Nomad Portable Jukebox MP3 Player Reviewed

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."

Comments

Re:Who the hell encodes at 128K though?

[mosch]

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?"

Who the hell encodes at 128K though?

[Wakko Warner]

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.

Re:Who the hell encodes at 128K though?

[TheGratefulNet]

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.

--

My only question

[scrytch]

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?

--

empe^H^H^H^H SonicBlue player?

[Drakino]

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.

I encode at 56

[samael]

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.
_____

MP3/CD players now in Costco

[Mr. Flibble]

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.

Re:MP3 not ready for prime time

[Graymalkin]

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.

Re:I have one too

[roady]

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.

One more thing that somewhat sucks..

[haggar]

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.

Reviews of EVERY mp3 player

[XJoshX]

My favorite site for mp3 player reviews is dmusic.com
Reviews of just about every hardware mp3 player out there and more.
check it out. (BTW, no I'm not affiliated)

Good case for Nomad

[mati]

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

Re: Stay away from the Mambox

[a_bastard]

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.

With regards to the batteries. . .

[kfg]

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.

Neo 25

[boomi]

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)

Re: Stay away from the Mambox

[ActMatrix]

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.
---

Re:Well....

[skt]

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.

MP3 CDR Players

[spellcheckur]

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.

Re:CD/Mp3 players

[aofoid]

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

Re:Like the Nomad? Try the PJB.

[EvlG]

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

[pjrc]

Only a couple days before CmdrTaco posted this story about my little homebrew MP3 player effort, there was a run of banners for the PJB-100. 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, and then this one as well.

I have one

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[skt]

tomshardware reviewed the Nomad as well. One of the cool things in their article is that they detail the steps necessary to hack your Nomad. 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.

[n6mod]

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.

[Fross]

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

[divide_by_0]

http://www.kuren.org/jukebox/

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