The new zen (credit card size!!) ..... a few questi

Question

hi just wondering if someone can explain the playlists section to me.
it says in order to create one you must be playing a song and then select add to playlist. when i do select this i have to make a playlist so i do. however when a select add to playlist all the songs in my mp3 are in the playlist automatically?
also is there any speakers you can buy for it and is the clear carry case good or just a bit of plastic?
thanks in advance

Answer 1

Not quite.
"All Tracks" is the list of all the tracks(songs) physically available on the player. Tracks that appear in the various categorical lists (like genre, artist, album, etc.) are subsets of all the available tracks that satisfy the selected criteria (e.g. they are of the selected genre, by the selected artist, part of the selected album, etc.). If you highlight a song in the "All Tracks" list and select "Delete Track" from the menu you'll be deleting that track from the player. If you delete an artist from the Artists list you'll be deleting all the tracks by that artist. Same goes for deleting an album or other categorical collection.
"Now Playing" is different. It is just a scratch-pad area of selected tracks. Only tracks in the selected list will be played and shuffled among. This list can contain anything from nothing to the entire set of tracks loaded on the player. Usually it will be somewhere in between, such as the song from one album, the songs by one artist or the specfic songs in one of your existing playlists. When you use the "Remove Track" menu item you are simply taking the track out of the selected music list. It doesn't delete the track from the player (note they used "remove" rather than "delete" to help point out this difference). It also only impacts the "Now Playing" list -- the song will still remain in any appropriate category to which it belongs based on its artist, album, genre, playlist membership, etc.
At any given time the current list of selected music can be saved as a new playlist (or, for that matter, saved to overwrite an existing playlist). To edit an existing playlist you'd start by telling the player to play the playlist (which moves its tracks into "Now Playing" as the selected music list), remove tracks from the selected music list and/or add tracks from the music library on the player via "Add To Selected" and finally save it out again from "Now Playing" using "Save As Playlist" (overwriting the original playlist name).
I hope this is clear. It isn't very complex in practice. It looks more complicated than it is in print. I couldn't even tell you if this is covered in the online docs on the CD that comes with the player; I never loaded nor looked at it either.