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

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