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Nomad Portable Jukebox MP3 Player Reviewed 98

Posted by timothy from the ok-yes-please dept.
Reader Whizziwig writes: "My CD player worked fine, but I was carrying around at least 36 CDs in my bookbag all the time, and breaking some. I also looked at all the mp3-cd players, I didn't see any that looked great, skip-protection & display-wise, plus it still meant carrying around a case of CDs." To deal with this, he bought a honkin' 6-gig MP3 player; read below for the review he contributed.

Words from the field

(First, a disclaimer: I'm not an audiophile, I'm someone who likes listening to music, and while I do prefer good quality mp3s and good hardware, I'm not an expert.) The Nomad Jukebox ("NJB" from here on -- my hands tire easily on my laptop) is the coolest toy I have ever had. The only thing which could eclipse it in my mind is a VAIO picturebook. I spent 3 months debating whether or not to get an NJB, read every review, trolled usenet, and compared prices. I heard both good and bad, but the negatives seemed to outweigh the positives. Three things won me over: the new firmware releases, the fantastic response of Creative to its users (most directly through creative.products.nomad) -- and that I found it for $370. This seemed like a lot less than $500+tax it's available for at some places. (Amazon & Buy.com both have it for $420. I also found a 50-dollar coupon, plus no tax online.)

Here are some of my thoughts and experiences thus far with this beast.

What's good:

Space: It can store 6 gigs of mp3s (that's actually 5718 megs, just so you don't feel cheated if you buy it and pull up "System Information"). This is obviously the selling point for the NJB. Flash based players generally have a max of 128 megs, and you're talking around 300 dollars.

Creative claims that 6 gigs translates into 150 albums (at 128kbps), I've been re-encoding my CDs, and have an album called "downloads" which is about 800 megs, and it's still comfy. Since you can transfer files off the NJB if they don't have the copyright bit set (specifically mp3s), the NJB can be used as a portable hard drive, just rename the file you want to transfer to .wav, (you'll need to use the Playcenter 2 software both to download & upload to it). For good or bad, Creative fills up the drive with 2 gigs of mp3s, about 1/2 classical, which you can't upload off the device, only delete. I've kept the gig of classical which sounds great, it's wonderful for relaxing or doing homework.

Sound: the player sounds great. The sound is crisp and clear, with basically no interference. Some people have complained that the volume is too sort, I have had no problem, I also don't listen to my headphones loud enough to go deaf. 13/20 on the volume dial can be too loud for me. If it's really an issue for you, a boostaroo can be found for under $20. There is a headphone jack on one side, which is controlled by the volume wheel right below it. The volume wheel is relative; you set the default volume which the player starts at, and then the volume knob raises or lowers that, a little window pops up on the screen to show what the volume level is at. On the back of the unit are 2 line-out for 4-point speaker system. It sounds great either way. This is all dependent on whether or not the mp3s can be decoded, more on that later.

Transfer: USB is more than adequate for transferring files. With the latest firmware,a theoretical transfer rate of 3.2 Mbps, downloading an album takes a few minutes. It does take a while to propagate the entire hard drive, I spent a day id3'ing my mp3s, building playlists and transferring all the files.

Creative Labs: they have been wonderful to their customers, one of their techs (Ji Lou) is extremely active on creative.products.nomad, they have been quick with new firmware releases, addressing users' issues, it's really positive to see. I have faith that most of the outstanding issues will be fixed by creative Real Soon Now. Seeing how great creative was being was one of the factors that gave me the leap of faith to buy the NJB.

What's so-so:

Batteries: The batteries only last 3.5 to 4 hours, and they're hard-to-find 1800 mAh NiMH batteries. The batteries have a 12 hour initial charge time and 4 hour charge after. Creative includes 2 sets of batteries, which means with a spare charger, you can carry 8 hours of playtime.

Because the batteries are NiMH, it is easy to lock or cap the batteries, and lose a significant part of their potential charge, and planning your battery usage can be annoying. Note too that building playlists on the unit, or using the spatialization and equalizer settings chew batteries. (Building on your computer or in playcenter and transferring them to the NJB is probably your best bet.)

OS/UI The OS can be slightly unresponsive, popping up a dialog that says "Working" for a few seconds, sometimes freezing for a few seconds, sometimes queuing up key presses and then trying to execute them when it starts listening to the real world again. The OS can crash, but this has never happened to me: it once locked up, though, and came back only after the current playlist was done. With recent firmware it's very stable.

I like the UI, it's intuitive, the buttons (both the soft & hard ones) are well placed, it makes good sue of what's basically a 7 line x 30 character display (variable width font), even non-computer people seem to have an easy time navigating once I explain what the "Lib" and "EAX" buttons do. (They bring you to the library, and to the catch-all menu called "EAX and System Menu.")

The boot time, on the other hand, isn't quite as pleasant. With about 5 gigs of mp3s, my NJB takes about 30 seconds to boot, this is normal (or even good) -- some people have reported upwards of 2 minute boot times. Chatter on the Creative newsgroup, this is because the FS on the hard drive doesn't have a file allocation table, and so when it says "Preparing Library," the device is actually seeking through and finding all the mp3s on the drive. I'm not sure if this is really the case, but it sounds plausible.

Physical: The NJB weighs 14oz. Not incredibly heavy, but it is noticeably heavier than a CD player, ( and much heavier than an MD), and makes my coat sag on the side it's on. It vibrates at times, especially on boot and when starting a song (doesn't vibrate like a cell phone, which is good), it can get hot, because there is an HD spinning up inside, though not nearly as hot as a standard-issue notebook. good: for what you get inside versus a CD player (a 6 gig hard drive vs. max of 80 minutes of music), the size isn't bad. It's pretty, and gets lots of oohs and ahhhs (hey, you're buying a geek toy, might as well get the proper respect).

MP3 Decoding: The NJB's decoding is not nearly as robust as winamp or xmms/mpg123, the area where this is most apparent is with corrupt mp3s. If the NJB encounters an mp3 with very corrupt frames, it will abort playback in the middle of the song (usually skipping to the next song). Generally a good gauge of how the NJB will handle an mp3 is to run mp3asm on it, if you get more than 1 line of output from mp3asm -v, find a new mp3 (for some reason, mp3asm sasy "skipped 128 bad bytes" on all of my xing-encoded mp3s, which play fine on the NJB). I haven't played with WMA at all, since I do most of my music listening under linux.

Those quibbles aside, it decodes mp3s, WMA and wav's well. It sounds good. It supports VBR encoded mp3s. Not much else to say.

Software Since I'm using a Windows box to connect to my NJB, I'll rant about that experience. Playcenter 2 is awkward to use and non-intuitive. When transferring playlists, you can only have an mp3 in one playlist, or it asks you if you would like to replace/replace-all/skip/cancel, there's no "skip all." This usually results in broken playlists. It's better to built basic playlists on your computer, like one/album, transfer those & the mp3s, then build other playlists on the device, but from within Playcenter 2 (it sounds confusing, but you'll figure it out). You first need to move your mp3s into the "PC Music Library," then transfer them.

The only redeeming part of Playcenter 2 is that the latest upgrade can handle .m3u playlists (a glorified name for a text file of list of mp3s with absolute paths), so I build all my playlists with either perl scripts on my linux box, or Drag-and-Drop in winamp (did I mention Playcenter 2 doesn't support DnD?), load these into Playcenter, transfer them over, and muck with Playcenter 2 as little as possible.

Durability: Part of the problem with having mechanical media over solid state media is that mechanical media have moving parts. Dropping the NJB causes the heads to crash. Running down a flight of stairs and slamming your pocket into the banister may cause the NJB to shut down ( you probably wouldn't want to do that to a CD player either -- it was the 42nd street subway station, it was rush hour, I wanted to get home ... ). It also means you can't go jogging with your NJB, because it does need to spin up the HD every so often. Headphones I don't like Over-the-ear headphones, the ones that cover your whole ear and go behind your head, so I wasn't thrilled with the included creative backphones. They hurt my ears, less than the similar Sony ones do, though. I've heard some people complain about the sound quality, they sound OK to me.

What sucks:

The case: Stupid large faux-leather thing, with a strap on top and no access to any ports. You can't even use the headphones with it -- it is useless for anything other than padding the Nomad in a bookbag. I have been unable to find a good case for the NJB and have been slipping it in my jacket pocket when in use, and using the case as protection during the day. Hopefully Creative will come out with a better case, something like the cases on the current sony cd-players would be nice, but the shape and size may make this tough.

SDK/specs: The one area where Creative falls down is with respect to the Nomad (Personal Digital Entertainment) SDK. The SDK is closed,and while there is an open application for the SDK, no independent developers have succeeded in obtaining one. Since the specs are so tightly guarded, there's no Linux driver, This is probably all due to Creative trying to keep complaint with SDMI.

Final Thought

I wish I could've done more justice to WMA, but since most Slashdotters use mp3s, it shouldn't be too big a deal. I also haven't mentioned the ability to record to the NJB, simply because I haven't used it yet, most people are buying the NJB so they can listen to music, not record lectures. I hope a future firmware release supports Ogg Vorbis as well. The NJB has a lot going for it, and it is a first-generation device (not first-generation mp3 player, first generation of mega-hard-drive mp3 players), so that's what you should expect. The upgradable firmware means that any software issues can in theory be resolved for download, and they probably will. Ji Lou is promising something special for Christmas for NJB owners, I'm guessing it's a firmware upgrade, I hope it's good.

Note: Whizziwig also mailed with this hopeful tidbit afterward: "On a seperate note: I just dropped my NJB about 3 ft (not on purpose), it was off, and appears to be fine."
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Nomad Portable Jukebox MP3 Player Reviewed More

Nomad Portable Jukebox MP3 Player Reviewed

Comments Filter:

  • Advertorials (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A couple days ago, there was an interview with They Might Be Giants, and just now, a big TMBG banner was floating at the top of SlashDot. Yesterday there was a big banner advertising the Nomad Portable Jukebox, and today there's a nice review of it.

    I realize banners rotate semi-randomly, and the Nomad is justifiably of interest to ./ readers. Naturally, advertisers will want to advertise stuff that's of interest to a site's readership.

    But it does raise the question of "editorial integrity." With other article ideas and interviews from which to choose, do you think those that favor advertisers, or that attract ad dollars in a quid pro quo exchange for publicity, are given special treatment?

  • Aiwa Car player (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I picked up the CD-MP3 player for my car @$300 US. The random function isn't very random, no playlists, but CD/CD-RW support is cool. It supports VBR and CBR MP3's so you can downsample and VBR mp3's and they still sound decent. IMHO it kicks ass for 300!

  • don't buy one (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i also have a nomad jukebox and i believe it isn't worth the money at all. here's my quick summary.

    good:

    1. Sound Quality - it's very good and i've had no volume problems.

    2. Nice effects - although they're useless to me, i'd imagine they make for interesting listen for someone with only a 4 speaker setup.

    3. 4 speaker sound - ability to fake surround sound and use 4 speakers.

    4. case design. i really like the case design. it's symmetrical, even with power supply, usb, and single line out plugged in. (the cable outputs attempt to be symmetrical as well)

    5. there is an extra set of batteries included.

    bad:

    1. battery life - the battery life is anywhere from 3.5 to 4 hours so long as you don't don't touch buttons once playing, only play 128kbps, keep the backlight off, and don't use any of the EAX stuff. (it says these in the manual)

    2. battery life indicators - absolutely horrible. i've had them jump from 100% to 65% in 3 minutes. on my last flight the entire 3 hour flight the battery indicator stayed at 55%. when i got on the next flight (an hour later and i didn't play music while i was on the layover) it was at 27% for 5 minutes before dying.

    3. non-intuitice UI - having the buttons constantly change and having a different select/open button for every menu makes it difficult to learn the navigation. the player buttons make a nice cross pad and it would've been nice to use those to navigate with maybe a few other buttons. things like battery life indicators and general settings (for backlight, sleep time, etc) are in the EAX menu (you hit the EAX button to access them)

    4. sluggish UI when playing mp3s. sometimes the entire UI will halt for up to 5 seconds while music is playing. you'll hit down several times and think it didn't catch the presses, then suddenly it catches up in a second, and sometimes it animates slowly hte buttons you pressed several seconds ago.

    5. horribly loud hard drive - it sleeps the hard drive while playing each song (it has 8 megs of ram which i'm guessing it uses to buffer most of the song), so when you play a new song, it wakes the hard drive which makes it really loud. the same sound hard drives make when starting up or awaking from sleep.

    6. transfer speed - since it's usb, you'll never get the ideal throughput especially if you're using other USB devices like a mouse or keyboard. on average i got less than 500KB/sec (notice the capital B for byte). i could almost encode as fast as i could transfer and if i was using gogo i'm sure i could've. (this is with the firmware update, i just updated it a week ago)

    7. playcenter 2 - it's horrendous piece of software. progress bars only appear in one window and if that window isn't shown you may just get a list of what's happening with no progress. it's all fagotted up through rounded corners and bitmaps so it uses so many more resources than necsesary just to attempt to look cool. (and it doesn't) sometimes, parts of the UI will get drawn over by another window and will never get redrawn. i'd have preferred something simple without all the wasted space in bitmaps because creative wants to forget everything about UI standards and create their own (and my god they're worse than microsoft in every way. not only can they not design good hardware and software, they can't get UIs either) it's not intuitive or easy at all. you seem to have to put all songs in a "library" before uploading them to a player, and then i couldn't even find a sync button to have it upload anything that wasn't already on it that's in the library. i've also had the encoder crash on me 3 times in the 10 hours i've used it.

    8. it can crash, or partially hang. while i was on one of my recent flights, the thing stopped playing music. i'd click on a song and it wouldn't play the song but the time would go from 0 to 0:01 and stop. no sound at anytime. it would do this for any song selected. the interface still responded but no songs would play. a reboot fixed it.

    9. playlists - i still haven't found a way to remove songs from a playlist. just clear the list and add songs.

    10. boot time. it's pretty pathetic folks. i've seen pcs and laptops that are just as fast.
  • The 128 bytes the author mentioned mp3asm is skipping is the ID3 tag. Not anything to worry about; mp3asm should be fixed to handle this, I would hope.

    - A.P.

    --
    * CmdrTaco is an idiot.

  • As long as it can hold at least a GB or two, that's more than enough for me. I don't know if I'd want to pay ~$400 for it, though; I'd definitely pay $200.

    As to the interface, I'm sure that'll get reverse-engineered soon enough, but it'd be much nicer if it didn't have to; there's no reason to develop a proprietary protocol for this. Heck, what's wrong with ftp?
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • And I love mine too. It's a LOT smaller than the Nomad (it literally fits into my shirt pocket), lighter and has a better battery life. 10hr playtime is just about ideal for taking to work.

    I've got a 20G drive on order for it, which should be here next week (my Christmas present to myself :)) and then I'll be completely content.

    I'm still using the command line tools from Compaq: they work great, and any 'tweaking' of the playslist and such I can do in vi without a lot of hassle.

    I bought mine from Thinkgeek, who seem to have a better prices than the vendors listed on pjbox.com, but things may have changed in the past few months.

    The 'marketing' side of the pjbox sucks: it comes in an ugly box, it has a manual that looks like a rush job... but the engineering side of the box is slick: tiny, great battery life, great headphones, comes with all the cables (including a power supply with changeable 'pins' for US or Euro use and that takes 100-240VAC at 50/60hz happily). It certainly increased my respect for Compaq engineers who designed it. Since the engineering side of the box is so nice, I'll forgive the ugly box and silly manual. (I -did- love the 1 page "okay, you probably won't read the manual" thing and that it came pre-loaded with some tunes so I could play with it before I got it loaded with tunes. :))

    It -is- more expensive than the Nomad... which is the only 'real' drawback. But, hell, decent scotch is more expensive than fire water, and it's worth it, too. :)

    All in all? It's the finest portable mp3 player around. Especially since last I checked the Nomad didn't have any Linux support at all: for me, that would make it a paperweight.
  • I second this. I've had a PJB for well over a year now; getting one right after the price was set and they opened for retail on the net. Its the best thing I've ever purchased. Yeah it is expensive but it handles everything thrown at it regardless of the bit rate (never tried more than 320), its tough and sturdy and the accessories that come with it are top notch. The headphones are some of the best you will ever hear that aren't monitor type. The battery life isn't a lie... I get above 9 hours per session everytime. Thats a mightly long time of uninterrupted music.

    But most importantly they actually care about the product. I dropped the hell out of mine. Cracked the case, broke the battery clip and lost a screw. They fixed it for cost of parts and shipping.

    The only draw back to the upgrade to 20 gig? You have to live without it for 3-5 business days.

  • No you can't. I've heard lots of arguments about why this is the case but simply, no. I always carry a mini-din-->rca cable in my bag so wherever I end up the pjb can almost always be plugged in.

    If you want somewhat cheap portable, use almost anywhere storage, I'd get a USB harddrive.
  • And I love it. It has great battery life, is smaller in size than the Nomad, and doesn't have the loading time issues that the Nomad suffers from. In addition, upgrading to 20gb (though I haven't done it myself) is said to be extremely easy, and can even be done for you at www.mp3factorydirect.com. The NanGo people are still very active in the support of the PJB (check out the egroups PJB100 list) and there are two or three Linux applications to load songs onto it that are being developed right now.
  • I just purchased the "Dorm_Blaster" bundle at www.overstock.com. It comes with a set of Altec Lansing ATA880 speakers and a MPstar MP3/CD player. I have to say that I just love it! The MPstar is great! Although it is not designed to be a portable unit (no batteries and larger them most), it is easily portable for the non jogger. I had it fall off the dash of my car and not skip while playing an MP3. CD playback will skip a little though.

    The speakers are also great for the price and since both of these units easily sell for $110+ on their own, it is a great deal.
  • Me too - 6GB would be nice, but what's the point if you can only listen for 3 hours before the batteries run flat?

    I'd be really worried about carrying a HD with me - even laptop HDs aren't designed to take a lot of shock when they're actually operating.

    Looks like yet another overpriced, impractical toy that'll sell just because it plays MP3 and gets mentioned on slashdot a lot. Oh well..
  • why have an expensive device that can only receive mp3s over a network

    You don't get it.

    I have something like 35GB of MP3's. I don't want to have to replicate that 35gigs everywhere I want to listen to music. Wireless isn't up to MP3 bandwidth yet (not even Ricochet [ricochet.net]), so local storage is a necessary evil for portable devices. But at home, I have a LAN. This is why man invented file servers.

    More to the point, the Rio/Dell Receiver has better DACs than any sound card ever will (and probably better than many SPDIF-input home theater receivers), and more importantly no moving parts. I don't want the whirr of fans or the whine of hard disks interfering with serious listening. And at high bitrates with good encoders, MP3s can be worthy of serious listening.

    That silence alone is worth the $299.

    -Z
  • Arrogant? I think it's right on the money. If they sound OK in Winamp, they must not be THAT corrupted. I don't care if you can detect the problem on an oscilloscope. I'm much more concerned with what my ears hear.
  • Hey, I wrote the review, and you're an AC, I would've liked to have responded via email.

    winamp & xmms/mpg123 are good at playing corrupt mp3s, have you bothered to run mp3asm and anything from your collection? I thought I was givign a good way to tell fi they would play or not.

    I said that Playcenter 2 has issues, and I explained how I've gotten aroudn them. Importing playlists is an easy & stable way to do it.

    Have you updated to the latest firmware? I use my NJB four at leats 2-3 hours a day. Sometimes with premad eplaylsits, sometimes iwth hand coalated ones, it ahs never crashed on me. I've had to reboot it once.

    I explained the problems with it, and that in my opinion it was worth the price I paid.

    Creative will never disable mp3s. Stop trolling.
    Thanks.
  • umm, again, I'm the reviewer.

    I *bought* mine. I didn't get it for free. I figured it wouldbe nice to tell the community about my experiences with the product, since a lot of slashdotters are probably interested in it.

    I don't know anyone at creative, except through the newsgroups, I'm not getting compensated for the rveiew. The ads were on slashdot before I even asked about my review.

    I really don't think I have a totally rosy view of the product. In ym case, the positives outweighed the negatives.

    --dave

  • empeg is a car player. RTFR. (R for review)
  • First of all, No, you do NOT have to register, pay or sign any document to get your SB Live to work under Linux.

    Secondly, I am well aware of the fact that the Jukebox is NOT the SB Live, but they are both produced by the same company, and the support they give to one mature device reflects on how they might support other devices as they get mature.
  • I was debating between a NJB and a PJB. You know what won me over to the NJB?

    $375 versus $600.

    I don't know about geek-friendly (I'm sure it will be more geek-friendly as time goes by), but it certainly is more wallet-friendly. Besides, Creative does support Linux (look at the SB Live,) it just takes them awhile. And with the upgradable firmwire, I'm sure problems will be solved as quickly as they are spotted.
  • after you get over the initial cost it's great.

    cheap media

    small size

    up to 40 hours of play time

    skipping isnt an issue

    option to record cd's via optical cable

    use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that

  • There are alternatives to the Creative nomad/D.A.P.

    PJB have been mentioned, but is unfortunaltly rather steeply priced.

    Then there is the neo 25 and archos units. neo 25 have been on the market a while, but I don't know too much of it.

    The archos unit is rather smaller than the creative and mounts up as a common USB hdd. Which means it's a breeze to move files with and you don't need any special software to transfer files to it (other than the driver I presume).

    Also there is no indication that it contains user-hostile copy protection devices.
  • http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/things/3474.html

    Six hundred bucks!?!?!? And that's cheaper than eight hundred?!?!?! For that much money I could buy a discontinued or remanufactured laptop and use it for something else.

    I'm hard on equipment, and I won't carry something with me unless it's in a very well-padded bag or cheap enough to replace easily. The most expensive thing in my pocket is my Palm V, and I got that for free anyway - the one I bought was a Palm III.

  • "I also looked at all the mp3-cd players, I didn't see any that looked great, skip-protection & display-wise, plus it still meant carrying around a case of CDs."

    Well the 36 CDs could be reduced to about 3 or 4 CD-Rs full of MP3s. Display-wise the ones I've seen so far don't look great but about something like 40s of skip protection sounds like more than enough for me! Yeah the MP3 CD players might not be quite as good but they're more suited to those (like me) on a tighter budget.

  • Those are NOT the only two albums, with the advent of CDR/CDRW mp3 players. I got an Iomega Hipzip (cheap 40MB removable media) for my birthday a couple of weeks ago and I'm exchanging it for a Phillips Expanium. CD-R/RW was already my favorite storage medium, since they average to a dollar apiece, can be read in nearly every computer, and can hold about 6 and a half ZIP disks. Now I can play music from them? At 128 kbps, that's 11 hours for a dollar! For the purist, it's still 5 hours at 256. Want to go up to 320? You're still way over 75 minutes. My prediction is that, unless the industry can stop it, this will be the new standard for audio distribution. Kudos to Phillips for leading the way and not sucking up the RIAA.

    ----

  • Simple, there's Gnutella [wego.com] and check out The Music lover [themusiclover.com]

    --Never trust a guy who \has his IP address tattoed on his arm, especially if it's DHCP.
  • What about uploading? I'd like to copy some files back into my computer when the 'box is full. So far, some people say it can be done, other reviews say it can't, and some say only .wav files. So what's the deal?

    Yes, I read the review, but others on other reviews disagree.

    ----- Never trust a guy who has his IP address tattoed to his arm, especially if it's DHCP.
  • Don't mean to be redundant, but Slashdot is not just about open source stuff. It's about technology, engineering, science... "nerdy" stuff.

    Anything that might be of interest to geeks and the like is welcome here on ole' ./

    --

  • This device sounds nice. It has a HUGE storage drive in comparison to other MP3 players out there but one problem persists. The device is too large. If they could make it the size of a pack of smokes (or smaller) and hit a $200 - $300 price range I think they would take off. I just dont think it is going to happen anytime soon.
  • I reccommend this [lik-sang.com].

    (From the product page) LiKKO MP3/CD Portable Discman - Can play MP3 CD / Audio CD / CD-R / CD-RW - Support long .MP3 file name - DIR programmable - LCD display - Resume / Normal / Hold functions - 500 seconds record sound Priced at $129 US.

  • Try your CD collection (and a decent MP3 encoding program).
  • Only coupon I could find was at Creative's site, for $50 at hifi.com AFTER you already have a Creative product to register against. That hardly seems applicable to a current purchase. Did I miss something?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • If you haven't already, go check out the empeg [empeg.com]. It's superior in just about every way. It even runs linux!
  • Is the Mambo X [mambox.com] MP3/CD Player. It can play audio CDs and CDs of MP3s and is portable.

    Another neat feature is is can use CDs that have directories on them, and it skips over non MP3 files (such as covers and CUE sheets).
  • This thing, with all it's quirks aside, is a bad ass toy. I've had mine for about 8 hours now and I am thouroughly happy. I was walking outside drunkenly after a christmas party and dropped my player. On concrete. It has marks on the plastic now, but after a reboot the player wokred fine. It took about an hour to upload my 120 or so mp3's onto this device, and the playback is wonderful. It may be pricey, but in my opinion it's worth it. This thing is just damn cool. It was the most cool christmas toy that was seen at my house this year.
  • <SARCASM>

    Gee... thanks! It's not listed on any search engine and anyways i had no idea about how to reach www.creative.com... oops... Creative Labs, i mean...

    And when i did "nomad mp3 player" in google and pressed "I'm feeling lucky", it crashed! I don't know where they would have sent me!

    </SARCASM>

    phobos% cat .sig
  • Sorry about that subject line. I think I've been watching too much Saturday Night Live Celebrity Jeopardy (with Sean Connery, ya know?).

    Anyway, I'm thrilled to know that the hard drive mp3 players are finally starting to hit and hit big. As with any software/hardware, it will only get better ... so I think I'll hold out on buying one for just a little while. (And as Murphy's Law says, as soon as you buy one, they'll release the "next-generation" kickass edition that you don't need because you just bought the excellent-but-now-crappy-in-comparison edition.)

    Also, though I'm not an advocate of this myself, my father wouldn't mind a nice little mp3 player with an AM/FM tuner as well. Anyone that has ever worked with radio technology should know that implementing an AM/FM tuner would take a very tiny chip and very little power when used, and I personally think it's a great idea. It's a known fact ... sometimes we just get tired of listening to the same old thing! Besides, what if you're caught in a horrible storm and need to hear some good (or bad) news, but your mp3 player is all you've got?! See, it's worth the extra $8.42!

  • Not that I'm trying to defend a bad product. But the first generation of the DS 818 player (commonly known as Genica or MPTrip) did have lots of problems like the ones you are describing. I have one of the very first models and have used it for over half a year and its still running fine, although almost all the paint scraped off. The newer versions of the DS 818 work just fine, although there are a few newer players out there that are more asthetically pleasing. I personally love mp3-cd players, however if you consider buying one I would advise you to read the mp3.com portables message board to help decide.

    -- BLarg!
  • They are not the same thing. Empeg is a car player and Rio reciever is a home receiver that uses the phone lines or ethernet. The Rio Receiver is being distributed by Dell [dell.com] and possibly others but I haven't heard them confirmed.
  • I have to agree. I looked at buying the Nomad but bought the Philips CDR mp3 CD player instead. My main reasons were: 1. 10hrs battery life compared with 4hrs for teh nomad (whats the point of carrying around 200 hours worth of music if you can only play 4 hours at a time). 2. Cost $500 for non-expandable 3. HD size too limited. 6 GB sounds like a lot but I already have a 60GB hard disk full of MP3s. When I travel I don't want to have spend all day synching my nomad, when I can just burn a couple CDs with my favorite tunes.
  • There is a third choice, somewhat unjustly rejected by the author of the review in the article, an MP3/CD player such as Pine on ThinkGeek [thinkgeek.com], or the Genica/Tavarua/MPTrip player at CoputerGeeks [computergeeks.com], mentioned previously somewhere among the comments here. I own a Genica, and while the craftsmanship, user interface and battery life leaves something to be desired, it offers the best storage/dollar option.Granted, judging from the reviews, I was extremely lucky to get a Genica that worked flawlessly out of the box, but there are other, albeit more expensive MP3/CD players out.
  • Such chargers are NOT recomended for use on AA's. Ok, like most R/C racers, ( I've got a fifth place in the national professional indoor carpet oval championships under my belt, a number of track championships and lap records, and for 5 years owned and operated my own indoor carpet oval track and hobby shop), I've done it, and it will work, but it WILL seriously shorten the lifespan of your AA cells if you do it regularly.

    You can do it with sub C cells though, and it shouldn't be a big deal to rig a sub C adapter for the Nomad that will allow you to use a peak charger for quick charges, as well as vastly longer play time per charge, at the expense of doubling the weight of the unit.

    And if you're going to go to THAT trouble, you could even use the new sub C rehargable lithium batteries, for which memory is not an issue.
  • I've been using my MD player for about two years now. It's aboput equal to a CD player in about 1/3 the size. If i had the money I'd see what i could do with a iPaq + a laptop HD and a some sheet metal from shop class.
  • Let me explain..

    Slashdot: News for nerds. stuff that matters

    look at the top of you page on the left


    ________

  • I use my NJB everytime I take a trip to one of my classes. At first I did have some problems with it, but I found ways to avoid every single problem I have encountered. First of all this thing does NOT have a very fast processor, just fast enough to do what it is supposed to do. If you have a mp3 playing and want to go running through all the other functions of the player, the NJB WILL slow down, WILL eat a lot of battery power, WILL crash sometimes. One major bug I have found is that when you try and play one mp3 just as another is ending the NJB will lockup a LOT. It must try and play 2 mp3s at once when you do this, the one you selected along with the next one in the queue. I simply don't do this. I make several playlists so I don't have to go around and change the mp3 every few minutes. One of the other posts here claims that the NJB's hd doesn't spin down. You can hear it spinning down, just by touching it you can tell whether the hd is spinning or not. This thing wasn't that great with the first firmware release, but now it supports FF and RV, this thing does everything I expected it to do now. With time you learn what to do and what not to do with the NJB. I'm still very happy I bought this thing.
  • nomadworld.com [nomadworld.com]

  • The specs say that player has 1.5 hours of battery life with the included lithium ion pack... that's less than acceptable for a "portable device".

  • Here are a few sites that discuss different types of batteries:
  • The best feature of the Nomad Jukebox is the firmware update feature. Every issue I had regarding the player was fixed (the firmware is now to 2.56, created in November). WMA's (though I don't use them) are supported, a seek feature was built in to rewind / ff through a song, and with the update (plus the updated programs) you CAN take mp3s and place them back on your computer! The lock on mp3s was removed when the WMA lock was placed on.

    And on the issue of corrupted mp3s: Whenever I have a corrupted mp3 (and I have had a few), the best way to fix this is to use Winamp and diskwrite as a WAV, then recompress it as an mp3 (I use Simple).

    Side note: Has anyone seen a program to resample mp3s to a lower bitrate? I also have a goofy 16mb mp3 player, and resampling my large mp3s is a 2 step process, plus I lose my ID3 tags.

  • Mp3 CD players are a good idea, but the Genica CD player from computer Geeks is not great product IMO!

    I thought, hey this looks neat, so I bought one. First one was great, bad interface, hard buttons, but it worked, for about 21 days, then it died for no apparent reason. Returned it, got another one, I guess they didint test it, because from the very first day it wasnt working properly.
    It would start spinning too fast and the laser wasnt able to read the CD. If I would tilt it slightly I could see the CD slow down and it began reading again. It got worst and worst also.

    Finaly I returned that one too and asked for a refund.

    Its a first gen product and for 99$ well you get what you pay for.
  • I already upgraded to a 20GB drive; it was totally hassle free, and I can now hold a TON of stuff on my PJB. All my stuff now gets encoded at 256kbps, and it sounds GREAT.

    Ditto the other comments on this thread - the thing is stable, light, small, runs forever on a charge, great sound quality, etc. etc. This changed the way the I listen to music, and I'm awful glad I *didn't* wait for the stinky Creative thing.

    Problems - no backlighting, no remote control, no two-way MP3 transfer. Relatively minor problems.
  • Flush your cache ;)

    SSI sells it with a better battery and a newer Firmware is available, incrasing the battery life to 4 hours (according to SSI's specs)

    I got about three hours I think, but that's with HQ (LAME VBR1 :)~ Mp3s, so the HD is accessed more often.

    But the short battery life is a problem, I have only two batteries, a longer trip could be dangerous... ;)
  • as im concerned if they work in winamp they are not corrupted. This is a pretty arrogant statement. Just because they work in winamp doesn't mean they aren't corrupted. Winamp is good at playing mp3s that are horribly encoded.

    Sometimes you by Force overwhelmed are.
  • I was just trying to say that if /. threw up every review it came across, well, it would be even busier and more confusing. I don't think it was a bad review, and it fostered some good conversation here, but are we going to see a review for every cool consumer electronics gadget? Why haven't we seen a review of that Rio home receiver thing, or that other MP3 hd player someone was talking about? I just think that there are better places for this than slashdot, is all. That's probably why I don't run the place, eh? ;)>
  • ...but is this what slashdot is for? User reviews of software that really doesn't directly pertain to open source? I could see if this article was about modifying it to add more space (which can be done, i don't remember where I saw it though), but I mean c'mon--everybody and their bastard children have already review this one. Again, it isn't that I think the review is bad, and I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I just think this review doesn't really belong on the front page of slashdot.
  • I agree totally. I got one of the first rio's myself, runs like a dream to this day & has taken serious abuse. My Lyra is even better--it survived the washer AND dryer with only cosmetic damage (chipped paint, didn't even scratch the LCD)
  • Well then, To keep things well rounded there are a few other option out there (all with 6gb of hard drive space)

    The archos jukebox 6000 [archos.com] which is supposed to have excellent sound quality and pretty similar battery life to the nomad jukebox and 100 dollars cheaper.

    The pjb [pjbox.com] which superior to the nomad jukebox, (longer battery life and comes highly recommended), thinkgeek sell this, very expensive ($690 I think)

    And also you should keep an eye out for the treo [treoplayer.com] which is going to be pretty gun, 8 hours of battery life, tiny, the next incarnation of the pjb and only $400 dollars

    Also there is the neo-25 [ssiamerica.com] which is cheap, but only got mixed reviews, so I would be a bit careful about buying it.

    Cheers
    Sam

  • Too late to get one for Christmas I guess, eh??
  • I just used a good old fashioned hole puncher to make access for the headphones.
    "Me Ted"
  • Be careful about overheating.
  • Does anyone know if there are any cdr/mp3 cd players out there that support high bitrates? Anything up to 256 bit? They seem like a good value now but all the ones I've seen only go to 128 or 160 bits and I'd rather have the quality if I have a cd full of mp3's.
  • Most harddrive-based models still do not yet support ID3 tags. But at this point in time, this player is the best thing going; but it's too pricy, even on sale. Another problem alot of players have is short battery life. Time and more generations will heal all...
  • Actually you can upgrade the HD, as it is only a standard 2.5" notebook HD. Tom's hardware has instructions on how to do this here [tomshardware.com]. You can upgrade to any size of notbook HD, but there are certain problems, depending on how many mp3's you have, mainly the boot time gets higher and higher the more mp3. 20 GB of mp3 will likely make for a 2-3 minute boot time, which IMHO, sucks arse...
  • If I'm not mistaken, AIWA makes a very nice car CD/MP3 player, I saw it in circuit city a while ago, I haven't heard much about it since then, but you might want to look into it, although a p120 is a much cooler mp3 player than the AIWA, IMO... just dont use it while driving....
  • From the same R/C store one can also get a peak charger that will charge up your batteries in like 15 minutes without capping, overcharging, overheating them. Such a charger is probably as expensive as your mp3 player but I find it very useful ;-)

    --
  • I've also been wondering about this, anyone know any sites that explain how to do this? I cant figure out how to transfer the mp3s from the Nomad Jukebox back to your computer...
  • Hi. I have read everyone elses comments with interest and I just really want to know a couple of things.

    no1. who do you consider to do the best mp3 hardware reviews?

    no2. which sites offer the best deals/security when buying a piece of kit? I just added compgeek to my favs. anywhere else like this which is potentially better? I really want to read some reviews of both Compaqs PJB 100 [damned expensive] and the Neo25. [how much is neo25 on average?]. thanks for any replies.

    -sol

    Time runs before you
    Calling, Calling, he is here!
    Mister ticktock man.
  • http://www.dailyedeals.com/ look halfway down the page in the middle and you will see a discount code for $50US off a $200US purchase from Amazon. I got my girlfriend a Nomad II for $187+shipping!
  • Nickel-metal hydride batteries are great because they last so much longer than nickel-cadmium. They also have one other major benefit: Contrary to this article, they have no "memory problem" (which requires you to completely discharge them at periodic intervals to keep from losing capacity). After a couple of full discharges at the beginning, a partial charge on them does them no harm at all.
  • While looking through mp3.com I found this

    http://hardware.mp3.com/hardware/individual/3083 .h tml

    it's a mp3/cd player that plays vcds and comes with a remote. How can you go wrong? ohh and it sells for $106 on pricewatch. It's made by some no name company but these are also the same type of people that gave us the Apex 600a (atleast i'd never heard of them before the 600a). I'm going to pick one up as soon as I can scrounge up the $.
  • About supporting Linux ? Well you have to register and then you have to sign a document and then you probably have to pay ! Moreover the SBLIve soundcard is NOT the device nomad !!!!
  • Actually the disk in those devices is a 2 inch disk. When you let drop these devices, the device will break NOT the harddisk. It is indeed a mechanical feature : the smaller the disk the more it can resist shocks and the disk is guaranteed to 9 G ! The PJB disks spins up ever 10 minutes or so because the device contains about 10 MB of RAM to buffer
  • the PJB can (if need be) support other sound formats. The firmware can be upgraded
  • yeah, you're so right dude. I encoded this 5th generation analog (All Nakamichi) with frau, and it was almost totally the same.

    the train's got it's brakes on, and the whistle is screaming dude. don't worry about these guys who don't get it.

    --
    "Don't trolls get tired?"
  • All these portable makers assume people still encode at 128K, which produces some of the worst-quality MP3s I've heard. I've seen players that don't even *handle* stuff over 192K. My default bitrate now is 192, and I've gone as high as 320 when the music demands it. Diamond used to claim their 32MB Rios could handle an hour of music, too -- how the hell can you squeeze an hour into 32 megs, even at 128K?

    - A.P.

    --
    * CmdrTaco is an idiot.

  • How much did Frauenhofer pay Creative to make sure it wouldn't be able to play Vorbis? Or did they just threaten them with lawsuits again?

    --
  • With the PJB up there in price, and the Nomad having so many things going against it (like 30+ seconds to "boot"? My empeg boots in 8 tops) I will probably hold out for a portable hard drive based unit under the Rio brand. With empeg now being owned by SonicBlue, (story rejected, oh well), any type of player like that is likely to come out of the UK offices, and simply blow anything else away.

    Although the TreoPlayer looks very tempting. Time to wait and see if it's upgradable as well.
  • Because on £15 headphones, on a portable MP3 player, while walking about, I can't hear the difference.

    Which means I can fit about an hour of music in 32MB.
    _____
  • I was shocked when I went into Costco here in Canada yesterday. There are some CD/MP3 players on the shelf for $140 Cdn. They play CD/CD-R/and CD-RW. I have never heard of (nor can I remember) the company that makes them, but it looks to me like the wave of them is just about to arrive. The only reason I did not buy one is that I currently use a pentium 120 Laptop as my MP3 player for my car, and the player at Costco plays 32-128 bit encoded MP3's, and I like my MP3's at at least 160 bit.

    Looks like the wave is going to come down, if these things are in Costco now, they will be everywhere in the next 3 months.

    Its about damn time.
  • I'd loave to use MD players rather than shell out for a portable MP3 player. The only problem is the fucking things haven't really caught on here as they did in Japan. You can go to a good electronics store and buy players and MD disks but anything besides that you're out of luck. The MD players have the drawback of not having enough third party software support (that I've ever seen). If I could rip my cds to MD format and plug the player into my USB port to transfer the files I'd jump all over it. As it stands though I have to hook the player up to my CD player and rip songs that way. Its very tedious compared to ripping CDs into MP3 and transfering them onto a portable MP3 player.
  • I found the review quite correct. But some issues are not well covered. Most of them are discussed in the parent post, but there are some more I want to share.

    Don't get me wrong, I like my jukebox very much. But the firmware really needs to be improved for the NJB to be worth its price.

    First as the parent post says the lock switch is software read. A major problem is that is doesn't really lock the keys. I usually carry my NJB in the back of my pants, so buttons get pushed quite often. If all of the buttons get pushed at the same time several time, the NJB will generally freeze, needing a needle to restart it.

    Secondly, even if you have 1 or 2 hours playback left, the NBJ will consider itself in low battery mode and refuse to save any setting.

    Third, I encoded all my mp3 at > 192Kb/s. The UI will then be incredibly slow, and often you think you selected a song, but the NJB will play another. Even more, the volume will refuse to work correctly under heavy load.

    The UI is really NOT userfriendly and could be improved a lot. No easy way to just play one song you want or remove a song for the queue without fiddling with all buttons (it's ok once you have memorized all the button to press in which order).

    But the most annoying thing is that all tracks are sorted on ID3 tags and there is no way to sort them by directories. So I get a lot of problems with my songs that don't have correct album/genre/artist tags (I have a big album called *UNKNOWN* on my NJB). Some songs just go into the wrong album in the NJB because of a wrong ID3 tag.

    NB: I just installed firmware 2.56.
    The improvements are that you finally have fast forward as advertised. Before this FW if you listened to a mixed album, you would have a 2 second silence before the next song was loaded. Now I just get an annoying *click*. The unit still crashes at least once a day., Creative refuses to acknowledge the problem.
  • IMHO, IMHO, of course, always IMHO: the hard drive. I know, it's sturdy and small etc. but I always thought as the best feature of MP3 players, the fact that they are truly solid-state.With clever engineering, solid-state can mean much less energy consumption. However, with a hard drive, there is always a certain (rather relevant) amount of consumption that can not be eliminated.

  • My favorite site for mp3 player reviews is dmusic.com [dmusic.com]
    Reviews of just about every hardware mp3 player out there and more.
    check it out. (BTW, no I'm not affiliated)
  • You can get a good case for the Nomad Jukebox (and the PJB-100) from headphone.com, an audiophile site. Of course it's custom built, so not exactly cheap: http://www.headphone.com/ProductsBags/TheNomadBag. asp

    -mati
  • First, I never tried the Expanium, but I've seen a very negative review of it in Maximum PC (5/10) and it supposedly had bad sound quality (I don't remember what else they were pissed at). I heard pretty positive comments about the $89 Genica/MPTrip/whatever (computergeeks.com). Reportedly, it has very good quality, and the batteries last for approximately 4 hours. Overall, I see no reason why it sucks any more than the nomad, other than the construction is shitty. You do have to have discs, but at least it won't get busted if you drop it and it doesn't skip that easy (according to what I heard). And it's easy to copy mp3s when you want them, not to mention that you have unlimited storage capacity. It is also about 4 times cheaper than the nomad and probably it's not as heavy. Overall, MP3/CD looks like a more promising technology than hard drive-based players. The only minus is that it doesn't display the title. However, unless you really care about hearing a particular track, it should not be a problem.
  • if you use freeware, yes, 128k really really sucks.

    but if you use Frau (I own a copy of the CLI version of Frau for linux) and use it at --qual=9, then its QUITE good and very near cd-like sound.

    before I ponied up the cash for Frau (and that took a LOT of soul-searching; I really prefer opensource software...) I used all the usual encoders (lame, blade, ...). and I had to use 192k or higher to sound ok. then after I bought frau and did half my collection at 128k, I found the space savings QUITE a good value for the audio. only very rarely (some female vocals) did 128k not sound at least acceptable.

    try the demo of frau and don't discount it simply because its not freeware.

    --

  • It should be noted that ANY AA size batteries will work. They do not NEED to be 1800's, although such should be available in any store catering to the electric R/C racing crowd.

    Batteries rated at less than 1800 simply won't last as long.

    As for caring for them, the same R/C shop ought to be able to give you lessons on how to care for them in such a way that they never get "capped" and retain full charge capacity. The mechanism of NiCd 'memory' is now known, as is its prevention. In fact the NASA web site has a nice little paper on it.

    R/C mail order outfits such as Tower Hobbies will sell you the batteries in bulk for a considerable discount over the storefront price as well.
  • As a geek I don't like the NJP, what to do with 6 gigs? I got twenty on my Neo 25!

    I can hook it to my windoze box and it's instantly recognised and listed as a harddrive.
    Why bother about audio, you can copy anything to the harddrive, getting a movie from friends doesn't involve CD'R's anymore, I got five Div-X ;) moviez on my box, gotta watch them...

    The IDE-Bus is just "tunneled" through the USB.
    Even fdisk could see the harddisk, and defragmenting works too(it's FAT32, uh)
    And yep, creating the index file after uploading takes about 30 seconds, booting takes 5 seconds.

    Why stay with a NJP? shure, shure it's got WMA (damn, yesterday I saw a WMA on Napster, I'm concernd now ;)

    My Woody doesn't like the Neo since there's no driver for him, but smbmount is at hand.
    (Gnapster directly downloads and shares from the Neo, no chance to forget updating my collection)
    My local collection has only backup character now.

    Whatever I wanted to tell initially, the Neo 25 is a geeky tool and U can UPLOAD from it.(RIAA and I agree that we don't like each other ;)

    Neo sources:
    www.ssiamerica.com distributor(manufacturer?)
    www.compgeeks.com (cheap Neo 25, AFAIK the cheapest source)

  • I wouldn't buy the Mambox if I were you - its quality and reliability are far lower than acceptable, even for a first-generation product. A visit to mp3.com 's message boards will attest to the countless problems people have had with this product.

    I've got a Philip's Expanium, which you can get at Amazon and Circuit City, probably a few other places. Runs for $199, which is a bit expensive, but its one of the only mp3 cd players that can reliably play mp3's of Any bitrate (24 through 320kbps)...lasts about 8-10 hrs on two AA batteries, never skips, and never runs into mp3's it can't play. Only thing missing is ID3 tag or filename display.
    ---

  • It seems like we're stuck with the decision of going with:

    1. A small, solid-state player that is smaller than a pack of smokes, but yet doesn't have enough capacity to hold a full CD.

    OR

    2. A larger, heavier hard disk player that is bigger than a portable CD player, but yet has enough capacity to hold most people's entire mp3 collection.

    Neither one is great, but the technology is relatively new and I'm sure we'll see better, cheaper models in 2001.
  • Given the durability (and cost) issues, I decided to go with a CD/MP3 CDR player.
    You can find them around for less than $100 nowadays, and it'll give you ~10hrs of mp3 playback. The interfaces aren't great, but it's an economic alternative to $500 bucks for a jukebox you still can't run with.

    The only real issue I have is that you have to fill CDRs with music, but for the same space that I used to be able to carry 10 albums, I can now carry 100... and put the thing on "random" to get a decent mix out of it.

  • The D-Link mp3/cdr player specs say it supports up to 320kbps encoding.

  • Re:Like the Nomad? Try the PJB. (Score:3)

    by EvlG ( 24576 ) on Sunday December 24, 2000 @09:35PM (#541084)
    Can you download files from the PJB? I'd like to be able to store my MP3s on it but then copy them to and from my work computer. Having to download them from my slow cable modem web server is really a pain right now; being able to pull them off the PJB would be sooooo useful. Not to mention sticking a secret stash of pr0n on there as well ;) So, can the PJB act as a USB hard drive file dump?

  • Re:Advertorials (Score:3)

    by pjrc ( 134994 ) <paul@pjrc.com> on Sunday December 24, 2000 @01:04PM (#541085) Homepage Journal
    Only a couple days before CmdrTaco posted this story about my little homebrew MP3 player effort [slashdot.org], there was a run of banners for the PJB-100 [thinkgeek.com]. I was a bit worried that maybe they would change their mind, but they posted the story, even though my little home-grown open-source project is more or less aims to be the same thing as the PJB-100 and NJB.

    Much as I like a good conspiracy theory, my personal experience (getting slashdot'd) suggests that they really don't tie the adverts to the articles, and in my case ran an article for an open-source project that aims to compete with what they had been advertising recently.

    I'm trying to resist the urge to make a shameless plug for my little project..... you can find it if you want, and compare with the PJB and NJB. The short story is that my little project is a circuit board that you assemble with a drive, and currently has very few features and no display, but is GPL'd and has great audio output. Maybe someday it'll compare with the PJB when I get the display board designed.

    For a second example, I noticed ads for vmware a couple days ago, not far separated from this article about Plex86 [slashdot.org], and then this one as well [slashdot.org].

  • I have one (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 24, 2000 @10:35AM (#541086)
    I bought an NJB as soon as i could get my hands on it. Its a cool toy but i must admit i don't think this reviewer really tried using the NJB very much. I have gigs and gigs of mp3s and as far as im concerned if they work in winamp they are not corrupted. About 30% of mp3s downloaded from napster or other online places will simply not work with the NJB and play about 20% of the way through then skip to the next song. The only software u can use to put songs on the NJB is severly buggy. You cannot import more than 100 songs into your "PC music library" at once. If you select more it just ignores u. The player itself is full of bugs. Sometimes when u reach the end of your playlist it will just lock up. If you try and add more than n number of mp3's to a playlist the player will lockup. I find myself rebooting the player about 3 times a day. My review would be much different. I would suggest to readers that yes.. this is a cool product.. but for the price u have to pay.. and the amount of bugs currently in the player.. u are much better off to wait untill the price comes down.. and all the bugs get fixed before picking one of these up. Also there is no way to access this thing in linux and while creative claims its a multios player (win/mac) no linux support will ever be supplied by creative.. and the sdk is closed.. my opinion.. skip this product and wait for a cool player of the same size that runs linux or some other open os and has a documented filesystem and an open api so u can write your own scripts to fill it up etc.. Also.. i really doubt that ogg vorbis will ever be used. The more likely thing would be that a future firmware will disable mp3 and make u only use wma.. err..

  • tomshardware reviewed this also (Score:4)

    by skt ( 248449 ) on Sunday December 24, 2000 @10:22AM (#541087)
    tomshardware [tomshardware.com] reviewed the Nomad as well. One of the cool things in their article is that they detail the steps necessary to hack your Nomad [tomshardware.com]. 6GB is never enough right?

    This looks pretty cool, but it's still a bit out of my price range. It isn't a solid-state player either, but I might be able to live with that if I was convinced this thing could endure the shock and abuse associated with a portable music player. Also, the battery life isn't that great (~4 hours?) but it's still much better than all of those 64MB players out there that can't hold a full CD.

  • I have one...keep looking. (Score:5)

    by n6mod ( 17734 ) on Sunday December 24, 2000 @10:23AM (#541088) Homepage
    OK, so I'm completely spoiled by the empeg and empeg's other product, the Rio/Dell Receiver. But the bottom line is this thing sucks. The UI is slow and often can get behind what's actually happening, so it will show one track title while it's playing another. The desktop software is entirely adequate for managing a 64MB flash-based player that might hold all of twenty tracks, but just doesn't cut it for a player that could hold two thousand. You have to add files one directory at a time (no drag-and-drop of /home/mp3) and I had a bunch of problems that make me think you can't have two tracks with the same title on the player at the same time. It takes an eternity to boot, and the boot time gets longer as you add more tracks to the drive. You can easily kill a set of batteries just carrying it in your bag, since the "lock" switch is read by software. The offshoot of this is that it boots up half-way, reads the lock switch, and shuts down. The audio quality is mediocre, and the headphone drive is pathetic, even before you turn on EAX. Trying to use any of the EAX (DSP) features will cost you about 10dB of volume, which makes headphones unusable without an external amp. To be fair, some of this could be fixed in firmware, and I haven't kept up with the updates since v1.75. You do wonder about a product that's initial release was v1.73, though. And yes, Ji Luo does an excellent job of paying attention to the customers in the creative.* fora. -Z

  • Like the Nomad? Try the PJB. (Score:5)

    by Fross ( 83754 ) on Sunday December 24, 2000 @10:37AM (#541089)
    For a far superior product (in my eyes), the PJB-100 kicks the Nomad's ass all over the place. Here's a quick run down of what it is:

    - 6 gig harddrive mp3 player, similar to Nomad
    - Much smaller than the Nomad (cassette walkman size), and weighs under 10oz
    - Upgradable HD (20 gig upgrade available in a couple of weeks, for $200 or so)
    - Rechargable Li Ion battery, lasts 12 hours, recharges in Unit. No damn AAs :)
    - Supports more bitrates than the Nomad
    - Harddrive actually spins down wihle in use (Nomad's doesn't), so it's quieter, cooler and doesn't use as much power.
    - Boots in 5 seconds max
    - Interface is MUCH better, the Nomad's sucks. Also has a bigger display.
    - SDK is OPEN SOURCE and is, of course, Linux Compatible :) There is huge support out there by people writing utilities and all sorts already. Compaq (the original designers) are being fully involved and giving a lot of support to it all along, too.
    - Available in many colours ;)
    - Case has belt clip and openings for jacks ;)

    When i decided I needed a high-capacity portable player, it was between the Nomad and the PJB, and the PJB won hands-down after some research. It's a bit more expensive, ($800 retail for the 6 gig) but it's far more expandable, better designed, and imho better value-for-money. For sure, it's more geek-friendly than the Nomad.

    As i mentioned above a 20 gig version is going to be available shortly, there will be an upgrade path from January turning a 6 gig into a 20 gig for just $200.

    Best place to buy would be ThinkGeek (.com), not only are they great and groovy, they have it for $200 cheaper than usual.

    Check out the site, www.pjbox.com, and reviews all over the place.

    Fross

  • more jukebox info (Score:5)

    by divide_by_0 ( 176557 ) on Sunday December 24, 2000 @10:22AM (#541090)
    http://www.kuren.org/jukebox/ [kuren.org]

    here is a page that has all kinds of information on hacking the jukebox to put in a bigger hard drive(20 gig!), and a bunch of other hacks to make it a little more fun. includes a bunch of pictures of all the parts inside and videos how to dismantle it

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