Major Bug in Creative’s Zen Touch MP3 Player

I’ve found a nasty bug in Creative’s Zen Touch portable audio player. I’m surprised to find a bug like this one in a third generation product (at least).

Suppose your music library has a few songs that you don’t really know which album they came from. Let’s say you write-in “” in the song’s ID tag.

Now suppose you decide to clean up some songs from your Zen Touch. Perhaps you don’t want all those Nirvana songs playing when you hit “random play”. Now, if you go to “Artists“, select “Nirvana” and choose “Delete Artist” then great, all your Nirvana songs will be erased from the Zen Touch.

But if you select “Nirvana” (or any other artist, it doesn’t really matter) and select “Show Albums” and then select the “” and “Delete Album“, ALL THE SONGS IN YOUR ZEN TOUCH THAT COME FROM AN ALBUM NAMED “” WILL BE DELETED… REGARDLESS OF WHICH ARTIST SINGS THEM!

This happened to me this weekend with songs tagged as “” and “” in the album field. I have yet to try with other album names (i.e., what happens when two or more artists have albums with the same title?), but this is really unacceptable behavior from a seasoned product.

One other thing really bothering me lately is the “CTPdeSrv.exe” process launched by Creative’s software once you connect the Zen Touch to your computer. The process will hog all resources even after you disconnect the player from your computer. I’m checking to see if there’s a conflict with Redchair’s Notmad Explorer, which I’ve also installed.