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MuVo V100 Menus and Controls

The MuVo V100 has a deceptively simple set of controls. The unit has only four buttons: a power key that doubles as a pause button when pressed lightly, volume + and – keys, and a multipurpose scroll wheel.To use the V100, you must first learn the mysterious ways of its scroll wheel. When moved forward or back, it navigates through songs, song folders, or menu items. When depressed, it acts as an enter key which confirms your choice of a folder or a menu item. When lightly moved back and forth during audio play, the it serves as a jog dial.

The scroll wheel serves so many functions that it turns into a roulette wheel in untrained hands. Woe betide the listener who tries to navigate through a 60-minute long podcast file and accidentally pushes the wheel hard enough to jump to the next song. Trouble waits for the impatient newbie who tries to skip ahead with the V100 in his pocket, depresses the wheel by accident, and ends up surfing settings rather than songs.

Once you get the hang of the scroll wheel, however, you’ll find yourself exploring the graphic equalizer settings, toying with the LCD brightness settings, or even using the voice recorder function. You’ll also appreciate the V100’s ability to easily move between folders and songs. The V100 allows you to shuffle through songs randomly, play sequentially by filename, move between tracks, or move between folders.

MuVo V100 Folders

More experienced listeners will find themselves creating folders for music based on genre, artist, or album. The V100 comes with three main folders by default: Library A, Library B, and Library C.Unfortunately, any new folders you create will be treated as subfolders, whether those folders live in the drive root or underneath one of the three library folders. Once you get the hang of it, you can easily navigate to your custom folders by entering the V100’s “skip folder” mode and depressing the wheel to enter the root directory or one of the library folders.

MuVo V100 LCD Display

The V100’s LCD provides sharp, legible text and a bright backlight. The screen displays the basics and a little more, showing not only song titles, folder names, and time counters, but also lyrics if available.Seeing the lyrics to a song while it’s playing is a neat feature, but unfortunately the burden of finding and entering lyrics is on the user. It’s not enough to know the lyrics to a song; you have to program the actual timing of each word or phrase into a custom LRC file created by the player’s bundled software. A Google search revealed a handful of sites with only a few dozen LRC files each.

MuVo V100 Bundled Software

One of the best things about the V100 is that it doesn’t need any special software or drivers to connect to a PC. Nevertheless, the player comes bundled with Creative Labs’ MediaSource 5 suite. Divided into music organizer, audio batch converter, and media player applications, MediaSource can rip music from CDs, organize songs into folders, play media on the PC, and transfer files to portable devices like the MuVo V100.The MediaSource Organizer puts its own spin on organization standard features you’ll find in other music organizers. The first time you run the organizer, it analyzes all the music files on your PC and sorts them by artist. If you have the time and inclination, you can add myriad details about each track including a genre (ex: rock, pop, rap), a rating (one to five stars), and a mood (ex: romantic, aggressive, playful). You can then instruct the organizer to create smart playlists based on these criteria.

Unfortunately, what happens on your PC stays on your PC, because the V100 doesn’t support playlists. Apparently, Creative’s more expensive players have playlist functionality so this feature is more useful to owners of those products.

One feature that directly benefits V100 users is SmartFit. SmartFit maximizes the V100’s capacity by converting MP3 files into WMA format while they transfer. Users can choose lower bit-rates to squeeze even more songs onto the player.

The MediaSource Player offers little to distinguish itself from Windows Media Player. Like Windows Media Player, MediaSource is capable of opening MP3, WMA, and WAV files. Like Windows XP’s built-in sound recorder, the Creative player can record audio from a microphone or line-in.The MediaSource Audio Converter is nothing to write home about. It allows you to convert batches of WAV,WMA, or MP3 files to WMA or WAV format. Want to convert something to an MP3? Creative wants you to shell out another $9.99 for what it calls an “MP3 Audio Pack.” I call it a waste of money. You can download lots of free programs that will convert to and from MP3 for free

Who Should Not Buy the MuVo V100?

Music fans who want to carry their entire collection of tunes with them at all times will be disappointed by the V100’s modest 1GB or 2GB capacity space. iTunes customers will be turned off by the inability of the V100 to play songs carrying Apple’s rights management scheme.

Who Should Buy the MuVo V100?

Listeners who want an extremely portable player with great battery life, solid sound, and the ability to double as a USB key drive will appreciate the V100. They’ll even learn to master the V100’s scroll “wheel of fortune” in short order.