Creative mobile player for FLAC files

I must declare that I have no commercial interest in this news article which I thought would be of interest to the audiophiles here:


Creative Technology has unveiled the ZEN X-Fi2, a media player with broad format support and a slew of rich features.  Notably supporting Apple's AAC and the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) audio formats, it also plays music files that are encoded in MP3, WMA and Audible 4 formats.  It plays video encoded in WMV9, MPEG4-SP, DivX 4/5 and XviD formats and can display JPEG and BMP images.  Available in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB models, it comes with a 3-inch touchscreen, X-Fi audio technology, FM radio, microSD card slot, speakers, voice recorder and TV-out interface.

For more details go to Creative's on-line store (sg.store.creative.com) and www.creative.com/zenxfi2.

Creative Technology is the company that developed the Soundblaster card.

It's a shame how the mp3 player market has been so squeezed by Apple.  Innovation has been strangled it seems, as my 5 year old iriver plays FLAC perfectly happily.

It's odd that they make different sizes of memory though - wouldn't they be better advised ditching the internal memory altogether and fitting as many SD slots as poss?  Make it SDxc compatible, stick three slots in, and you've got a capacity of 250Gb  in a couple of years, and 48Gb pretty easily now. 

Portable hard drives should be obsolete soon - interesting to see what Apple then try and do with the ipod.

Penetration_Guru wrote:

Portable hard drives should be obsolete soon - interesting to see what Apple then try and do with the ipod.

I dunno about your country, but here in India people are going for protable hard drives in a big way. 500 gb Wester Digital portable hard disks have been selling really well and I just heard that they've introduced 1 TB and 2TB capacity disks now. Almost everyone at my wor place owns an external HDD. USB Pen drives were all the rage till recently but the external hard discs are more cost-effective. So not sure what the alternative would be, if they're going to be obsolete soon. Or maybe I misunderstood you?

Interestingly 500 GB WD hdd costs roughly 4500 rupees, 1 TB costs 6000 but the 2 TB costs approx 20000. Not sure why 2 TB is so expensive.