Creative Labs DAP6GO2 Jukebox digital audio player (Creative Jukebox 10 GB)

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Product:	Creative Jukebox 10 GB
Date:	23/05/01 (392 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: can store huge amiunts of music, looks good, loads of features

Disadvantages: None,, none,, none

Looking more like your average personal CD player, Creative Labs' nifty Jukebox can nevertheless store up to 150 albums' worth of choons
ound 1,500 copies of it on Creative Labs' new DAP Jukebox, enough to keep even the most hardcore of Cliff fans happy.
Alright, so the majority of us would probably want to use the Jukebox's mammoth 6Gb of storage space for something a little more palatable, but you get the idea. You can store a good 150 albums' worth of MP3 files on it which represents a fairly hefty percentage of anyone's record collection and means you won't be stuck for something fresh to listen to for weeks, months even. The Jukebox isn't just an MP3 player, either, it'll play WAV, WMA and AAC files too, as well as being able to record directly from CD, with no loss of quality, through a line input on the back of the unit. Even using this method you still get ten albums' worth of true CD-quality music. Upgradeable firmware also means that you can download upgrades from Creative's Website and update your Jukebox to play new formats as they become available. Nice.
The Jukebox is a stylish little beast too. A little bulkier than most players thanks to the 6Gb hard drive, but no larger than your average personal CD player and better-looking than most. Swathed in metallic blue and silver, and with a sizeable 7-line LCD, the Jukebox manages to deliver both aesthetically and functionally.
Connection to your PC (yet again, Mac owners are left out) is via USB, which provides some stunningly fast transfer times. A 4Mb file takes just 11 seconds to transfer to the Jukebox, so you're looking at an entire album in about a minute and a half, which is mightily impressive. Creative has supplied an armada of file management, encoding, and playback software too, making its £350 price tag seem a little more reasonable. The supplied Creative Playcentre 2.0 software allows encoding at bit-rates up to 320Kbps, more th
an any bundled software I've seen so far, although 128Kbps is acceptable.
As far as playback's concerned, the Jukebox is an absolute belter. MP3 and WAV files sound the business despite the limitations of the solid-state formats, and direct line-in recordings from CD are crystal clear. This is probably due, in part at least, to Creative's decision to bundle a decent pair of headphones with the unit, infinitely preferable to the tiny earphones most manufacturers seem to favour. There's tons of options to sift through as well: you can adjust the equalisation using the parametric EQ; adjust the playback speed without altering the pitch, and even add environmental effects like Hallway and Auditorium to the track to make it sound like it's being played live.
Combine all this functionality with the fact that you'll be able to use it as a normal 6Gb external hard drive and the Jukebox looks like the sort of bargain you'd expect to find down your local pound shop (but rarely do). There is really only one cloud on the Jukebox horizon, and that's the battery life. You'll get between four and five hours playback from the 4 AA NiMH cells, depending on how much playing around with the unit you do during playback, although Creative will be supplying two sets of the cells when the unit hits the market in time for Christmas.
All in all, a superbly designed, great sounding bit of kit. Buy one, download Cliff's next Christmas single, and give it to your Gran. At least that'll give those luckless record shop worker-types a little breathing space.

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