In 2005 Creative beat Apple, whose side you took then?

oh look, the wind just changed direction...

The patent was on the nested menu style of media organization. So that familiar artist/album/genre drill-down UI that the original iPods had and made them so famously usable.

I don't know of any direct prior art, since apparently a slightly different form factor yields patent protection. If I recall, the Creative product was the first to do this on a mobile device, however it was a familiar media access technique for a number of players on computers, including Winamp.