ZEN V Plus WAV

[beluga25]

Hello everyone--

Sorry if this is covered elsewhere, but I tried searching
for "Zen WAV plus" and it said the
words were all too common or short!

Anyway, I'm simply trying to put WAV files on my 4Gb
Zen V Plus because I prefer the audio quality to
MP3s and I just need 20-30 songs at a time, not
5000.

The V Plus says everywhere I look that it supports
WAV, but when I use WMP11 to rip WAV from CDs and
sync it to the Zen there's an error message stating
WMP11 can't convert to the file format the player needs.
If I use Creative's Media Source it only offers me a
maximum rip of 320kbs (which I'll use if I have to).
If I drag the WAVs directly to the player they don't
show up on the display when I try to play them.
Could there be a tag problem I'm not dealing properly
with?

TIA,

Peter
Madison, Wisconsin

[ZenChick]

WAV files are not taggable. That's why they don't display properly. Try looking in the various lists under "Unknown" to see if you can find them.

[beluga25]

Thanks for the response, ZC, but I have to apologize
for mis-speaking about what the Zen is doing.

I recently purchased new MP3 players for my
wife (Sansa C240), daughter (generic MP4/MP3)
and myself (Zen V Plus). When I discovered the
WAV issue with the Zen I started experimenting
with the other players and got mixed up remembeing
which one did what.

Anyway, if I drag WAVs to the Zen, they DO show up on
the display (although if I drag them to "Recordings", not
"Music", they don't show up) but when I try to play them
they give me a "Playback error" message.

I found the WAVs the player generates from the MIC
input are IMA ADPCMs while all my music WAVs are
straight PCM, so I downloaded a trail file converter
to make my PCM WAVs into IMA ADPCMs. Then
they played but were extremely garbled,
almost unrecognizeable.

Oh well, maybe I'll just have to settle for 320kbs!

Thanks again for your time though,


Peter

[ZenChick]

You can encode them with LAME using the VBR-new preset, -V2 setting, and it will produce MP3 files that sound about as good as the originals.

LAME is strictly CLI, so unless you are very comfortable around DOS prompt operations, I suggest getting a GUI frontend for it. RazorLAME is a good front-end. Both LAME and RazorLAME are freely available on the internet.

[beluga25]

OK, ZC, I'm old (55) so I started "around DOS prompt
operations". It should be no problem, although I'll
probably wind up tying the GUI anyway. I'd heard
about LAME, but not familiar with it, so thanks a lot.


--Peter