I'm planing to buy Creative Zen Touch in a few weeks. The reason for this is simple: it's the best MP3 player that I can afford myself right now, and Ipod is VERY expensive in my country. Plus, some more advanced players (like Iriver) are hard to find because there are only few distributors.

Let's cut to the case.

I have never made a complete MP3 archive of my CD's so far, but I will start ripping tomorrow, to be ready for the new player. I decided to use preset standard setting that most people here recomend, but I've read in some reviews on Amazon.com that new Zen has a problem with VBR (doesn't display time correctly). A few people recomended VBR fix, but the autors of these reviews said that it didn't help.

So if someone here has Creative Zen Touch, I would like to hear your experience with it regarding VBR, and please recomend me which setting would be the best compromise for use on Zen, if the VBR time displaying problem can't be solved.

Thanks.

I have a Zen Touch. Happy with it. Good choice. Better sound that iPod and cheaper. Spend your money on a good headphone.
Concerning vbr, I intensively use alt preset standard with lame 3.90.3 and I don't have any problem, it rocks

Sorry I dunno the answer - I have no Zen - but I know a forum that might help you:

nomadness forum

I don't have a Zen Touch but have a Zen Xtra. My Zen has ONLY --alt-preset standard files (ripped with LAME 3.90.3). I don't have even a single CBR or some shit downloaded off the internet. I have not faced any problems playing these files for the past 11 months or so that I have owned the Zen Xtra. Since both of them possibly share the same decoder, I don't think there should be any problems.
In fact there have been reports that the all too famous iPod can't decode --alt-preset standard files correctly. I cannot verify the authenticity of this information.
In short, I guess you will not have any problems with your new Zen Touch. Enjoy!!

I can verify this...it's bullshit

Thanks to all.

Well, I suppose I'll start to rip my CDs at LAME APS now.

No worries

I own a zen touch and there is no problem with the track time for VBR MP3s on the zen touch (almost all the music on my zen is in VBR MP3 format.) But the player does have a problem displaying "some" VBR WMA track times and also dsiplays the progress bar incorrectly for these WMA files. There were also reports of skipping of a few seconds at the beginning of VBR WMA files on the zen touch (although the last firmware update was supposed to resolve this problem.) I myself have never experienced WMA files skipping on my player.

track lenght prob:
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/bo...d=111164#M29301