Not mad to buy a NOMAD (Creative Jukebox 10 GB)

Member Name: pookie_rabbit

Product:	Creative Jukebox 10 GB
Date:	08/01/03 (352 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great price, Enough features for most people

Disadvantages: Couple of bugs/quirks

I have been the proud owner of a trusty Diamond Rio MP3 player for a couple of years now. It was an emerging technology when I originally bought it and since that time new products have come and gone and we where told that with the ‘demise’ of Napster that the digital music scene was dead. In this time though I have come to swear by my Rio and everyone should realise digital players are not just for ‘pirates’. The only problem was that despite having a reasonable amount of memory in it I could only get around 25 tracks on it. This wasn’t the end of the world as I did rotate the songs but I was on the lookout for something that could hold a bit more.

There are basically two types of MP3 players on the market – those that require memory to operate (like my old Diamond Rio), e.g. 32, 64 or 128MB of RAM and those, like the Jukebox, that rely on some sort of internal hard disk. Needless to say the difference between the two is size on a couple of counts. A 10GB internal hard disk can hold a hell of a lot more files than 128MB of RAM but anything holding a ‘hard disk’ has to be bigger. While memory based MP3 players can be found as small as a pendant the average disk based player is around the size of a CD – but this is also changing. The final difference at the moment is price. Memory based players are generally a lot cheaper than the disk based systems.

Forgetting the memory-based players for now (they have plenty of reviews in there own right) I shall give a brief overview of the current market for disk based players. It would be fair to say that there are fewer companies vying for this market and the major players are Creative, SONICblue (of Diamond Rio fame) Archos and Apple. These devices tend to hover anywhere between £250 and £300 and vary in size with all the company’s now managing players the size of some memory based MP3 players. Generally though the smaller the more expensive. Of al
l the companies Creative seem to offer the largest range of products and price including the small Zen, a more powerful NOMAD Jukebox 3 and the object of this review the CD sized NOMAD JukeBox 2.

Coming in at around £170 (from Amazon) this is, as far as I can tell, the cheapest such a player has arrived on the market so far and brought it into a range for me to make a purchase. In truth anything over £200 was still making me wince as a bit of a luxury.

Having received my purchase promptly from Amazon (as usual) after an aborted attempt to visit a Comet superstore to save a pound and a day (“sorry Sir digital audio is so yesterday. Fancy a mini-disk player?”) I prepared to unbox, install and be frustrated as per normal with electronic items. The following is based on my ownership so far (albeit a week) and will be updated if any shocking discoveries come to light.

First off installation was a breeze. Basically your first task is to install the rechargeable battery which needs a charging of 4 hours to give you a supposed 16 hours of playtime. Now this is my first little challenge of the packaging. So far I have not got anywhere near 16 hours without running out of battery. I will stand corrected on this when I have done some exact science but a full charge will definitely give you a ‘number of hours’.
As my player charged I proceeded with the software installation which again was uneventful. The software installation comprises of drivers as well as the Creative PlayCenter which makes up the bulk of the software and is the main front end for ‘ripping’ and transferring files to your Jukebox. Perhaps the only thing I would make a note of was the option of making PlayCenter your default MP3 player on your PC. You don’t need to select this option if you prefer, for instance, Microsoft Media Player.
Having recharged my player it was time to plug it into my PC (the Jukebox does not support Mac̵
7;s) via USB. The player supports both USB 1.1 and 2 according to the packaging. One point to be aware of is that from research I have made since the player does not work well connected to a USB hub. Direct is best. For me though no trouble and Windows 2000 found my player and launched Creative PlayCenter as expected.

I was now ready to transfer music to my player. Like I said at the beginning I have a number of downloaded MP3 files but the vast majority of my music is still on piles of CD’s. To get this music off a CD you must ‘rip it’. Fortunately there is a good multi-media presentation that talks you through the major features installed with the software. For this procedure you use the Creative PlayCenter. The basic process of this is as follows –
Insert audio CD
PlayCenter optionally (but advisedly) connects to the CDDB Database on the Internet to download artist and song information. Without this you would have to manually key in information on each song.
PlayCenter ‘rips’ the CD and stores the songs on your hard disk in either MP3 or WMA format. A typical MP3 file comes in at 3 to 4MB in size, WMA generally smaller.

When this process is complete (and on my not so quick PC this takes around 15 minutes or so an album) you are ready to transfer your songs to the Jukebox.

The sync process is again pretty straightforward. Select the album or songs and just press a button. A whole album will be transferred to your player in less than a minute.

I guess one of the differences to the more expensive players is the size of the internal disk. The disk on the NOMAD JukeBox 2 is claimed to be 10GB (the system tells me closer to 9 ½) whereas you can get bigger disks on the other models. To give you a very rough idea on this I have used about 1GB so far but have transferred over 30 albums. It will be a couple more weeks before I get my whole collection across!

So you have your album
s across and now it’s down to the player. The system comes with a pair of decent headphones first of all. Not world beating but do the job. If you are big into music you might just want to splash out for something better. Also supplied is a reasonable carry case with belt clip.
Controls are on the side and top of the device. On the side is the power on/off, headphone socket and the perhaps a little fiddley main control used for moving up and down and selecting. On the front are the menu, volume up, down, play, stop and pause keys etc.

Navigating to a song is pretty simple. You can select by artist, album or genre etc. Another nice feature is custom playlists. You can create multiple playlists (such as ‘Summer Driving’) and put various songs in it. Once playing the sound is very good, perhaps my only slight complaint that I would like the volume up one more notch sometimes.

OK so far very positive, almost 5 stars, but here is my attempt to knock us down to 4 out of 5.

No doubt all machines have quirks and this is no exception. On a couple of occasions the device has switched itself off almost as though it is running out of power. Switching it back on it is fine.
I have had a couple of refusals transferring files across. Trying again seems to solve the problem. If not deleting the songs from the album transferred so far and trying again seems to do it. Like I say happened a couple of times.
I have also heard some people complain about the PlayCenter generally but I think it does an adequate job. For those who really dislike it a new 3rd party utility called ‘Notmad’ can be bought instead for around $25.

I guess I should also point out again these systems are generally bigger than standard MP3 players. I have little doubt they are also more prone to failure because of more moving parts. Whereas I could throw my Diamond Rio across a room and get away with it I doubt I could do the same with m
y JukeBox.

I wish I could mention all the other features of the JukeBox (for instance its ability to be used for standard file transfer between machines) but alas I don’t want to boar you to death. Bottom line is if you are looking for a good functional disk based MP3 player at a knock down price the JukeBox 2 could be just for you.

Summary: