Storage Capacity, Use as portable HD,

Battery Life, Price

I've had my jukebox for four months and I've never had any problems with it. I think the volume level is fine as long as you don't want to kill your hearing. The stock headphones are terrible, but all stock phones are. I bought some Sony digital earphones and the sound was plenty loud for me, even at the 14 volume level. If you have a problem with the volume of Mp3's all you really have to do is run them through an editor to ampliify the sound. CoolEdit 2000 works well for that. With all the firmware upgrades it is now very stable. The only apparent downsides are the price and the weak battery life.

Similar Products Used:

RCA Lyra(worst MP3 Player ever), Creative Labs Nomad

Storage, storage, storage.
Unique in its space.
Decent sound quality.
"Wow factor"

Slow load times.
Weak sound level.
Horrible battery life.
Pretty hefty with 4 batteries.
Cost.
Sound quality is lacking.
EAX features do not add anything to the equation.

Ok,

I was really excited to purchase this item, as the oppurtunity to listen to hours and hours of music without repetition (something you can't get with 64-128mb players.) was very enticing. So I bit the bullet and purchased the unit from Amazon.com.

Intitial thoughts:

Where is the volume? I live in NYC, and NYC subways cause lots of noise, but my CD player can do a good job at drowning it out, not the case for the NOmad Jukebox, the volume it too low.

SLOW! The boot time for the Nomad is a good 25-40 seconds. While playing songs browsing for others is truly painful.

Battery life. It is a good thing they give you 2 sets of rechargable batteries, because the stated 4 hours of listening time is under some lab condition that normal use does not afford. You will be lucky to get 2-2.5 hours with this puppy.

Sound quality. Now, this is very important, and to this extent I can say I am disappointed but it does give you acceptable usuage. With MP3's coded at 192-320, the quality is quite good. 128 and you do see a significant difference.

The Equalizer is usuable, and if you take the EAX settings, down from the 50 percent default settings, and tweak the equalizer a tad, it can sound quite good.

Overall, I am pleased with this first attempt to make a "mass market" product of this type. Definate improvements can and should be made, thankfully, this unit does have a Flash bios.

All new buyers should update their bios to the latest version, available at www.nomadworld.com. It offers you the ability to FF/RR in a song, no gap between songs, and copy from the Nomad to your PC (if not copyprotected.)

I hope they address the "slowness" of the unit with future upgrades.

P.S.: You can upgrade the HD on this unit to 20 gigs, quite nice, check out tomshardware.com for further info.

Similar Products Used:

Nomad II, Rio 500, MPTRIP.

Live recordings up to DAT quality, lots of storage, great software package, ability to use as backup device for PC

no firewire, no remote, no digital out, questionable durability

First off, this thing is very cool. My original purpose in getting it was twofold: it should be a replacement to my broken Sony home CD player and it should do live recordings. (By the way, never buy Sony CD players. I've had two and both have died within 3-4 years.) Got it only two days ago, but have played with the recording function quite a bit as I am in a band and needed a portable recording solution that was true CD quality (as opposed to MiniDisc) or better. The Nomad gives me this because it can record at DAT quality, 48khz.
What you do to record is essentially this: hook up your mic to the line in and then select "Recording" off the little screen. Now you have a menu with some info and choices to make:
MonitorThru (On/Off), SamplingRate(11.025khz-48khz), InputGain(0-15), and Boost (On/Off). There is a problem if you don't use an amplified microphone. The problem is that there is a nasty whine from the hard drive that gets louder the more you crank up the InputGain setting. So the solution, if your going to use a microphone, is to MAKE SURE you pump the microphone through a pre-amp, mixer, or multi-track recorder. Once the mic is fed through one of these, the signal will be hotter and override any of that crappy disk noise. So all the former reviewers who beefed about this problem just need to take my advice and get some form of preamp for their mics.

Here's how you record on the Nomad. From that Recording menu, you select your recording preferences, press 'ARM' to prepare to record, and then the 'Play' button to start the recording. Recordings will be saved as non-lossy .WAV files (nice for creating quality CDs of live performances) into 10 minute increments. Incremental recordings, saved as tracks, are a safety precaution against crashing, something that happens frequently when you have multi-gigabyte files. The Nomad will save the recording to an Album called 'Recording nnn', where n is the next available number starting at 001. The first 10 minutes of the recording will be labeled 'Track 1'. If you go beyond 10 minutes in your recording, each successive track will be named Track 2, Track 3, and on like that. Once I have a recording saved, I use Creative's PlayCenter 2 on the PC (connect it up using USB - where's Firewire when you need it?) to copy the file over to my hard drive to tweak the sound file to my liking in Cool Edit. Make sure you have plenty of room on your PC's hard drive, because 48khz recordings suck up a lotta drive space.

One thing about the PlayCenter software. I had a conflict with some CD burning software which would hang my PC (a 600mhz Pentium III/320MB) everytime I tried to install the PlayCenter. I was on the phone for two hours with Creative Labs tech who was very good, but couldn't solve my problem. I will most likely have to reinstall new ASPI drivers from Adaptec (now Roxio). Blecch. So I finally ended up installing the software on my older 200mhz Packard Bell running Win2K server.

The PlayCenter's interface is nice. You have two windows that represent the source and destination of where music or data is and where you want to put it. So, you can rip a CD, copy recordings made from the Nomad back to your PC, take existing MP3s OR ANY DATA off your hard drive and throw it on the Nomad.
Notice I said 'ANY DATA.' Because earlier versions of the firmware and PlayCenter2 don't have the ability to copy any data to/from the Nomad, make sure you download the latest firmware and PlayCenter2 versions off of www.creativelabs.com or www.nomadworld.com. You can use this thing as a backup drive as
well!! You can also control all aspects of the Nomad, from deleting songs, to creating playlists, and labeling and organizing your music from this interface.

One of the best things about the PlayCenter is that it has a link out to CDDB, the music database. When you rip a CD (at any quality level you want, from 20kbps all the way up to 320kbps), all the track information is automatically downloaded and the music is categorized for you. One warning: you have to have a speedy CPU, memory, and CDROM in order to avoid skipping or other artifacts when you rip songs. I'd say you'd have to have at least a 300mhz Pentium II pc, 128MB RAM and a 24x speed burner. My box is a 200mhz Pentium with 64MB RAM and a 20x reader and I got artifacts when I burnt a Vivaldi CD at 320kbps. Another great thing about the software is that it allows you to rip to both to the Nomad and a directory on your PCs hard drive at the same time for backup purposes. I don't have that much space on my PC, so I choose not to make the backup. Finally, the sound quality varies according to the encoding rate. Music
recorded well and encoded well sounds great, but do yourself a favor and getter a better set of headphones than the ones included. I have an older pair of Sony MDR-V600's and they sound much better than the Creative headphones.

In the final analysis, time will tell if this thing is actually going to hold up under many recordings. I pray that Creative has some extra hard drives lying around in case this bad boy crashes!! I have yet to figure out the best means of backing this thing up, but I'd imagine it'd be a good idea to have a 20GB drive lying around. Enhancements Creative could make are plenty: Creative needs to get a remote control for this thing as it will be hooked up to my main stereo. Also, Creative should include a digital out for people who want to use this as their main sound source for both home and traveling. Digital out
would give us music lovers better audio quality. Finally, make the data transport mechanism Firewire for quick uploads/downloading of data. All-in-all, this is a nifty little device. Let's hope it holds up under repeated use!

Similar Products Used:

Diamond Rio

Amazing capacity, upgradable bios

battery life is very short.

Neat product. Unclear to me what EAX does or adds, although I can tell that files ripped at 160 kpbs require more battery than 128 kbps.

Sound is good, volume a bit low, but with my noise cancelling headsets, not a problem for subways.

I would have bought this unit if I would not have won it :-) Lucky me!

Massive storage capacity!!!

Slow start-up; power usage; recording quality.

One day I was driving home with a pile of CDs (neatly stored in a case, of course!) when I realized that there had to be an easier way to enjoy my collection. I had never really considered purchasing a portable MP3 player because of the limited storage capacity. I had interest in the new lines of MP3 CD players on the market, but I realized that even with a fast burner, it would be a pain to keep burning CDs for it. I remembered I had seen ads for a new device from the good ole' boys at Creative Labs called the Nomad Jukebox that held a gazillion or so CDs worth of music (6-gigs of MP3 data, to be exact – around 100 CDs at 128kbps MP3 compression). I took the plunge and bought the thing a few days later at the local Best Buy, and I've been in love with it ever since. Creative is marketing the Jukebox as being able to hold one's entire music collection - if you're like me, 100 CDs isn't anywhere near your entire library, but it's better than carrying them around in your vehicle! I'm also a college student; when I go home, it's great to have that much stuff to listen to.
I suppose I have to issue a few complaints, however. The most noticeable, for me, is the short life of the batteries. For an individual who uses this in their vehicle, this can be a major drag. However, I found a car adapter at Wally World that would pull the 12v 1200ma this thing takes (don't leave it playing by accident, though; I did the other day and came back to a half-dead battery two hours later!). Startup speed for the on-board OS is a little slow, as well. On the other hand, what can I expect from a little portable that holds 100 CD's worth of music? As far as the recording quality the product boasts, I have yet to be satisfied. Another justification for my buying of the Jukebox was its ability to record in WAV data at DAT quality (better than mini-disc). I wish the device would have included a built-in mini-microphone for voice recording (lectures, moment of vocal and lyrical inspiration, so on), and even a small microphone leads to a more awkward package. I was slightly disappointed that the line-in jack is an 1/8” instead of ¼”, but I won’t dwell on this point. I have attempted to record a few of my old records digitally, and keep getting a really annoying and extremely high pitch throughout the recording (both with microphone and line-in recordings).
To conclude, this device is great! Please do not expect it to replace a CD player, especially in home - the loss of quality for 128k MP3 compression is noticeably (for my ears, at least) worse than a CD. Nonetheless, I feel it is worth every penny that I financed it for (zero percent, no payments for six months - let's hope the retroactive interest doesn't kill me!!!).

Similar Products Used:

None.

Storage capacity, user interface

Slow menu system, Tricky to use as portable harddisk

All features described is in the new firmware version 2.56 and PlayCenter 2.1

The Nomad Jukebox (DAP Jukebox in Europe) is a great device for taking you MP3 files on the road.

The user interface is straigh forward and let you queue up songs or entire albums from artist, genre or album view. You can also save the queue to a playlists.

You transfer the files to/from your PC/Jukebox via the PlayCenter software that also lets you rip CD:s and transfer them to the Jukebox.

The sound can be output to headphones or one of the two line out ports (for front and rear speakers). Headphone volume can be adjusted.

On batteries it runs at least 4 hours when playing 128 kbps encode MP3 files.

It includes stuff you don't get on other harddisk based portable MP3 player. Like gapless playback, WMA (Windows Media Audio) support, built-in disk defragmentation.

Of all MP3 players I've tried this is by far the best buy at any price.