Creative Labs Nomad (MP3) Jukebox

About 6 months ago the need for an MP3 player was driving me insane. I wanted to listen to the dozens of songs I'd copied from Napster, and I didn't want to have to be chained to my Mac to do so. Sure I could burn them to CD, but that's a hassle, and not instant enough. Plus, I want the name of the song and the band to come up on an LCD screen. If I download 30 hardcore songs by 30 different bands I need to know who's singing what! So, I needed an mp3 player. Which one though? Should I go with one of the very small and very light ones and put up with the small number of songs that can be stored? Should I go with one of the removable media drives like the HipZip from Iomega? Or should I go for the Cadillac of MP3 players (at least at the time), the 6-gig Nomad Jukebox? After much deliberation and research I went for the latter. Sure it's expensive (I paid $420 for mine, but you can get them now for around $300), but it has a ton of bells and whistles the others just don't have, and it holds about 100 hours of music. 200 CDs on a drive about the size of a regular portable CD player? You can't beat it.

The first thing you'll notice is its stunning industrial design. It is a metallic brushed light blue and silver (a second model is plain silver) with a 2" by 1" LCD screen in the middle, and the bottom is curved so that it fits nicely in your hand. The volume dial and headphone jack are on the right hand side, while that lock button (to prevent you accidentally pressing the keys as you move) is on the right. The back of the unit has a jack for DC power, a USB jack for connecting it to your computer, a line-in jack for attaching a microphone, and 2 line-out jacks for connecting speakers. There are 11 buttons on the front of the unit. The 4 big ones in the middle are Play, Pause, Next Track and Previous Track. To the right hand side you have up and down buttons for scrolling through selections on the screen, and on the left you have the LIB button for bringing up your music library, and an EAX button for different sound settings/unit preferences etc. The last 3 buttons are set right under the screen, and are basically selection buttons for commands on the screen. The unit has an infrared port on the front, and although this has no function as of yet, that might well be written into the firmware at a later date. That's one of the reasons I like the unit so much: they included a ton of expandability into the unit. It takes 4 AA batteries, which is pretty heavy power consumption, but it ships with 8 NiCd rechargables, an AC adapter and a recharger, so they thought of that too.

That's all well and good, but is it easy to use, and how does it sound? Well, once you get used to it, it is easy to use, but there is a slight learning curve. It connects directly to the USB port on your Mac, and you need SoundJam to interact with it, although I do believe iTunes will work. There is a free limited version of SoundJam on the CD, so no worries there, but I already had the full version anyway. As soon as you boot into SoundJam another window pops up, which shows the contents of the jukebox. To delete items from it you highlight them and hit the delete key. To add to it you simply drag from your hard drive into the Nomad window. Couldn't be simpler. It comes with about 2 gigs worth of pop music, classical and spoken word already on it, but if you are like me, you delete that immediately. Before uploading to it, you will want to pay attention to the ID tags on your MP3 files. You need to make sure that you have song name, artist name and album name on there, otherwise housekeeping can be a chore. Remember, we may be talking about thousands of songs here! You can sort by artist name or album name, you can make individual play list compilations and save them, and you can also hunt for certain songs. All this is done on the small LCD screen though, so again, you want to organize the songs as well as you can before you upload them. For regular CDs I let the CDDB do all of the work. For songs I've downloaded I will group them together with similar songs and give them all an album name in the ID3 tags-"1980s Brit Punk" for example. This keeps them altogether and basically makes a compilation album. I also might download everything I can find by a certain band-The Groovie Ghoulies for example. I might get 3 tracks from each of their albums. Instead of having them sorted by their real album titles, which might leave me with 8 different Groovie Ghoulies listings, I will change the album title to the name of the band. That way all of the songs are listed together. You can also assign a play order by giving the tracks track numbers. However, these don't always stick, and I've never been able to figure that out. Anyway, once you get all of your music on there, the hardest thing you'll find is deciding what you want to play! Seriously, it's a beautiful thing. No more deciding what CDs you want to take somewhere, or which one CD you want to listen to as you work out. Now you have all of your favorites with you at once. It takes a minute or so to boot up, and when it does you have to scroll through a tone of artists/album titles, but click play and you are away.

While not super sturdy (I wouldn't want to drop it, but you wouldn't drop a hard drive, and that's all it is), it does have an 8 Meg buffer, so songs do not skip at all. Battery life isn't great-about 4 hours max-but they are rechargables, so it doesn't really matter. You just have to remember to plug it in when not in use. It comes with a ton of different audio settings, but most of them are useless unless you have 4 speakers attached: who wants to listen to music as if they were "in a cave" anyway? I called tech support and asked them what use some of these settings were. The tech answered me honestly: "no use at all" he said. "Turn all of the effects off". Fair enough. Like I said before, you can attach a microphone and record stuff, and in the future they are supposed to add the option for transferring regular computer files to make it just like a removable USB hard drive. Not bad. There are some extras you can buy for it. For example, you can get a cassette adapter so you can play it in your car, and you can now get something called the PlayDock. It is a boombox looking thing made by Cambridge Soundworks. It has no radio or anything, it is just speakers, and you attach your Nomad Jukebox to it to create a Nomad portable player. Nice idea for around $200.

Bottom line: I love it. It has changed the way I think about mp3s: it has made them invaluable to me. If you are impatient with scrolling through a small LCD screen, then this may not be for you. If you are comfortable with doing that, and like to keep your mp3s organized, you will love it as much as I do. More importantly though, if you want to take a shitload of music with you wherever you go, this is the only way to do go! God bless the people at Creative Labs!

www.nomadworld.com
www.creativelabs.com

by neil

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