Creative MuVo Micro N200 512 MB

...the MP3 player. The Creative Muvo Micro N200 512MB seemed like the perfect option for me (although it does have one of the most confusing names around), so now I'll tell you all about it!

~~~~~~~ CREATIVE INDUSTRIES ~~~~~~~

To start, a little introduction. Creative Industries is a digital entertainment company from Singapore, which was founded in 1981. They make PC sound and graphics cards, as well as various other audiovisual ...
...being just plastic with the Creative logo on it. I think the Creative earphones look pretty cool as well, they're a little bit like the iPod ones; quite minimalist.

~~~~~~~ EASY TO USE? ~~~~~~~

Appearance is all well and good, but can you actually listen to your music easily? Luckily, the answer is a resounding yes. I'm completely terrible with computers, but I found it easy to get my songs onto it. Rather than plugging ... more

After years of faith in my CD Walkman, I finally relented and succumbed to the temptation of the MP3 player. The Creative Muvo Micro N200 512MB seemed like the perfect option for me (although it does have one of the most confusing names around), so now I'll tell you all about it!

~~~~~~~ CREATIVE INDUSTRIES ~~~~~~~

To start, a little introduction. Creative Industries is a digital entertainment company from Singapore, which was founded in 1981. They make PC sound and graphics cards, as well as various other audiovisual technology products, and they've now moved into the digital audio players market. After Apple iPods they're the leading MP3 brand. As well as making the Muvo Micro in 128, 256, 512MB and 1GB sizes, they do a whole range of other models, including the Zen Micro, Zen Nano (which I think came before the iPod Nano) and their latest, the Zen Vision, which plays videos, movies and music, and is available in up to 30GB.

~~~~~~~ APPEARANCE ~~~~~~~

This model is Creative's smallest and lightest MP3 player, and it's available in black or white. Weighing in at just 22 grams including AAA battery, you can hardly feel it as you walk down the street with it in a pocket. Its smooth, shiny black and silver plastic outer is sleek and stylish, and it has a rather small display, which can be lit up if you please. To be honest, I find the screen a bit too small since it only takes up about one sixth of the front surface, the rest being just plastic with the Creative logo on it. I think the Creative earphones look pretty cool as well, they're a little bit like the iPod ones; quite minimalist.

~~~~~~~ EASY TO USE? ~~~~~~~

Appearance is all well and good, but can you actually listen to your music easily? Luckily, the answer is a resounding yes. I'm completely terrible with computers, but I found it easy to get my songs onto it. Rather than plugging the actual MP3 player into your USB drive as most do, you need a special USB to Mini cable. (I presume this is provided with the player if you buy it from a shop, but I got mine on eBay, so I had to buy it separately. If you do buy this on eBay and it doesn't come with a cable, don't worry, I got one for £1.50.) It's incredibly simple to put your music onto the player, just plug it in, choose your songs and away you go.

Once the songs are on there, you want to find and listen to them easily. The one big disadvantage of this type of MP3 player against a jukebox type is that there are no folders. That means you have to flick through your big list of songs until you find the one you want. This isn't such a problem if you don't have many songs on there, but I think that this 512MB player holds about 135 songs, and if you have this many it can take a while to find a specific song. Obviously the exact number of songs you can fit depends on how long they last and what quality they are (MP3/WMA), but I think 512MB is the right amount of memory for a regular listener. Who needs thousands of songs? When would you ever listen to all those? About 135 is perfect, and you can easily take tracks off when you get bored and put new ones on.

The controls of the player are overall quite good. It's mostly done with a flicky wheel type thing, where you push it from side to side to scroll through items, and press it in to select. This can be a little fiddly to use since it's so small, and occasionally you can accidentally press it when you meant to twist it, but you soon get used to it. There are also two buttons for volume up and down, and a button on the front for the power and pause/play. Nothing too complicated really, and after about 20 minutes I completely understood the whole MP3 player.

~~~~~~~ FEATURES ~~~~~~~

This MP3 player has plenty of features. Well, as many as I would want anyway. As well as playing your MP3 tracks, this model has a FM radio with 32 possible presets. The radio quality is generally good, although in some positions and areas you may get fuzziness. You can even record directly from the radio onto the player and listen to these over and over. If you love the sound of your own voice, there's a microphone of reasonable standard for recording stuff and listening to it. You can play your tracks in shuffle mode, repeated, alphabetically, or there's a strange option to play a section of music between two points over and over again. Needless to say I haven't really found this particularly useful yet, although maybe when I become a DJ and want to do some funky remixes…

The sound quality of the music obviously depends on the quality of the headphones, and since I don't actually own the Creative earphones that normally come with this, I can't comment on that. But with the headphones I have, the sound is perfect for your downloaded music. The quality when listening to microphone recordings isn't that brilliant (but this is the same with any microphone recording), and the quality of the radio recordings depends on the quality of the radio in the first place (which is mostly good). The volume levels are just right, and cover a surprisingly large range. In a silent room, you can easily listen on level 1 out of 25 and hear perfectly. In a busy street, 15 out of 25 blocks out all background noise, and anything approaching 25 is probably at dangerous levels for your long-term hearing (i.e. perfect for rock fans).

The settings menu lets you adjust all sorts of things, from the language of the display, to the length of time the backlight stays on for, to the individual, customisable sound settings for if you like extra bass. You can lock the player to stop it turning on or off, and it can automatically switch off if you leave it idle, to preserve battery life. Talking of which, the battery life is quite good. It obviously depends on the quality of your batteries, but the one I've had in has lasted somewhere between 12 and 15 hours and is not quite dead yet! So much for iPods which last for about 6 hours between charges! Rechargeable AAA batteries are the way forward!

~~~~~~~ VALUE FOR MONEY ~~~~~~~

Ah yes, we must come onto financial dealings. The best place to buy it from might be the Creative website,

www.creative.com

they have it here for £51.47 including delivery. On amazon.co.uk it's £58.23, and I've seen the price as much as £75. Of course if you shop around you can pick it up for less, and I bought mine on eBay for £40. It didn't come with headphones or a USB cable, but after buying these, the whole package cost me under £50. Not bad at all for a 512MB player, and if you sell all the CDs you put on here, you could probably make a lot of that money back!

The quality of the product is possibly not the best around since it is fairly easy to scratch the plastic case (although iPods too are notoriously bad for scratching), but I think that even at £75 you are getting a very good MP3 player for your money. I have had absolutely no technical malfunctions or problems of any kind, and nothing has broken… yet! I've read people complaining about how the blue backlight makes a buzzing sound, but this is so ridiculously quiet that they must have been nit-picking and searching for a fault.

~~~~~~~ OVERALL ~~~~~~~

I would definitely recommend this MP3 player. As my first foray into the world of digital music players, I don't particularly know the field, but this certainly ticks most of the boxes for me. It's not perfect and it has its faults, but at the end of the day it's a lot cheaper than an iPod, probably just as good, and you won't look like a sheep as you walk down the street! Hope you've enjoyed reading!

4 stars
 

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