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Library Navigation
Navigation (1.43)
There are four tools at your disposal for browsing menus. The primary way to navigate menus is with the top-center and bottom-center keys, which will auto-scroll when the key is held. The top-left and bottom-left keys jump to the start or end of a list. You can press the right-center key to access an alphabetical scroll (you can select a letter to jump to all items beginning with that letter). The top-right and bottom-right keys will partially skip down a list, but they're a bit unreliable since they often skip down by an arbitrary amount.
While there were many tools at our disposal, the X-Fi scored poorly on our timing test. This test measures how long it takes to skip from one specific song to another specific song. The X-Fi did this a few seconds slower than our current average time. Part of the reason for this poor score is that the X-Fi is somewhat slow to respond to inputs. Also, while the searching tools are nice, they're a bit cumbersome to use.
Sorting options (7.25)
You can view your music by playlist, album, artist, genre, or all tracks in their entirety. Video files can be viewed by "video," which shows all your videos, or by TV, which is a label applied by Creative's sync software.
Search options (2.00)
You can search through your library in a few ways. You can use the top-left and bottom-left buttons to skip to the beginning or end of a playlist. The top-right and bottom-right buttons skip through playlist items, but don't really do so in a logical way. Of course, you can always opt to use the top-center and bottom-center keys to scroll through the list. Holding the keys down will autoscroll.
Playlists (5.92)
Making playlists on the X-Fi isn't particularly easy to do, initially, mainly because there's no "New Playlist" option. What you can do is save a song that's currently playing as a playlist, then add other songs to it via the options button and the "Add to selected" command. This is somewhat unintuitive and clumsy, but once you've started adding things to a list the process is straight-forward.
The device also comes with quite a few built-in playlists available, courtesy of the DJ feature. These playlists will change dynamically based on your listening habits and other criteria: recently added, album of the day, random play all, most popular, rarely heard, highly rated, and yet to be rated. If you choose to use the Creative Centrale software, you will also be able to sync over a few more playlists, the most significant of which is the "recently added" playlist.
Equalizer & Filters (10.75)
The Creative Zen X-Fi's equalizer has 5 different frequency bands for you to fool around with 80Hz, 250Hz, 1kHz, 4kHz, 13kHz. Each band has each of which has 13 different levels (-6 to +6). There are also 8 equalizer presets: acoustic, classical, disco, jazz, new age, pop, rock, vocal.
The Zen X-Fi's name is partially derived from Creative's like of X-Fi products, which hinge on some unspecified audio quality. As such, you can opt to turn on the X-Fi crystalizer or expander, both of which alter how your music sounds. The crystalizer will, according to the manual, "made audio richer, clearer, and closer to the original sound." The expander will "give sound a realistic and 'live performance' feel." We attest to the fact that both of these features change how the audio sounds, but we'll leave it up to you and your own subjectivity to determine whether or not they're worth switching on.
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