Customer Reviews

Creative Labs NOMAD Jukebox Zen 20 GB MP3 Player (1394 Firewire)

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

First I bought a Nomad II that uses SmartMedia. It was a pain to constantly upload new music to it due to the limited storage. Then I bought a Sonic Blue CD based MP3 player. It skips so bad it's unusable. So I set out to decide between iPod and Zen. I chose the Zen because it's much cheaper. I won't go on about all the great features, except to say it works very well. Everyone complains about the PlayCenter software but it's not that bad. If you really hate it you can buy Notmad Explorer for ... (which is better I admit).

However you should know about a few quirks:

- It only has a 3 month warranty! No excuse for this. Shame on Creative. So figure in another ... for an extended warranty.

- The battery is not user replaceable, and lithium-ion batteries don't last forever. Fact is it will need to be replaced in a couple years.

- There is no STOP button, so you can't stop it from playing a song. VERY ANNOYING.

- The remote is not included. Many places are selling it for ... which I think is really expensive. I ordered it for ... but it's on backorder.

- It's a little larger than the iPod, but not much.

- Instead of using a directory hiearchy, it relies on the ID tags, which are often incorrect on downloaded music.

- The included headphones are too tight and can't be adjusted

Some things I really like:

- The LCD is easy to read

- Firewire transfer is very fast

- You can charge with the USB port (great for the office)

- The AC Adapter is 110/220V so it works in Europe

Overall I like the Zen but I feel Creative took lots of shortcuts to get the price lower than the iPod. If you add some nice ear bud headphones, extended warranty, and remote control, it still comes out to be cheaper but not that much.

The Nomad Zen is simply the best MP3 Jukebox out there. It defintly on par with the Apple IPOD or far past.

Here's an overview

Features- 9.0
The Zen has Advanced features such as Enviromental Effects, that i have never seen on another MP3 Jukebox before. Other features include time scaling, Customizeable Logos, Spatialization, and Smart Volume which evens outs sounds when low depending on conditions, such as being on a plane or in a car. It has both Firewire and USB 1.1. There is a version that does have usb 2.0 alone. With a firmware upgrade, you can transfer non-copyright protected songs, between units. If you have a Sound Blaster Live, Audigy or Audigy2 sound card you can you use an EAX enhancement for your audio files. You can search for music that is on the unit. The Player Supports WMA, which is a vital feature for anyone who ripped all their CDs using Windows Media Player. You can also use the device as a portable hard-drive, however you cant run programs off it. In order to use at as a portable Hard-Drive you must use the include File manager Program, which kind of defeats the purpose.

Performance- 9.0
The Zen sounds fantastic. It has a 98dB Noise to Sound Ratio which one of the highest, if not the highest for a MP3 Jukebox.
Its quick to start up and charge. It takes about 3-4 hours to completly charge, which gives almost 12 hours of battery life (the USB 2.0 version gives 14 hours). It charges through the USB port or through an included adaptor, however not through the firewire port. Transfering Music is fast through firewire, and with USB it transfers at a rate of about 1 MB/Sec, not too bad. However, there is one major problem, swithching trough songs is sluggish. It takes the unit about 1 to 2 seconds the switch songs. This annoying at best. The included headphones aren't the best.

Software-8.0
In order to transfer songs you must use Creative Labs Play Center. This Program is simply mediocre. While it does have a nice interface and good feature set, it has several minor flaws, such as having to select each folder indivudualy instead of being able to just select a master folder, such as "My Music", in order to transfer music. The Actual Operating System on the unit is not that bad, it gets the job done effectively, and access to all the features is easy.

Aesthetics- 9.0
The Unit is Zen-Like, with it's smooth metallic case. It also comes with a black Leather-like case, that provides easy access to all the functions, except the Firewire and USB Ports. The included head phones are good-looking, how ever they dont sound that good. The operating system on the unit is easy to look at, and has well designed icons. Play Center is also good-looking and skinable. The unit also is a liitle heavy

Value- 9.5
The Unit is well below what the 20GB Ipod Costs. Even though the headphones aren't that great and the optional remote is costly, it still is worth the money. Even after buying better head-phones and the hard to find remote, it still costs less then an IPOD.

Overall-9.0 (or 5/5 for amazon)
The Nomad Jukebox Zen is the best MP3 jukebox player out there. Simply put, a must for any music listener with more than 20 CDS.

I'm a music lover, and I have a substantial CD collection, but I found that I wasn't listenening to my whole collection, because I would forget that I had certain things. Not only has the Zen allowed me to take my whole collection with me everywhere I go, it has increased the enjoyment I get out of my music by letting me listen to those forgotten albums again.

I did a lot of research on these players, and decided to get the Zen (after playing with the iPod) for the following reasons.

1. Drive size. I had to fit over 800 albums on the thing, so I needed a lot of room. The Zen scores by letting you store smaller WMA files, and by being upgradable. You'll void the warranty doing it, but you can easily switch the hard drive for a larger one (I have a 60 GB drive in mine). Since it uses the standard size laptop drive, this is inexpensive and easy to do.
2. Features. Don't get me wrong, the iPod is easy to use, but that also makes it less powerful. Zen allows you to cue up songs, albums, artists, or genres, so you can micromanage and create a mixtape on the fly, or you can drop in a few genres and have your own private radio station that fits your mood that day. If you have a windows computer, and can't use iTunes, the iPod just doesn't compare.
3. Size. It's smaller than the JB3, so it fits in a jacket or pants pocket. While it is larger and heavier than the iPod, it's not much of a tradeoff.
4. Price. It's so much cheaper than the iPod, the choice was easy.

Another reviewer complained about albums not being played in the proper order. This is a fault of the playcenter software. It's easy to fix, by just transfering your files the right way. ...One thing to be aware of with the Zen though. Some users have come up against a track limit. No matter how small the files, or how big the drive, it seems you can't have more than about 11,000 songs. Apparently, it is a limitation of the operating system, which may be fixable in the future. Still, that's a lot of music.

I've been thoroughly enjoying the Zen for almost a week now. As this is my first portable MP3 unit, I won't spend time trying to compare this product to others. ... Comparison isn't a good way to evaluate anyway.

After installing the software on my desktop machine, I powered the unit via the included AC adapter. While I was expecting to take a while to get a full charge on the internal Lithium-Ion battery, four hours was enough. This is probably due to the fact that these units are fully charged at the factory and just started shipping on October 14th! I also hooked up the USB connection (I don't have FireWire yet). While the desktop's USB hub sometimes drops the connection and forces me to reboot, I had no problems using USB on my notebook, so the problem was my hub, not the Zen nor its drivers. Since I already use MusicMatch 7.2 to rip my CDs and organize my collection, I didn't use PlayCenter, Creative's encoding and device management software, for ripping. It was nice that, once you connect the Zen, the computer automatically starts PlayCenter. I could navigate to the MusicMatch directory and all my files and then drag and drop them to the Zen. One small nag was that, when more than one level of directories exists(i.e. Artist->Album->Song files), you can't transfer all the albums for an artist at once. This is true even if you use PlayCenter to navigate and click the transfer button. In fact, PlayCenter highlights the transfer button, indicating that a transfer is possible. But, when you press Transfer, nothing happens, not even a warning message appears. This does make the initial load process a little tedious, especially if you have lots of files in your collection. Good thing you can easily queue up more files to be transferred while the Zen is loading.

Since I recently upgraded to MusicMatch 7.2, I started recording files in MP3Pro format, which essentially cuts the file size in half and is supposed to be backward compatible with regular MP3 players. While I don't think the Zen currently supports MP3Pro, it had no problem playing the MP3Pro files at a lower quality level (less highs). Hopefully, the Creative folks will provide a firmware upgrade to take care of this as well, thus doubling the unit's capacity. ...I'm sticking with the MP3/MP3Pro formats.

The Zen provides excellent playback quality. Its sound is bigger than its size. The included headphones are "behind the head" style and provide good sound, albeit a little muffled. I prefer Philips' new Nike brand headphones for comfort and sound quality. Hook it up to your home stereo system and let this unit show what it's made of!

The user interface provides a lot of information in a small screen. While I would have liked a bigger screen, selecting albums, artists, playlists, and genres is easy to do. A clickable scroll wheel provides quick access. And, creating playlists on the unit is both doable and easy. Just pick the songs or albums you want as a playlist. As you play each one (even for a few seconds), they're added to the "Now Playing" list. Once you're done picking, switch to the "Now Playing" view and select "Save as Playlist". Name it and that's it. Just make sure you clear the "Now Playing" list first! Otherwise, you'll get all the other files you've played recently!

As for durability, an aluminum case surrounds the unit. While I don't know how much of a jolt the hard drive can take (and don't care to find out myself!), place the Zen in the included carrying case and you probably won't have a problem. The case also provides a handy belt hoop that ISN'T made of plastic and should stand up to many days of use.

Onboard sound processing is also included. While you can add reverb (Environment), change playback speed while maintaining pitch (Time-Scale), tweak the EQ (Advanced EQ), spread the stage (Spatialization), and apply compression and limiting (Smart Volume), you can't do two at the same time. So, I can't boost the bass a little AND apply limiting to the loud passages. I can pick one but not both. While I know that it's great that I can do any of the above in real time, I would really like to apply volume control and EQ together. Maybe the Zen 2 will give us that...

20GB (really 19GB after formatting). Enough said about capacity!

While Creative boasts 12 hours continuous playback from a single charge, I have only experienced 9 hours and 15 minutes. This is after fully charging the unit the first night and cycling it from full charge to the "low battery" warning a few times this week. While this is long enough for a full workday, some folks may wonder why they can't find the access door to switch batteries. There isn't one (oops). Again, maybe the Zen 2 will address the replaceable battery issue. I'm sure I'll get out my jeweler's screwdriver next year when it's time to replace the battery! ...Creative has a real winner in the Zen.

This little MP3 player packs a PUNCH! 20 GB of data store is amazing. Currently, I have half the drive filled up with MP3s. No kidding, it's got nearly 1800 songs on there now. I know what it advertises, but the truth is you're probably going to want to bump up the bit rate on your songs. All mine are in 160 bit-rate now.

I take this thing with me on the train in the morning. With 1800 songs to put in shuffle mode, I may not hear the same song twice for months. Good, clean display. Has an internal EQ, along with the EAX processor to suit your music tastes.

I took the 2.0 version of the ZEN, not having a firewire connection on my PC. After creating my MP3 with the included software, it took about 25 minutes to upload over 10GB of music to this guy. Seems like a lot of time, but you just have to do this initally when you have an empty player. Imagine when you simply want to add a new album you just bought from the store. Since complete 10 MB songs upload to this little guy in about a second. A entire music CD can literally load in a few blinks. That's amazing technology! What a time to be alive!

Get it now. Be satisfied. Don't bother with the iPod. Too expensive to play back the exact same songs in the exact same quality. You're just out more money if you go that route. Plus this player comes with a beautiful case, headphones, and software. And although you may not think this is important, the power adapter than comes with the unit is DUAL VOLTAGE so that if you happen to take the unit overseas (ANYWHERE) you can plug it in without worry about frying your new toy!

Cheers!

I became interested in getting an iPod a few weeks ago, but I finally settled on this Nomad Zen. I found the 10 Gig iPod ridiculously overpriced compared to the Zen which is 100 bucks cheaper (after rebate) and 10 Gigs bigger. Reading the reviews and hearing the Zen myself, it sounds better than the iPod as well. Some people think that the Zen uses the same Toshiba harddrive found in the iPod and Toshiba Mobilphone, but they're wrong. The Zen is a tad bigger than the iPod because it uses the same laptop harddrive found in the Discman sized Nomad 3. This drives the price of the Zen down as there are more of the standard laptop harddrives around than those tiny and exotic Toshiba ones.
I really like the Zen overall. It's bigger than an iPod but it's still pretty small. If you never saw an iPod before, the size of the Zen would still be considered amazing. What I don't like about the Zen is that there are too many buttons on the sides of this player and they all look alike making navigation a lot less simple than disc based navigation of an iPod. You get USB and Firewire input/output but you can't charge the built-in Li-on battery through Firewire. The headphones aren't very good and the bundled software is bloated and buggy beyond belief. As soon as I got the Zen, I got Notmad Explorer, and you should too. It makes file transfers as easy as dragging and dropping files in Windows Explorer.

I can't really say enough about the Nomad Jukebox Zen. I've read a couple other complaints on here, and I think the people just didn't stick the device out long enough.

First off, mine came with all necessary cables, and unlike an iPod, it also came with a case to protect it. The guy that didn't get all his cables should have promptly returned to the store for a different Zen.

Let me first say...is the iPod cool? Of course it is. It looks neat. It's very small. It has a very intuitive menu system and a nice sized screen. Along with all that, however, it's got a $500 price tag for the 20gb model.

Well I got my Zen from Amazon.com for about $330 shipped. Add in my $50 rebate that they've got going right now, and the $25 gift certificate I had, and this thing stepped in at roughly half the price of the iPod.

I hate to compare for a review, but so many people say the iPod is so much better. So I'll comment on a couple things.

Size: This thing is really pretty small. It's certainly smaller than any portable cd player or walkman I've owned.

Capacity: 20gb didn't seem like to much to me initially, but I've probably got 125 albums in it at Lame VBR2 (about 192kb) and it's only about half full.

Functionality: It functions great. The menus are easy to move around in if you tag your .mp3s well. If you're just going to download songs off kazaa and put them right in, you're proably not going to me happy with any .mp3 player. Taggin in a way that makes functionality to you is key with any .mp3 player.

I actually like the menu system of the Zen. It's maybe a touch small, but overall, it doesn't seem to bother me. The screen is incredibly easy to see in the dark as well. It's basically indiglo.

Sound: It sounds fantastic. I was skeptical at first, but the amp is pretty powerful for a portable device and Powers some of my higher end headphones wonderfully (Grado SR60s, Sony MDR-7506)

Bill's last word: People complain about Nomad software. Well since the Zen is a PC device, a number of people have already designed third party applications for the Nomad's. Something you don't often see for Apple products. Notmad explorer is one fantastic app, and JBHTTP is another. JBHTTP makes your nomad a web server and you can stream music through Internet Explorer. As I type this, three people I work with are all listening to my music along with me. I bet you can't do that with an iPod.

Bottom line: Save some money and buy some great headphones so you can enjoy your .mp3 player.

I've been using one of the original Nomad Jukeboxes, upgraded to 20 gig, and finally saw a device that convinced me to switch...the Zen! Sure the Ipod is cute and neat and all, but there was no way I was paying the price for a 20 gig one. The Zen has enough features at a very attractive price that I did not see any reason to get something that costs more. So far, I have not had reason to regret my choice.

Firewire made transfers super-fast although they did lock up on me a number of times so I had to keep restarting. Also, my collection is mainly WMA files and the included software did not correctly handle the ID3 tags. Apparently only deals with MP3 files, even though WMA is supported by the player. So I had to purchase 3rd party software to do the transfer...which is much easier to use in any case (Notmad Explorer).

I really like the new menuing. A big, big improvement from the menus on the old Jukebox which were frustrating and hard to use. The scroll button makes it even easier to get around and enter text. I never have a problem changing the play mode now!

Sound quality is excellent, and volume level is as well. Other little improvements abound...like now when you hit the back button, it goes to the beginning of the song, rather than to the previous song. Makes it a lot easier to listen to the same song over again.

The buttons can be a bit hard to figure out in the dark, and the screen is still pretty small. Battery life seems very good (certainly compared to the original Jukebox, which was terrible!!) The player comes with a nice leather case, which so far has saved it from damage a couple times when I have dropped it on the floor. The headphones are adequate, and fine for me.

Finally, one reviewer said you could not stop music...you certainly can, just use the play/pause button. Not sure what he was thinking.

This is a good sounding unit with a huge storage capacity, which can hold an awful lot of music files in both the MP3 and WMA formats. It can also store data files containing text, graphics, or movies. This gets around the problem of files that are too large for floppies and which take too long to be burning to a CD, with the associated problem of incompatibility of burning software where a partially burned disc is wanted to be appendable. Nero and Adaptec work together, but Gear is only compatible with Gear.

I chose this unit over the Apple iPod because it had both USB and FireWire connections. The iPod only has FireWire, which is not fitted to many computers that you might want to up/download data to/from, so the Creative labs is the more versatile choice. The iPod does look more swish, the Creative labs looking good, yet rather traditional.

So, if you're looking for a convenient way to transport large data files and have lots of music to keep you entertained, this Creative labs unit is a good buy.

Fantastic product by creative. I got it just 4 days ago and its one of the best things i ever bought. For a music lover this device is "your music collection anywhere". I had some experience from my brother's Jukebox (6 GB) and i was amazed even then but my objections were the capacity and the duration of the batteries something that is solved now. Last but not least, I listen to Opera and some rock albums that between the tracks dont have gaps and that was a major problem with all the mp3 players including pc players. They use to produce gaps of 2 secs and that was very annoying. But for my surprise this doesnt happen with zen. Flowless play and amazing sound. Right now I carry it anywhere.