I am a very happy owner of Creative's Nomad Jukebox Zen.
I thought my MP3 files were properly tagged, but once I started playing them on my Zen I soon realized that some changes were required. These changes were essentially motivated by the fact that the Zen's screen is smaller (in height and width) than my computer screen, as well as the fact that the thumb wheel is a bit cumbersome to scroll through many lines with.
I've always hated having artists with names like "Fixx, The". I've always wanted to see the name as it's spoken, i.e. "The Fixx". This is actually supported by ID3v2 (2.4.0). The TSOP field will contain "Fixx, The", and the "TOPE" field will contain "The Fixx". The Zen will sort the Artists by the "TSOP" field, but always display the "TOPE" field.
The same is true for the album and track names.
| Display | Sort | |
| Artist | TOPE | TSOP |
| Album | TALB | TSOA |
| Track | TIT2 | TSOT |
OK, nobody does this right, but I would love it if they did. I've always hated multi-cd sets. For example: I have Pink Floyd's The Wall which is a 2 CD set. Each CD has 13 tracks. On my Zen I would really like to Select "Pink Floyd", and then see one entry for "The Wall". If I started playing "The Wall" it would play tracks 1-13 from disk 1 first, and then play tracks 1-13 from disk 2 second. i.e. play them in the order that I would have played them had I used my CD's.
The problem is that if I give both of these CD's the same name when I encoded them then I would have two track 1's, two track 2's, ... , two track 13's. The Zen (and most other players) would then play both track 1's, and then both track 2's, etc. The best solution I have for this is to set the first CD's album title to "The Wall (Disc 1)", and the second "The Wall (Disk 2)". This works, but I now have two entries for what is really one album, and it takes more steps than necessary to play.
The solution is to support the "TPOS" field. I would set all disc 1 tracks to "1/2", and all disc 2 tracks to "2/2". The Zen could then do the right thing.
Most people don't know that there's actually a ton of fields to list the artist(s) - about a dozen. Most encoders put the artist string into the "TPE1" field with is really the "Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)".
This works fine for most popular music where the performer is the composer ("TCOM"), but it fails for classical music. When I want to listen to classical music I want to see "J.S. Bach" as the artist, and "Yo-Yo Ma" as the performer.
I realize that most MP3's out there don't have anything filled in for the composer, but if that value were present then please consider the composer to be the artist, otherwise use the TPE1 field.
In addition to the Genre moods can be specified in an ID3v2 tag. For example "Romantic" or "Sad".
Content group descriptions are also a good thing. Classical spans a 300 year timeframe, and to be forced to use "Classical" as the sole descriptor is a bit confining. Content group descriptions allow me to specify "Baroque" or "String Quartet". I know this can be achieved with playlists, but that is manual.