For they Decided to Play the Fool

Creative Labs, at least to me, has often come across like the makers of the Macintosh: they can make brilliant hardware, but they can’t code to save their lives. My Soundblaster Live works teriffic, but the control panel set bars on programming idiocy. Oozic ( www.oozic.com ) is a brilliant 3D visualization engine… but whenever you go full screen you have their ANNOYING advertisements on the bottom (whether or not you bought Producer… a product that seems exactly the same as its demo).

And so, on the advice of a friend of mine, I went to purchase the Nomad Jukebox. My hope was to take the Jukebox to use for on-the-fly recording of DJs ( at an event I will work in a few days), and while I still may trust the Nomad for this purpose, and will recommend it to my music industry friends as an alternative for RECORDING a mix (Vinylheads are very touchy about sampling rate)… it’s not always my cup of tea.

Having had the product for a few days, leaving it plugged for a few days, I find that it absolutely refuses to charge. For this I will return it to the store and exchange it for another. I also find that it continues to skip whenever I search through the library on the Nomad… guess it’s little hard drive just can’t take enough damage… but that’s just the hardware… let’s go on to the software:

Let’s ask a simple question…. What kind of idiot makes an MP3 player with recording ability that records to a variant of a .WAV file? Really? I mean, considering the relatively simple process of MP3 encoding, you have to just slam your palm into your head in disgust of their idiocy. And while they were nice enough to include a CD ripper and an MP3 encoder, you can’t decode mp3s to .WAV, and you definitely can’t re-encode an mp3 at a different bitrate (I detest those who record something at 320 KBps just because they think it would sound better… bitrates are like cutting hair… once its gone, you gotta wait for another chance to get it just right). Also: the software for your computer simply refuses to… well… play nice. Whenever you want to add an MP3 file to your nomad you’ve got to stop everything (perhaps to avoid that skipping I mentioned earlier).

All told the Nomad is a great on-the-fly wave recorder… but nothing much more. It seems to have been built with the cheapest hard drive imaginable (my laptop, which should have a smaller (in actual real world size) hard drive than the Nomad II, can play mp3s better)). As far as the Nomad working as a real world product… well, let’s wait for the Nomad III.