Creative Technology Nomad Jukebox (6 GB) MP3 Player

The problem with mp3 players today...

Now I am sure we've all seen the latest wave of Mp3 players. They are small, compact, cool looking and have usually 32-64 mgs of storage for your favorite Mp3s. 32-64 mgs! Thats hardly enough. With napster and cable modem I am downloading hundreds of mp3s a week. At an average of 4 mgs each you can only have 8 mp3s on the 32 mg players and 16 on the 64 mg players! Can you imagine listening to the same 16 songs over and over again all day! With CD players you can switch when you get tired of one disk; however, most mp3 players have built in memory which means unless you stop by your computer a couple of times a day your pretty much stuck with your 16 songs ALL day long! Not to mention the price of mp3 players today. High end players are usually $200 - $300. At this rate you can buy a cd burner and burn your mp3s to cds!

The Creative Labs Jukebox changes all...

Can it be? Finally a mp3 player that can hold more then 64 mgs! When I first saw this I though it was a miss print. 6 gb!!! Thats almost half my hard drive, I could put almost all my mp3s on this one thing! Creative labs really over did it this time 6gb is overkill and totally blows the competition away! Well I though I must have it and I bought it on the spot! Heres what I think...

What you get...

The unit itself is very cool looking. Its about the size of a cd player maybe a little bigger. It comes in 2 colors and has a LCD Display in the center. It comes preloaded with lots of music - 20 hours according to the box. I personally didn't like most of the stuff so I simply deleted it but it all depends on your tastes in music. It also comes with 1 4-pack of AA HiMH Rechargeable batteries and a spare 4-pack too. You also get stereo headphones which is pretty standard and a carrying pouch which is always helpful! Also included is the USB connector to connect it with your computer and a AC power supply. You also get a fairly decent software bundle.

Whats good...

On the unit you get 6GB of hard drive space. That means at an average of 4mgs a song you can put 1500 songs on it! Thats like 100 HOURS of music! You also get 8mgs of DRAM for a buffer which is like 5 MINUTES of anti ship protection! The unit allows for voice recording and
has adjustable playback speed. The music from this unit is awesome. In fact it has a dual stereo line out for surround sound! It is extremely easy to use. I learned all the functions of the player within a few minutes without even a glance at the manual! Loading the mp3s on the Jukebox is a simple drag and drop with the software, an idiot could figure it out! Another great thing is that the player weights like nothing. Almost the entire weight is from the batteries.

Whats bad...

Well everything has its good and bads and the jukebox is no exception. Lets start off by saying the they gave you the bare minimum when it comes to software. You get "PlayCenter 2", which is basically an all in one MP3 software for playing and managing content to your player. It also lets you encode and decode MP3 files and Windows Media files. If you have a mac you will get SoundJam MP which I guess is about the same thing. The transfer rate between your computer and the player is pretty damn slow! It took nearly an hour to transfer about 1gb of files. I guess you can just go do something else while it does that, but its still pretty bad! By far the worst down side to this player is battery life. This thing sucks the life out of a set of batteries in like 5-6 hours, even though your suppose to get like 10! Plus according to creative you have to use the kind of batteries they gave you for best performance! I can typically go through both sets in less than a day. Another thing is that the carrying case is too small it doesn't fit anything but the player. Where are you suppose to put the extra 4 batteries and the headphones?

The price...

Well I didn't put the price in the good or the bad for a reason. Sure its $500 and thats alot for anything; however, if you think about it the price is right. Look at it this way a 64 mg mp3 player costs almost half as much. Now would you rather have 2 64mg players or one 6GB player! Thats what I though! Think about it a 6gb harddrive costs about $150 then add 8mgs of ram, software, LCD display and the works and make it all portable it will probably run up to about $350 something bucks. Add in the profit, advertising and all the business stuff and you see that $500 isn't too bad. In fact I personally think that for the money the value of this player is better than any of the other mp3 players by far!

Start worrying...

Another really bad effect to this player is that your always worried about it. After all you don't want to lose or brake your $500 state of the art player! I am afraid to bring it to many places with me cause I think it will get stolen. I typically only use it at home or in the car. At home its probably easier to use my computer and in the car its a pain cause there is no car adapter and you have to use the batteries. Also this thing is really to big to be jogging around with it, at least thats what I think.

A final though...

Well if you have held out this long from getting a MP3 player it wouldn't hurt to wait a little longer. I am sure creative or some other company will fix the problems with this player and have it on sale within a few months. Also once everyone else catches on there will be more players like this at a lower price tag. However if you got the money and can't hold out any longer this is definitely the best mp3 player out right now!