This 20GB hard-drive-based MP3/WMA player looks cool, nice in the hand, has pretty reasonable controls... and has some odd software with some weird quirks.

• I can't get the Creative software to find the 6GB of music already living on my laptop. Although I've pointed the MediaSource tool at the top level directory of my music repository, it doesn't see anything.
• The Creative folks decided not to make the Zen appear to Windows as a hard disk. I suppose it's because they didn't want to implement a standard filesystem internally. That was a mistake; near as I can tell, the Zen treats the hard disk as if it were a single directory. Each track must be uniquely named by the song title, which is a real problem if you have two or more tracks with exactly the same title (in my case, there are two tracks called “Sunday“ on the soundtrack to Sunday in the Park with George).

I'm going to LA for a 4-day weekend; I'll see how it works for me during that. I'm pairing it with a pair of Bose QuietComfort 2 noise-cancelling headphones (which I adore for air travel); the sound quality should be at least as good as that generated by the Dell C610 laptop I currently use.