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Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox "C" (Blue)

Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox "C" (Blue)

List Price: $219.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great MP3er
Review: It is a great device. It is a little bulky, about the size of a CD player, for an active person (hard to run with) but works great in a car or anyother place that isn't too wild. People are right about it [using]up the batteries, but with an AC charger and a DC charger it makes it possible to charge and run anywhere. It has its misshaps with some songs, which happens in the same place (it skips), but deleting and then putting the song back on solved the problem.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great MP3er
Review: It is a great device. It is a little bulky, about the size of a CD player, for an active person (hard to run with) but works great in a car or anyother place that isn't too wild. People are right about it [using]up the batteries, but with an AC charger and a DC charger it makes it possible to charge and run anywhere. It has its misshaps with some songs, which happens in the same place (it skips), but deleting and then putting the song back on solved the problem.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Faulty Hard Drives
Review: On paper, this sounds like a great MP3 player. It has the storage, 6 GB, to last me for many years. Problem is,this is my 2nd Nomad and I'm hesitant to get a 3rd.
The hard drive in units 1 & 2 went bad, causing lockups that only removing the batteries could resolve. While downloading music to the Nomad, the unit would freeze up and the software would give me an error message telling me the unit was busy or unavailable. This happened every session. During playback, the unit would freeze up and not continue the playlist. I couldn't turn the unit off, I had to remove the batteries to shut it down. Nomads' Tech Service advised that my problem was hard drives with bad sectors. I can forgive one bad unit, but not
two. At this time I can't recommend the Nomad Juke Box until they address the hard drive issue.
I've never realized the problem free service that I'd hoped for
with this unit

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Faulty Hard Drives
Review: On paper, this sounds like a great MP3 player. It has the storage, 6 GB, to last me for many years. Problem is,this is my 2nd Nomad and I'm hesitant to get a 3rd.
The hard drive in units 1 & 2 went bad, causing lockups that only removing the batteries could resolve. While downloading music to the Nomad, the unit would freeze up and the software would give me an error message telling me the unit was busy or unavailable. This happened every session. During playback, the unit would freeze up and not continue the playlist. I couldn't turn the unit off, I had to remove the batteries to shut it down. Nomads' Tech Service advised that my problem was hard drives with bad sectors. I can forgive one bad unit, but not
two. At this time I can't recommend the Nomad Juke Box until they address the hard drive issue.
I've never realized the problem free service that I'd hoped for
with this unit

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Who needs a CD changer?
Review: One fine summer day, my employer gave me a Rio with 32Mb on board. It was expandable to a maximum of 64Mb with an additional 32Mb chip. This was a nice little gizmo to have, and it started me down the path of MP3 mania - which before I had dismissed as frolly. Before long I was ripping every CD I had (in excess of 150) to my laptop to take with me on the road (I'm a road warrior, and I spend more time in trains, planes, and automobiles than at home). And as one might expect, it wasn't long before I was out of space.

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

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

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Good, but should be better
Review: Pros: (almost) 5 gigs of storage, attractive design, good sound, nice headphones included, software is upgradeable, plays well with iTunes on Mac.
Cons: Many people (including me) have problems with the built-in battery recharger. No battery power display in main menu screens (you have to dig for it). Software is poor in general; you can't search for a song by title or queue an entire artist's library by name; no "queue all" feature; playlists uploaded to the player aren't saved - you have to remake the list on the player. No downloading capability! This is VERY lame if you want to share songs with a friend or backup the tracks that comes preinstalled on the player. Hopefully this will be remedied with future software releases. No forward or reverse scanning - this is very inconvenient if you're listening to audio books or other long tracks and want to come back to the middle of the chapter.
Conclusion: if you can't wait to get a portable hard-drive type mp3 player then this should satisfy you, but personally I would wait for the next generation of models which will have greater storage and improved software.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: One year later
Review: So, I've had the Jukebox for just under a year now and here's what I think: It does everything that they say it does. It's reliable and eliminates the need for a cd player. Overall, I'm happy with it. However, a word of warning. The "Playcenter" software that ships with the unit installed easily when I was running Windows 98. When I moved to an XP machine, it was a different story. The updated drivers at the Creative site were more confusing than anything else. Eventually I ended up following directions from a site dedicated to Nomad users, and after two days of hell I got it to work. Apparently this is a common problem. I couldn't tell you what I did and hope that I never have to do it again. Now that it's done, everything is great and I love my Jukebox.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Only Downfall is the size
Review: The Creative Labs MP3 player is great. The screen is very easy to understand and is great for organizing music. I bought both the Archos and the Creative labs MP3 player and it out performs the Archos player in so many ways. The archos is very small, that is the only thign it has goin for it. The screen is terrible and you can't group music into artists. The creative labs even though it has a short battery life it still is worth the money. They also give you a second set of batteries.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Only Downfall is the size
Review: The Creative Labs MP3 player is great. The screen is very easy to understand and is great for organizing music. I bought both the Archos and the Creative labs MP3 player and it out performs the Archos player in so many ways. The archos is very small, that is the only thign it has goin for it. The screen is terrible and you can't group music into artists. The creative labs even though it has a short battery life it still is worth the money. They also give you a second set of batteries.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great Player! Short Battery Life, but Awesome Features!!!
Review: This is a Great unit and is definitely worth the price, especially if you consider the fact that it has 100x more storage than most mp3 players costing about half the price. The sound quality is great and it is packed with many features that cannot be found on lower end mp3 players. The software that comes with it is wonderful and very fast, I ripped and transfered 10 CDs to the jukebox in under an hour! The fact that it supports multiple formats (MP3,WAV,WMA, and more in the future) as well as having an upgradable operating system helps insure that it will stand the test of time. There is one thing that bothers me though, that is the fact that people often say that the Jukebox cannot do things that it actually can. I have the latest version of the Jukebox operating system (2.86) and have no problem moving MP3 files from my Jukebox back to my computer. The only case where this is not possible is where the MP3 has been specifically designed with copyright protection which I have only encountered with the music that came bundled on the Jukebox. Another issue that I see alot is that you cannot skip through a song. You can!!! Just press and hold the foward or backward skip button and you will move through the song, it even shows you were you are and how long the song is. I do not know if this was available on older versions of the OS, so if it does not work on yours, upgrade! As far as the battery life goes, this was meant primarily as a desktop unit that had the capability of being portable, it comes with 2 sets of rechargeable batteries that together last up to 8 hours (actually longer from my experience). I admittidly use it from battery power most of the time but have never had a problem with a lack of power.


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