Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) is utilised on a range of devices, but especially so by Creative. Creative Zens (and their variants) utilise the protocol. Whilst the Creative NOMAD isn’t MTP, it too uses an awkward protocol not natively supported by OS X. The infamous Zune (in the eyes of an Apple fanboy) too uses MTP, however, Microsoft make it very difficult to transfer data to.

XNJB is a piece of software that provides a graphical front-end to a libnjb and libmtp: free and open source libraries that allow communication with devices like Creative NOMADs and Creative Zens. Unfortunately, neither support the Zune, due to additional restrictions Microsoft put in place. The libraries work on other POSIX operating systems, like Linux, but XNJB does not.

XNJB allows users to upload and download songs from their media players, for ID3 data to be edited and devices searched. All of this has to be done within the software; it is not integrated into iTunes or Finder.

The transfer of data felt a bit slow to me, but I expect this is primarily due to the messiness of my library and the nature of Media Transfer Protocol.

This software is, however, a useful tool when you first got the Mac. I do, though, doubt you could realistically continue to use a MTP device successfully with OS X. Naturally, you could use it inside Boot Camp or a virtual machine, but in my opinion, that too is not an ideal option.

Compatible devices are listed on their website.

Recently though, I’ve decided to invest in an mp3 player. I knew about the standard players available but after doing some more research, I’m more confused than ever. So I decided to ask the tech-savvy readers at Ghacks to help me make my decision.

Now I’m looking at hard-drive based players with a minimum capacity of 60 GB. Here are some of my thoughts on the different players so far:

Apple iPod Classic: Good battery life (30 hours for audio) and file storage capacity (120 GB). I’m not too keen on it though because it’s very restrictive as far as supported file formats are concerned. I don’t want to spend hours just converting my videos. Also, I’ve read that new versions of iTunes place a lot of restrictions on the machine.

Zune 80/120: This one is last on my list. Battery life is decent but that’s about it. Video format support is really poor.

Archos: Not bad but not great either. Battery life and file format support is just about okay. Storage capacity is good. The player itself is a little on the bulky side as well.

Creative Zen Vision W: The sort-of runner up. Creative had decent battery life (13.5 for audio and 5 for video) and supports a good-sized number of file formats. However, the player doesn’t seem to support videos encoded with the H.264 codec or those in the Mpeg-4 format. Also, at 60 GB, it’s the lowest in terms of storage capacity.

Cowon A3: If I had to choose a player based on features alone, this one would be it. The A3 has 80 GB of storage and plays virtually every audio and video file format you throw at it. In fact, the only format that it doesn’t play is AAC file with DRM and Quicktime movies, both of which I don’t use anyway. Besides this Cowon’s A3 can be connected directly to both standard and hi-definition TVs and can even record from the TV. It’s perfect. The only drawback is the battery life. The official site says that the A3 can play 7 hours of video and 10 hours of audio. In practice, I have no idea how long it lasts.

So now I’m stuck between the Creative Zen Vision W and the Cowon A3. They cost almost the same. Should I be concerned about the lesser battery life on the Cowan? I assume I can also hook it up to an adaptor and play it when I’m at home. If I do take my player out, it’s probably not going to be used for more than 5-6 hours.

Please help me out with this. What portable media player do you use? Are you happy with the storage capacity, file formats supported, and battery life/ Any advice for me? Let me know in the comments.

Aviary is a suite of web based creative tools. Each of the tools has been named after some kind of bird, so you’ll have to get used to nearly 20 names like “Phoenix”, “Hawk” and “Raven”.

All of our tools are based right in your browser or as downloadable AIR applications. Our tools all communicate and relate to each other. To illustrate an example: You can import a swatch from Toucan into Phoenix, while doing complex bitmap processing of a 3D object developed in Hummingbird. Finally, you can take your finished artwork and lay it out in Owl as the DVD artwork for a music CD you and your friends put together in Roc and Myna and offer it for sale in our marketplace, Hawk.

Aviary is still very much under development and is strictly in invitation only beta. You can however sign up with the early “early bird invitations” form and specify what type of tools interest you, such as “image editing” or “desktop publishing”.

I actually have no idea how many of these tools are actually completed or at what stage the project is at. I have received an invite to two, “Phoenix” and “Peacock”, an image editor and pattern generator.

All I can say is that these applications are fantastic. They run from the web but act exactly like desktop software. It loaded fast and I experienced no lags or anything to indicate this wasn’t just a normal program running on my computer. Phoenix is fantastic program and almost matches Photoshop for functionality. In fact some of the example images produced are completely comparable to those produced by the commercial application.

When you receive your invitation you’ll get a user account which provides you with a dashboard and a place to save, store and showcase what you have created and a central place you can access all your applications from.

Daniel_K was also told to stop distributing drivers for sound cards that would enable features that were not intended for them. The community outcry is huge. The thread was started yesterday and it reached page 26 with most forum users vowing to never buy a Creative product again siding exclusively with Daniel_K.

I think the main point that is making it extremely frustrating for most users is the fact that one guy was able to fix driver issues while the Creative driver developer team failed. A smart move if you ask me would be to hire that guy right of the forum unless there is a reason why the development took that long.

The drivers are already spreading on various torrent websites and it seems that this is going to be a public relations nightmare for Creative.

All you need is to know the name of the old card, the name of the new card and the freeware Driver Cleaner Professional. Don’t get irritated by the professional, it is completely free to use. Download the freeware and install it. The next step is important. The first thing to do would be to use the uninstall option in Windows to remove everything that could be left from the old drivers.

The best way to run Driver Cleaner Professional would be right after you have uninstalled the old drivers and applications but still have the old card connected to your system. Just start Driver Cleaner and choose the name of the drivers that you want to remove. You can for instance choose a general name like ATI or Nvidia which removes all information about those drivers on your system.

Another option would be to choose a specific driver, like ATI WDM and remove that one only. The program removes all references in the registry and all drivers that are stored on the system.

If the new card is already connected to your system you might run into troubles if the card is from the same company. I suggest you still delete all references and install the newest drivers after you have rebooted your machine.

Update: Driver Cleaner Professional is no longer free software. The developers are now charging for the program. See Remove Old Windows Drivers for a free alternative.