Creative Zen and Mac Os X

I have a (relatively old now) Creative Zen Vision M mp3 player.

Zen Vision M

So its not the slimmest or most elegant piece of kit in the world, but it plays music (thats why we all wanted these things in the first place, right?), videos and has more than enough storage.

Great.

Problem is, I’m also a fairly dedicated Mac user. I have a Macbook running Leopard. I didn’t really think about it and assumed there wouldn’t be any problems. The naivity of youth. Are these compatible? Does the Pope shit in the woods?

No, no he doesn’t.

What would be really nice would be for Creative to release a handy little iTunes plugin for the Zen series, to introduce all of the integration and flexibility of the iPod to this platform.

Ahahahahahaha. But seriously. It is a little annoying.

So yes, I have reluctantly dual booted XP for those essential windows tasks, this seemingly one of them. But wait, help is at hand. Enter Richard Low, saviour of the meek. In terms of platform compatibility issues anyway. His open source XNJB application really does a good job of getting audio on and off your mp3 player. Videos and pictures are a bit hit and miss* but in essence, I can’t fault it.

Head over to his page to download it.

*As far as I know. I haven’t looked into it in detail because I don’t really feel the urge to watch films on a 2.5″ screen. But if you really can’t bear to be separated from your tiny TFT porn, use the Windows apps.