Creative MuVo Micro N200 256 MB MP3 Player White

After reading many good reviews on this item, I bought it. There were a series of disappointments.1 - The instructions - TERRIBLE is a good description. Incomplete, misleading, confusing - both in the written and windows help file on the cd that is inexplicably not installed on your computer.2 - The method of getting the tunes on the player is not well documented at all. The instructions lead you to using the proprietary juke box program that very poorly mimics Windows Media Player. It turns out you don't need the juke box at all. You can just use Windows Explorer to drag and drop. The almost completely undocumented MuVo Explorer does have the nice feature of compressing and converting files on the fly as they copy to the player. Unfortunately, even on my 2.4 Gigahertz cpu it drags on for a LONG, LONG time. Why?3 - The arm band is way overkill. It is built for BIG arms and could carry a one pound dumb-bell. There is a neck strap tie point on the MuVo, but it does not come with a neck strap. I made my own and it was perfect.4 - The controls and screen are too tiny and not intuitive. Switching between FM and Music sometimes takes moving the icon about 5 notches, sometimes not at all. It is inexplicable and unpredictable. You cannot make this important mode switch blindly and have to squint to watch the micro icons scroll by and get the right one. If you click the wrong one you will get unexpected and unwanted results like the entire screen flipping over 180 degrees.5 - Here is the show stopper for which I will be returning the MuVo after a week's use: the loudness goes to "40" but sounds like "4." The radio, and some ripped cd's are ok at near or full volume, but none of my Grateful Dead cd's were listenable at full volume. Walking on the street a passing car drowned out all the sound, even with an alternate headphone that is very efficient.

I had moderate expectations with regards this. My daughter (age 11) has been eye-balling all the iPods her friends are getting, but I couldn't afford them (especially the Mini, which I understand is being phased out in deference to the iPod NaNo. Plus, I liked the idea of a flash memory based storage, and the advertized ease of draging-and-dropping MP3's and WMA's into and out of the player. And that she could connect it to her CD-player to import songs as MP3's, without the need of a computer.Well, it has been everything I'd hoped it would be for her. She loves it, and her iPod-ish friends think its cool, too. It is sturdier than I expected, very small, and weighs almost nothing, so I can see why it would be appealing for jogging/aerobics. She also likes the FM radio (though reception is not exceptional except for the strongest signals) and the digital voice recorder features. It has been relatively intuitive for her to figure out - otherwise it would have gotten shoved in a drawer. She keeps a library of MP3's and WMA's on her computer, and drags-n-drops files between the MuVo and her computer, for whatever ~4 hours of music she wants to take around with her. Frankly, I think this beats having to try to use your MP3-player as the library of all your music - less tragic if something happens to your player if you have your master library at home on the computer (which you are of course backing up regularly, right?). She gets excellent run-time off of a rechargeable AAA battery (my estimate at this point, 25 to 30 hours). I strongly recommend investing in a pair of rechargeable batteries (one in the unit, one in reserve), as they seem to run longer, and will pay for themselves over the cost of akaline batteries very shortly. And get a charger for them.Also, it's nice to work with MP3's and WMA's instead of the semi-proprietary M4A format. And make sure you understand that this unit will not play M4A's.These must be getting popular, as the price is now ~$14 more than I had paid in August.Hope this helps.

I have been through two of these units, and neither one operated properly for more than a few hours. I spent hours corresponding with Creative's help desk trying to correct the "programming error" on the first unit, and nothing worked. I finally returned it and got a replacement, which also malfunctioned after the first use. Problems varied from not staying powered on, to forward and reverse buttons turning off the unit rather than doing what they are supposed to, and also the memory malfunctioning so that when I turned it off or paused it and turned it back on, it picked up at a totally different location. There are supposedly downloads you can get to correct these errors, but I don't think it's too much to expect a new product to function properly for several months, let alone a few hours!Buy something else!