Customer Reviews

Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox "C" (Blue)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Well,
First the complaints - and some suggestions
1. Low Headset Volume - I tried about 6 different sets - the sony in ear Type seem to work particularly well and are WAY louder than the stock headphones
2. Long boot time - Upgrade the firmaware and if you have alot of music like I do (5 gig) - make sure you reload your whole library if you notice considerable boot lags- if you delete a lot and edit a lot the disk becomes fragmented ;0) A complete sequential reload seems to really improve boot times on my unit (before = 2 minutes)(After reloading songs = 30 sec or so)
3. SKIPPING- My unit does not skip EVER W/ the latest firmware installed If your unit skips - return it to creative for a replacement. It should not skip. 4. Battery Life - Their is something funny W/ the charging circuit - I don't know if there is a fix. My fix is that I charge my 2 sets of batteries in an external charger/conditioner -
5. Upgrading the hard drive - On your own - when my warranty ran out I installed a 20 gig drive.... I still have not had the need for all the space but my collection grows daily. There are many sites (search) on upgrading...but remember IT VOIDS THE WARRANTY - you should probably just sell the old one here on Amazon and buy a 20 gig model.... ;0) THE GOOD PART!... The menu system slows up a bit when you have alot of music loaded on BUT it is pretty intuitive to use...took about 3 minutes to learn how to use it - for once.... Use the tutorial
- the queue system is Especially good -
Also- there is nothing quite like having about a zillion CD's worth of music in one place. I have had 3 of the small memory hungry players. If you are sick of loading/unloading music all the time...BUY THIS!
I figured I'd let you all know what I though since I already have one of these and I am buying another as a gift. Enjoy!
Overall- I would say this is one of the coolest "toys" I have. For all of it's "problems" - most of which are easily solved the +'s far outweigh the -'s

Pros: (almost) 5 gigs of storage, attractive design, good sound, nice headphones included, software is upgradeable, plays well with iTunes on Mac.
Cons: Many people (including me) have problems with the built-in battery recharger. No battery power display in main menu screens (you have to dig for it). Software is poor in general; you can't search for a song by title or queue an entire artist's library by name; no "queue all" feature; playlists uploaded to the player aren't saved - you have to remake the list on the player. No downloading capability! This is VERY lame if you want to share songs with a friend or backup the tracks that comes preinstalled on the player. Hopefully this will be remedied with future software releases. No forward or reverse scanning - this is very inconvenient if you're listening to audio books or other long tracks and want to come back to the middle of the chapter.
Conclusion: if you can't wait to get a portable hard-drive type mp3 player then this should satisfy you, but personally I would wait for the next generation of models which will have greater storage and improved software.

One fine summer day, my employer gave me a Rio with 32Mb on board. It was expandable to a maximum of 64Mb with an additional 32Mb chip. This was a nice little gizmo to have, and it started me down the path of MP3 mania - which before I had dismissed as frolly. Before long I was ripping every CD I had (in excess of 150) to my laptop to take with me on the road (I'm a road warrior, and I spend more time in trains, planes, and automobiles than at home). And as one might expect, it wasn't long before I was out of space.

The Nomad Jukebox from Creative provided me with a full 6Gb of disk space for MP3. I was able to put most every CD I listened to on a regular basis, on it, with room to spare. So I put a book on CD on it too. The form factor is great! Looks like a CD player, but isn't. I get looks from people on planes who wonder how I can listen to one CD for 4 hours straight - when in reality I've been mixing the flight away. I was worried about the interfaces capability to get me around 6Gb of MP3, and while it is a little slow (couldn't you have put a little faster processor in there guys?), it's also very intuitive. The software included, let's me manage my Jukebox with ease as well as play MP3's from iton to my PC speakers. I have the Creative DTS-3500 speakers, and it sounds great!

Of course, it's not without it's drawbacks. The battery life is horrible. Creative maintains that the Jukebox is built not for prolonged independant use, but as a portable CD collection for your office or car, or wherever there might be an power source. So when I say I listend to 4 hours straight - it would have been more but the batteries went dead. On the other hand, you can order more from Creative. Also a big bummer is that while you can transfer MP3's to the device, it won't let you transfer them back to your PC (as it will with any other file type). Looks like the Creative execs got a little worried about legal issues.

As you can tell by the rating and the title of the review, I am one happy camper with my Nomad Jukebox.

Why? Well first off, 6GB of MP3's is a LOT of CD's. Next, because I am a music freak, I bought the 20GB upgrade for the Jukebox (search the web for Nomadworld). Anyhow, the dang thing just runs great, is slick, and now I have 500 CD's to cart around with me (yes 500 CD's on this thing!).

The only drawback is that the battery power get's drained quickly, but Creative Labs has been kind enough to give you two sets of rechargable batteries so you can listen to 8 interrupted hours of music without a recharge.

The software that comes with the Jukebox Ripps CD's in a flash, is easy to use, and makes managing all of this music a snap (thank goodness).

Makes flying in an airplane just fly on by (yes, pun intended).

Get it - it is well worth the money. Why waste your time with a 64 MB MP3 player... uploading, deleteing, uploading, deleteing. This thing will hold all of your music.

I liked my Jukebox, I really did, but it flaked out after 6 months and died after a year. And now, after some monkey business with the support team, it's dead and I'm done.

The short story:

It worked great for a while. 6 Gig IS a lot of music, even when I ripped at highest quality VBR. It played anything from 32 to 320 kbps as well. I loaded it up and swapped songs nearly every day.

I think the first downfall was when I updated to the newest firmware. In doing further reading after that, MANY people had similar skipping/freezing problems. Basically, the player would freeze, returning an error, which meant that you had to run the equivalent of a "scan disk" to patch it up. This happened with greater and greater frequency until I basically had to do it every 100 Meg of songs or so. Sometimes even after 2 songs! With 6 gig, you can guess I didn't want to babysit my player as it loaded songs.

Part of this might have been because I was deleting and adding 300 meg of new songs almost every day. I think that exacerbated what otherwise might have been a dormant or relatively harmless problem. But it still should have handled it.

Eventually, it stopped playing songs all the way through. And that wasn't because of the tune because you could reboot the thing and it would play that tune just fine the next time. No, there was something really wrong.

I sent it to their help desk and for [dollar amount] they took a look at it (because it was a month out of warranty!). They reported nothing really wrong and the guy ran the clean-up process and returned it. Apparently, he neglected to read the two page letter I had included that said that I had already done that and even re-formatted.

I sent it back, with a disc full of MP3s of various sizes and shapes and asked them to load the disc on in it's entirety. Guess what! It failed!

They couldn't figure out what to do, so they sent me a new one. Normally this would have cost me [dollar amount] out of pocket, but since their last fix was warranteed for 30 days, I got lucky. Watch those warrantees people!

Anyway, this one worked for a while, but still froze up when I was loading too close to the "full" mark. I had to leave 50 meg free, then 75 meg, then 100 meg free. Finally, it choked all together and now I have a nice handy [dollar amount] paperweight.

I could send it back I guess, but I'm not interested in paying [dollar amount] bucks for a new machine that will only last another 4 months. No thanks.

It had it's good qualities:
- Played any MP3 I fed it, random, repeat.
- Nice organization of stuff on the machine, by artist, album, genre and playlists.
- Easy to get tunes on and off (when it wasn't malfunctioning)
- Solid feel. Nice button response. I liked the weight of it.
- It had playlists which you could upload, but I hated that. Plus, it slowed it down while booting up. What I used was the track numbers built into the tags of the MP3s. It used that to order them.

Criticisms:
- It broke. And not just for me. Look around in the newsgroups, you'll see plenty of people with similar problems. Honestly, being in IT, I have a bit of a knack for debugging problems, and I think this was probably some sort of problem with their delete function. I hope they read this and try to fix it.
- It tried to be robust by using ID3v2 and v1 info AND this weird thing called Lyricsv3, which nobody's ever heard of. Unfortunately, it always defaulted to v2, even though I prefer v1, and then this Lyrics thing which I had a hard time finding a program to strip out. It would have been nice to force it to use ID3v1.
- Needed a "Queue everything" selection
- Took forever (30secs+) to boot up. When I read why, it was a totally stupid reason too. It had to rescan every MP3 or something. Wasted time.
- It broke. Twice. Did I mention that?

I'd certainly think twice before buying one of these, or their higher-priced, larger HD cousins, as they use the same firmware.

Peter

The Creative Labs MP3 player is great. The screen is very easy to understand and is great for organizing music. I bought both the Archos and the Creative labs MP3 player and it out performs the Archos player in so many ways. The archos is very small, that is the only thign it has goin for it. The screen is terrible and you can't group music into artists. The creative labs even though it has a short battery life it still is worth the money. They also give you a second set of batteries.

I have one of these and it's great to go hours and hours on random play without hearing the same song twice. However, it's sometimes difficult to find a specific song that I want to hear or set it up so that it plays one album from start to finish. One problem is that the more songs in storage the slower the machine works. Another problem is that the operating system and the computer software are buggy although Creative does produce upgrades and patches for both of those. Having said all that, it's really great for travelling, background noise or whatever.

As advertised the NOMAD is a great player. It works well with headphones, in the car (with an adapter) or with speakers. Unfortunately, the NiMH batteries supplied are awful. The first charge, according to the directions, is 12 hours. I charged both sets and it worked great, playing for almost 2 hours on a single charge. The next 4 charges failed to give me more than 10 minutes play time. When the company was contacted they never answered my questions or letters. My recommendation is to but ALOT of AA batteries or get a power inverter for your car to run it off the plug in adapter.

I *love* the space on this thing! I'll be able to load all of the songs that I would anticipate wanting to listen to while traveling and it's a good size.

Now for the few drawbacks:

The carry case that comes with it doesn't have a long handle for easy transport and doesn't provide room for you to put the unit in the case while the headphones are plugged in.

The PC software is *not* intuitive and does not preserve track order so if you listen to an album, you get the songs in alphabetic order (at least, that's my current experience). There's also no automatic way to convert songs with the PC software.

The Apple software I'm using is iTunes - free and excellent with only one drawback: you can't edit song information once it's on the jukebox (the PC version seems to allow this). However, it does allow you to both preserve and edit track information which is great for those multi-CD "greatest of..." albums - I converted Les Miserables and Best of Meatloaf into single albums and was able to preserve the original song order. The other thing I love about iTunes is that you can set it so that when you pop in a CD, it immediately gets the track info from CDDB, rips the album to mp3 and ejects the CD when you're done - great for converting a collection while doing other things.

If you have the good fortune to be able to work on both platforms, use iTunes for conversion and only use the PC software if you need to edit info *after* you have copied your music to the jukebox.

So, I've had the Jukebox for just under a year now and here's what I think: It does everything that they say it does. It's reliable and eliminates the need for a cd player. Overall, I'm happy with it. However, a word of warning. The "Playcenter" software that ships with the unit installed easily when I was running Windows 98. When I moved to an XP machine, it was a different story. The updated drivers at the Creative site were more confusing than anything else. Eventually I ended up following directions from a site dedicated to Nomad users, and after two days of hell I got it to work. Apparently this is a common problem. I couldn't tell you what I did and hope that I never have to do it again. Now that it's done, everything is great and I love my Jukebox.