All your music with you everywhere! (Creative Jukebox 10 GB)

Member Name: TheLetch

Product:	Creative Jukebox 10 GB
Date:	08/01/01 (209 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Sound quality and huge capacity

Disadvantages: Weight and battery life

I know it’s been advertised to death but this product really lives up to the hype. I bought mine direct from the US and so have had it for some time now. The player itself attracts interest just on its looks but it wins people over when they hear the quality and actually realise the potential that the 6Gb capacity gives.

Technically (without jargon hopefully) it stores the music files on a small robust hard disk along with its Operating System and also allows for voice annotation recording storage. It connects to a PC/MAC via the supplied USB cable and this is where you source your music files for the device.

I say music files as it now supports WMA files as well as MP3 files – this highlights one of the benefits of this player over most solid state MP3 players, the ability to upgrade its capabilities. The player’s own home page www.nomadworld.com, provides drivers updates for the PC/MAC software AND the firmware (tech term meaning hardware dependant software) on the player.

How does it perform?

Well let’s firstly list the sticking points for most people:

Low battery life – due to the power required to run a hard disk the rechargeable batteries only last for a couple of hours (however, the device comes with two complete sets of batteries)

It’s heavy – in comparison to most MP3 and some Minidisk players, again due to the hard disk and 4 batteries, so not suitable for jogging with. Having said this I travel to work by train, each day, with it in my coat pocket and it’s fine.

It’s expensive – any purchase over £300 is likely to be seen as over the top (especially explaining to partner!) but compare to a Sony Memorystick with 64Mb memory for £30 difference…

Good/Great/Selling points:

Music quality – what it’s used for and therefore paramount, the software supplied for the PC (sorry MAC users) is superb (and has ju
st been updated) and allows you to manage all your music files on the device and your PC effortlessly. I record from my CD’s using 75% variable bit rate and the quality is excellent – it takes roughly 25-30 mins to rip an average CD – the files created are probably slightly larger than most fixed bit rate recordings (which you can use if you prefer) but they sound perfect. Plus it downloads Album/Artist/Genre info from CDDB2.

Looks – it’s in the London Design Museum! Seriously cool.

Capacity – I have with me, as I write, all my favourite music plus some of the preloaded music that they supply (20 hours, mainly showcasing it’s abilities but I have left most of the ‘Classical Best Of’s’ on, also comes with two audio books!). Playlists allows me to listen to any selection of my music, created on the fly or via the PC/MAC software.

Features a plenty – EAX effects (as in their SoundBlaster Live products), surprisingly effective if limited in use, ability to speed up/slow down playback (mainly used for audio book) works well, standard EQ settings, Headphone/Surround speaker spatialization (very smart – but uses extra battery life), Library with playlists, albums, artists and genres alphabetically sorted with search facility, and more!

Wishlist – www.nomadworld.com provides excellent support and a good forum where wishlists and problems can be raised, the Creative team does take these things on board and the player and software are being improved all the time.

It’s just excellent and getting better.

Summary: