Creative MuVo TX review

Aside from its new colour scheme, the MuVo TX looks identical to the MuVo NX.

It's extremely compact and, with a USB plug built into the device, it doubles as a Flash memory drive for transferring files between PCs. The battery compartment holds a single AAA battery. Although this isn't as elegant as a built-in rechargeable battery, it does mean you can take spares with you. An alkaline Duracell battery kept the MuVo TX going for more than 14 hours. However, it's disappointing that Creative hasn't addressed the less-than-robust build quality.

Plug it in, and the MuVo TX appears as a removable drive in My Computer, allowing you to drag and drop folders full of MP3 or WMA files. This should make loading music easy, but the player can't read track orders from their ID3 tags, and instead plays each folder's contents in alphabetical order. This means file names will need to start with their track number if you want to play albums in order. Bizarrely, the supplied MediaSource software can't do this automatically, so you're better off using iTunes or one of its competitors - see page 86. MediaSource's ability to recompress music as it's transferred is useful, though, as it allows you to keep large, high-quality music files on your PC, and reduce their size as you transfer them to the MuVo. This enables you to fit more into its 243MB formatted capacity. The downside is that it makes transfers very slow - it took almost six minutes to convert and transfer a 43-minute album on our 1GHz test PC.

Fortunately, transfers are otherwise pretty quick. You can write to the MuVo TX at 2.42MB/s - a huge improvement over the 0.6MB/s write speed offered by its predecessor, the MuVo NX. The supplied headphones are the same ones that come with the MuVo 2 , which provide much fuller bass than those bundled with the NX. High frequencies could be clearer, though, and they're pretty big for in-ear headphones. The player itself sounds good, although we'd have like it to go a bit louder.

The MuVo TX is one of the better Flash memory-based players we've seen - but also one of the most expensive. Unless you want something shock-resistant for use during sport, we'd recommend spending a little more on Rio's 1.5GB Nitrus.