Creative Labs NOMAD Jukebox 3 40 GB MP3 Player

by Creative

Product Details

Product Manual [1.53mb PDF]

• Item Weight: 3 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00006A8ZP
• Item model number: 7E+12
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #247,294 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

CREATIVE LABS (7000000000207) Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox III 40GB MP3

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Innovation with flaws, October 28, 2002

By 

HPD (Santa Cruz, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Creative Labs NOMAD Jukebox 3 40 GB MP3 Player (Electronics)

I have owned the Nomad 3 (40 GB) for a few months now and have praise for the innovations with a LiIon battery and a fat drive, the firewire/USB ports and the recording feature. However, there are significant drawbacks with this device that I believe have to do with human factors and make me look elsewhere for a better solution. In a nutshell, Creative's device is beautifully and innovatively engineered, but stupidly designed in terms of software, form factor and user interface, due to an apparent lack of usability awareness at Creative's design team. More specifically:

- It is not possible without extra software to connect the player and simply use it as external harddisk, which is possible with most other players on the market - a major drawback.
- The player sometimes locks up and needs a reset or battery removal.
- Disk access is rather slow and playback typically incurs some startup delay.
- The bulky discman form of the player may make it familiar to nontechnical users but is neither handy nor practical. Several times I have almost dropped the player because of its rounded shape and placing it on a car console other than flat is not possible.
- The second battery options reminds of "razor-blade" extra moneymaking - why not make the device smaller or offer one large built-in battery?
- The jog wheel favors right-handed people - a crosshair or wheel-based user interface in the front middle would have been more practical - see ipod design.
- The recording feature is very limited - the input level is not variable and a mic input would have been essential.
- The PC software for the player is non-intuitive and the creation of playlists largely useless, because shuffle play cannot be chosen just for a specific playlist and applies by default only to all loaded songs.
- The currently played track is only shown when pressing the info button twice.
- The player plays by default only a single track in normal mode and then stops.
- The search feature is rather primitive, largely due to the low-res display.

MP3/WMA (etc.) playback and recording on a high-capacity small-format player is a promising market and I do wonder how much longer it will take for companies to step beyond intentional "deficiency engineering" and present a compact device with an intelligent and practically designed user interface. Apple is closer in many terms but the lack of recording and copy capabilities makes the ipod a consumer toy rather than a tool.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Forget iPod, This Is The Real Deal, December 10, 2003

By 

Justin C. Phelps (Spangdahlem (Eifel), Germany) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Creative Labs NOMAD Jukebox 3 40 GB MP3 Player (Electronics)

I purchased my Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 almost a year ago in January of 2003. Before that I had a Creative Nomad Jukebox C refitted with a 30GB hard drive that I bought on eBay. I was looking to upgrade since the battery life of the Jukebox C was pretty terrible.

The Jukebox 3 I purchased was refitted with a larger 60GB hard drive. The first noticible difference is the battery life. At close to 22 hours of continuous play, EVERY OTHER MP3 PLAYER BECOMES OBSOLETE! Of course this will fluctuate depending on your backlight settings and such. I was very hesitant of the side scrolling wheel since the Jukebox C came with up and down arrow buttons. After getting used to using the scroll wheel I am convinced nothing else is better. Driving down the Autobahn in Germany and being able to locate and play artists and albums with one hand while driving 130KPH is a godsend.

As of now I have 10,000 songs, 40284MB on my Jukebox 3. The user interface software, Creative Playcenter, is very user friendly. I initially used Firewire but had some problems so I only use the USB interface now. I think it is only 1.1 speed, though it is noticibly faster than loading songs to the Jukebox C. I have had a few problems connecting to Playcenter, but nothing that can't be solved with patience. I was impatient once and found some different Third-Party software called NOTMAD. This NOTMAD software allows the user to use a drag and drop interface like Windows Explorer as well as transfer regular computer files, a feature NOT allowed by Creative Playcenter for the Jukebox 3. I prefer using Playcenter and using cut/paste to input Artist and Album information.

Using the Jukebox 3 to play songs or albums is very easy. Anyone who rides in my car can learn to use it very quickly. I don't use the playlist option that much, but it was easy to make a playlist. I heard an ugly rumor that the iPod can only utilize playlists made on the computer and is unable to make playlists on the iPod itself.

There is one detractor to the Jukebox 3 which starts to occur when around 8,000 are loaded onto it. There is a utility called "rebuilding library" which starts when you turn on the Jukebox 3 within 24-48 hours after loading new songs. This can happen with as little as adding 2 albums. From my understanding this utility is much like defragmenting the hard drive, moving the bits of information closer to the middle of the hard disk. This utility takes approximately 2-3 hours to complete and has the backlight on so it is best to have your battery adapter plugged in when this occurs. You can manually initiate this along with other utilities by using the included manual (but who reads those?) I only note this as a detractor because unless you manually initiate it after loading new songs, it will self-initiate within 24-48 hours at the most inopportune times like Trans-Atlantic flights, long road trip in Germany. Yes i am bitter. I use my Jukbox 3 every single day so this bugs me when it happens.

Support for the Jukebox 3 is outstanding. Updates to all drivers and firmware are easy to locate based on model and operating system on the Creative website.

The physical durability of the Jukebox 3 is outstanding. My Jukebox 3 has been all over Europe, trips back to the States, Saudi Arabia and more recently Iraq. In especially dry or dusty environments I try to keep it covered and/or enclosed as much as possible. It has dropped a few times, once on a hard tile floor, and never skipped! The scroll wheel has held up great, I foresee this as a possible problem in the far future. An important note is operation in cold environments. DO NOT LEAVE OUTSIDE OR IN A CAR OVERNIGHT IN A COLD ENVIRONMENT! When you turn it on the next morning it'll be slow and the screen will look like it is broke. I paid $600 for mine so I baby it so it will last for a long time.

In short, the battery life is the best out there at nearly 22 hours. Support, usability, durability are 1st class in my opinion. As i stated before, I paid $600 for a refitted 60GB Jukebox 3. So the price you pay for any Jukebox 3 model now is a steal. Hope this is more a helpful review than a sales pitch. Enjoy!

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The player is great, I've tried them all.., June 14, 2003

By 

Randy Winston "[e-mail]" (New City, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Creative Labs NOMAD Jukebox 3 40 GB MP3 Player (Electronics)

I note that some of the complaints about the menu setups of the Nomad 3 reflect the fact that the users did not know that the first thing they could have done is go to Nomad's website and download an upgrade for the firmware which make the players menu display the individual albums or track for each artist.
I frequently check their site for upgrades but the capacity is enormous, I even have audiobooks downloaded onto this thing. I've owned all the Nomads since the first 6 Gig unit and this one is by far the best.