.

A third reason is that the battery lasts longer, and that music starts much faster.

Warning! Some users have found that certain CompactFlash cards do not work. Read the posting to get brand names and model numbers of memory cards that work, such as the 8GB Transcend TS8GCF120.

Xfer Photos from Cameras to Zen Micro?

A strange tip over at Popular Photography.com:

Using select camera cables, I can connect digital cameras from several makers to my Creative Zen Micro music player, and their image files are transferred automatically.

I have both -- several digital cameras and the Zen Micro -- but I haven't been able to try this tip, because the cables are a problem. The Zen Micro has the miniUSB female connector; most cameras have the same or a proprietary connector. Thus, an adapter cable is needed, which I don't have.

But, I can't see this tip working, because neither the camera nor the Zen Micro are USB servers -- one is needed to initiate the file transfer operation. I wonder if the editors of Popular Photography tested the tip, which needs more information. For example, should the Zen Micro be in File Transfer mode?

I wonder if the tip submitter used a USB transfer box, which allows two non-server USB devices to communicate with each other. I've looked at them at London Drugs (about $40), but decided they wouldn't work well, because there is no control over which files are transmitted, and where they end up on the receiving device.

In for Warranty Repairs

My Zen Micro MP3 player is a victim of the headphone connector flaw: after a few months of use, its headphone connector wears out. Typically, you hear just one channel; the music sounds weak.

On mine, the breakdown had to occur during our 3.500-km drive into northern Canada -- we made it as far as Hyder, the most southernly town in Alaska that can be reached by road. We had the Zen Micro hooked up to the rental car's stereo through the iRock fm transmitter. But it wasn't much fun reaching down every few minutes to readjust the connector; with each bump in the road, the connection would go bad.

I submitted my warranty claim to Creative, and they gave me the RMA number. Problem is, the nearest repair facility is located in the USA, and I'm in Canada. I didn't relish the thought of (1) paying to ship the faulty unit internationally; and (2) paying customs taxes and fees when it recrossed the boarder into Canada. The dreaded brown UPS organization charges $17 just to process the paperwork.

(I checked with the retailor who sold me the Micro, but they said they would charge me whatever it cost them. Whatever happened to free lunches?)

I complained about all this on the nomadness.net forums, but members told me that Creative ships it back pre-paid, and I wouldn't incur costs for the return trip. Now why wouldn't Creative have told me that? I shipped it off, and am tracking its repair progress on Creative's Warrenty and Repair Web page.

I'm hoping the Zen Micro returns to me before I leave for Europe in mid-October.

Updates

Mon 19 Sept -- unit arrives at Creative USA warranty location.
Wed 21 Sept -- unit tested: "Headphone Jack Non-Functional"
Sat 24 Sept -- unit replaced: "FG,CREATIVE ZEN MICRO 5GB SE CLI WH/BK"
Sat 24 Sept -- unit assigned UPS tracking number; not picked-up by UPS yet.

Mon 26 Sept -- (Afternoon) Creative emails me that the unit is on its way back to me, but the tracking number they provide does is unknown tp UPS: "UPS could not locate the shipment details for your request"
Mon 26 Sept -- (Evening) UPS finally has it in its system: "Sep 26, 2005 8:50 P.M. STILLWATER, OK, US ORIGIN SCAN"

Tues 27 Sept -- (4:10pm) UPS delivers the long-awaited box. Inside, Creative shipped a new Zen Micro package, which means I now have a spare battery, headphones, cloth holder, and USB cable.

I gotta say, though, it sure is kewl to be able to monitor the progress of repair!

Video Zen

The Register reveals that Creative has designed a 30GB version of the Zen Micro with 3.7" color screen and video playback. Screen resolution is 640x480, and takes up most of the front of the unit. USB 2 (for connection to computer) and CompactFlash slot (for reading files from digital cameras).Apparently shipping end of August.

It plays back:

Audio
- MP3
- WMA
- WAV

Video
- MPEG 4
- WMV
- DIVx
- XviD

Images
JPEG
TIFF

Firmware Upgrade for Zen Micro

It's a week late, but Creative finally released the promised firmware update that fixes the battery rundown problem. You can access the 1.10.02 firmware starting from here.

New features include:

- driverless charging: plug into any USB port, and push the Micro's switch to Hold.
- quicker charging both from AC and USB
- longer playback time at higher bitrates (11+ hours playback time at 192kbs tracks.)
- unit shuts down after 4 hours (instead of the previous 24-hour wait) for longer standby battery life.

Update

Oops! After people began installing the firmware update, they began experiencing problems, like the battery dying when the headphones are left plugged in. Creative pulled the update from their Web site, saying that you should re-install the older 1.02.05 if you experience problems.

20GB Zen (Micro)

Blowing away Apple: Creative on Monday revealed the 20GB version of its Zen Micro, upping the capacity from 4GB-5GB-6GB. Same body as the Zen Micro, 4x-larger hard drive, but a shorter name: just plain "Zen."

I notice that the battery life is shorter by 1 hour (from 12 to 11 hours), and that removability is not explicitly stated. I wonder if it uses a smaller battery, built-in to accomodate the large hard drive? And the body is magnesium, allowing its walls to be thinner than the double-layer plastic used for the Zen Micro(*). Ship date was not announced.

Also announced, the Zen Neeon. Creative calls it "The Smallest and Lightest Harddrive MP3 Player." That it is. The battery is said to last 16 hours, but is not removable. The LCD screen displays a variety of colors, but I find the body design not that pleasing.

(*) Over the weekend, the Zen Micro slipped from my hand, and fell a couple of feet onto the concrete. Good news: no damage, visible and otherwise. I am guessing the thick plastic walls absorbed the shock.

Lower Bitrates = Power Savings

"Purists" like to record MP3 files at 320kbps (aka bitrate). This is the highest bitrate available for MP3, and involves the least compression. The theory is that the music sounds better because of less compression. In practice, some people cannot hear any difference above 192kbps; you may want to try compressing a song at different rates -- 128, 196, 320 -- to determine if you can hear the difference.

(I write "purists" in quote marks, because if they truly were music purists, they would not be listening to music in MP3 format at all.)

The drawback to 320kbps is that it takes up 2.5x more disk space; or, you can fit 2.5x fewer songs on an MP3 player than at the most common bitrate, 128.

And now, word of another drawback: power consumption. Tests by Stainlesssteelrat shows that batteries in MP3 players don't last as long at 320kbps as at lower bitrates. For example, the Zen Micro lasts 12 hours at 128, but just 7 hours at 320kbps. (You can see the chart here.) The theory is that the harddrive has to work longer to read the larger music data files.

Charging But Not Glowing

The Zen Micro glows with a slowly-pulsing blue light while charging. That's a visual confirmation that the battery is being recharged. In some cases, however, the blue doesn't glow, reports Harvey_From_Creative on the nomadness.net forums:

The Zen Micro displays the charging icon but no light when there is an insufficient level of current, usually when it is charged through a USB port:

1. The USB port doesn't deliver adequate current to charge the player; and/or
2. The Zen Micro drivers haven't been not been installed onto the system used for charging.

In any case, the Zen Micro still is being charged, just in a less spectacular manner.

Color Obsession

The good thing about the Internet is that it lets people with strange obsessions find like-minded ones. Here's an example: SHARE YOUR ZEN MICRO PICTURES! has hundreds of photos of Zen Micros.

There is also a poll on the favorite color, although it is a bit strange in that the vote has to be based on the photos, and cannot be the color of your own Zen Micro. Results thus far:

1. Black - the color of mine!
2. Dark Blue
3. Silver
3. Red
5. White - would be my second choice.
5. Lime Green
7. Orange
8. Purple
8. Pink
10. Light Blue

Zen Micro Power Issues

Creative boasts 12-hour battery life for its Zen Micro -- true, for continuous use. Their Web site proclaims, "Extend your playtime another 12 hours with each additional battery you buy"! But a flaw in the firmware reduces that claimed 12-hour life to half, if you use the MP3 player for a short time every day.

Amazing! A device whose battery life shortens the less often you use it.

Customers figured out the problem, but it was not until last week that Creative belatedly promised a firmware upgrade (by end of May) that helps reduce (not eliminate) the problem.

(The problem: turn off the Zen Micro, and it goes into a light sleep for 24 hours, a mode that consumes a lot power. The advantage is that the Zen starts quickly, and continues playing from the exact spot from when it was turned off. After 24 hours, the Zen goes into deep sleep, using far less power; the drawback is that the Zen takes longer to turn on, and continues playing from the start of the song.)

The Creative solution: reduces sleep mode to 4 hours, so that deep sleep comes quicker, consuming less battery power.

Not enough, in my opinion. I think the customer should be allowed to reduce sleep mode to 0. Why should Creative care if I don't mind the Zen taking 15 seconds to wake up, and continue playing from the start of the current song? Long battery life is more important to me.

When to Recharge the Battery?

Different kinds of batteries perform better when they are recharged at a specific point in their discharge cycle. NiCads were notorious: they needed to be fully discharged before being recharged.

The battery in the Zen Micro is a Li-ion polymer battery, which prefers to be recharged when its power gets down to roughly 40% capacity. Representatives of Creative suggest this occurs when the Zen Micro's battery meter is down to one bar.

If the battery should be recharged at 40% for optimal performance, that means the Zen Micro runs just 7.5 hours between recharges.

Turn Off the Equalizer

I find this hard to believe, but apparently the equalizer uses power. To extend the life of the Zen Micro, turn off equalization. No benefit to me: I have the equalizers turned off on all my digital music devices, anyhow, because I find they tend to make the music sound dreadful.

Zen Micro: The Innards

Step-by-step photos of taking apart a Zen Micro 5GB MP3 player: Anatomy of Creative's Zen Micro Audio Player. Taking it apart reveals these tech specs:

* 5GB hard drive is made by Seagate, also used in the Rio Carbon. It looks to me that the drive could be pulled and used in digital cameras that support CompactFlash Type II memory cards.
* The Zen Micro has a 16MB RAM buffer.
* Touchpad uses the controller chip from Synaptics.
* FM radio is by Phillips.

The disassembly is interesting, because it might be possible to subsitute other drives, such as a large capacity flash drive, or a larger capacity hard drive. No word, yet, if this is possible.

Zen Micro Battery Drain

January thru June is the mad book writing season for me. This year I have four books to update for publishers, plus another four of my own. And later on, yet another book for a corporate client.

Writing and updating that much is a task that takes up 10 to 14-hours a day, six to seven days a week. Typically, I get up at 6:30, write some, take the kids to school, and then write (with breaks) until 10pm.

To celebrate the completion of the first two books in this marathon, I rewarded myself with the Zen Micro MP3 player from Creative. It's small, cheaper, and more-featured than the otherwise eqivalent 5GB Apple iPod. For me, the dealmaker was the "special edition" that included most add-ons at no extra cost (extra battery, deskstand, power supply, etc). Yah, I got the one with black faceplate; the only other model in stock at London Drugs was hot pink.

But today I have bad news to relay: a flaw in the Zen Micro's power management means that the 12-hour battery life does not occur under normal operating conditions.

Now, we are all used to manufacturer's overstating battery life by as much as 50%, but this case is different:

* When you run the Zen Micro continuously, you get 12 hours of battery life.
* When you run the unit for a hour a day, you get 6 hours battery life -- the opposite of what you'd expect.

Creative explains that the Zen Micro performs the following power saver functions:

1. After a user-adjustable time of non-activity, the Zen Micro goes into sleep mode. This is a shallow sleep mode that allows it to wake up in 4 seconds when a button is pressed.

2. After 24 hours (not user adjustable) of inactivity, the unit goes into deep sleep mode. This reduces power consumption, but takes longer to wake up -- 15 seconds. Also, the automatic bookmarking is to the nearest song, not to the exact point.

Why a wait of 24 hours? Creative claims that waking up from deep sleep mode take more power than the power wasted being in shallow sleep mode for 24 hours. Members of the nomadness.net forums disagree. Tests by electronics professionals showed Creative's explanation wrong:

* Shallow standby consumes about 1 hour of playtime every 20-24 hours.
* Calculations show that a single battery charge can do over 400 cold boot-ups.

Creative then came up with other creative reasons for shortened battery life:

* Corrupted MP3s
* Greatly fragmented disk drives
* Using older firmware

But independent tests showed these claims to be false, too. The clue seems to be a high-pitched whine given off by the Zen Micro during shallow sleep mode. What is it?

One idea: "The power loss as well as the high-pitched noise could well come from the current transformer that must be present in the ZM to supply the memory used during the live standby (a component that sits between battery and memory and sizes the voltage and amperage coming from the battery down to the lesser current the memory needs). If it operates very inefficiently (apparently not uncommon in cheaper electronic gadgets), it could indeed consume the power the ZM loses during standby."

You can read a detailed summary of the problem at Jan's Web site.