SilentChasm

Haven't had any problems with the touchpad. It can be a little sensitive at times but you can reset the sensitivity. I never was a fan of touch pads on MP3 players but I can see why people like them (more precise control of scrolling speed). MTP players allow the folders on the player itself to be accessed and music drug to. You can open it up like an Explorer window and copy the files over just like that. MTP is what's in PlaysForSure devices such as the Zen Vision M. The Player usually has two directorys. \Media Library\ \Data\ Inside Media Library there is a folder for each content type Music, My Playlists, My Recordings, My Slideshows, Pictures, Video, TV(the folder that XP MCE transfers recorded shows to) and ZENcast(Creative's audio/video podcast program) You don't have to use any kind of program: if you have WMP10 or WMP11, you can just drag and drop. It doesn't matter where you put the files(as long as they're in the correct type folder), as they usually get the track info from the ID3 tags.

If you didn't notice from my posts on the Zen Vision M, I have one and it's working perfectly. I used to use a Zen Xtra, and a Nomad IIc before that. I organize everything myself and have over 15GB of music alone. I used to use the software that came with it (Creative MediaSource) but when I reformatted to Win2k (more stable, secure, generally faster) it didn't work with the updated firmware on the player so I switched to Media Monkey and haven't looked back. Media Monkey works with iPods, Zens and other MP3 players and makes tagging and organizing a breeze. Playlist transfer works better than MediaSource and it keeps the track order. Album art can easily be embedded in the tags so it always will display on an iPod or anything else that supports it. Also supports winamp plugins for stuff like chipamp so you can easily convert music. EdgeCrusher: MediaMonkey has an "Auto-tag from filename" feature that makes it really useful for stuff like that. You can just use stuff like strings like <Album>\<Track#> - <Artist> - <Title> or <Year>\<Genre>\<Artist> - <Album>\<Title> and many other ways of doing it including conditional statements in order to tag files and it will automatically change the tags for you. So if you had VGM music (ex. "Chrono Cross - 102 The Brink of Death.mp3" you could set it to \<Album> - <Track#> <Title> and it would tag it for you. There are also other ID3 tagging programs to automatically do it for you. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#Editing_ID3_tags

Inimitable: Zen also has micro ones: http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Portable-Media-Player-Black/dp/B0007Y79G2/sr=8-1/qid=1169288149/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-3453379-9665731?ie=UTF8&s=electronics and the Zen Vision (regular, M, and W) are the video incarnations. shadowbeard: I was under the impression iTunes had the ability to right click on the file in it's interface and convert it to MP3. I've seen it done in other versions but I haven't really ever used iTunes. If you can, then you could then load those files on the zen. You might check iTunes and see if you can convert the files. You could convert them all to MP3 before you buy to ensure that that method works.

I've had the problem with the audio/video sync before too. I set AutoGK to resize the video to Width:320 and audio to MP3 CBR 160 and I haven't had any problems with the sync on the files I converted since then. It can actually load AVI with DivX and Xvid.

Zen Vision: M has a program to convert video if it's incompatible with the player. It will automatically resize it to fit the screen and reencode it to the formats the ZVM supports. You can also use programs like AutoGK and alltoavi to convert videos to compatible formats if you want more settings. iTunes music won't work in its original form. You would need to convert it to mp3 or something else using iTunes or another program to remove the DRM. For podcasts there's the "ZENcast Organizer". It can handle all the video and audio podcasts and automatically transfer them to the player. If something is incompatible it converts it automatically before it transfers it. It supports MPEG, DIVX, XVID and WMV for video. Has a FM radio. You also don't have to use any of the software that comes with it at all if you have WMP10 or WMP11, as it is a MTP device. You can just drag and drop files onto it in folders. You can make playlists/slideshows on your computer and select which tracks/photos you want on them. You can also make playlists on the player itself by adding tracks to the now playing list and saving it as a playlist. Customizable: Set backgrounds, menu appearance and menu configuration (If Music, Video, Pictures, Now Playing, etc are on the main menu and in what order they're displayed). 60GB has a USB Host Feature (plug camera into it and download photos to it without a computer for more storage space).