This music bytes into your heart

By PETER GRIFFIN

A few months ago the Apple iPod music player came into my life. I managed to get it to talk to my PC and I fell in love.

There's nothing like being able to slip 10Gb of heavy metal into your pocket, all of it just the spin of a dial away.

But there's a thriving market for low-end, lightweight players - if you're happy enough getting around with Mbs rather than Gbs of sound.

The Nomad MuVo from Creative Labs fills that space nicely. At 75g it's vastly portable and with 64Mb and 128Mb versions is capable of holding an hour or two of music.

No cables and no software are required. It's plug and play to the max.

And it's designed around the user-friendly USB port, which on newer Machines has shifted from the dusty rear of the computer to adorn the front casing and even keyboards.

The MuVo breaks into two pieces, one housing an AAA battery that will provide around 10 hours of playing time, the other, a simple control and a solid-state memory unit with a built-in USB port.

There's no battery-sucking LCD and adorning buttons have been kept to a minimum.

The most you will be doing is pressing "play" or skipping through the tracks. There's no built-in equaliser or bass and treble controls, but the sound is crisp, surprisingly so for such a small device.

Installing the MuVo on a Windows 2000, Me or XP machine will remove the need to install a driver.

Simplicity was the design brief here. Creative hasn't tried to put any fiddly copyright protection measures in place to make it hard to transfer songs.

I did all my file swapping in bog-standard Windows Explorer, where the MuVo appears as just another drive when it's plugged in.

You can use Creative's PlayCenter software to transfer songs to the MuVo, but why clutter up your hard drive with another media player when you can drop and drag with existing ones or a file manager?

Like the iPod, the MuVo also acts as a data storage device. You can load it up with 64Mb, which makes it useful for ferrying files between home and a work computer.

Price: $349 for the 64Mb model and $449 for 128Mb (GST excluded).