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Reverse-Engineering The Creative Nomad Jukebox
indole writes "As it enjoys a large, growing, user-base, the Creative JukeBox still suffers from Creative's ugly corporate obstinateness. Despite the pleas of its users, an SDK has not and will not be released to the public. A nice little initiative is growing out of the frustrations of creative.products.nomad to reverse-engineer the Nomad Jukebox USB protocol and hopefully design some more functioning software. The Protocol Refrence v0.1 is up and due for an update very shortly. Hack away boys."
1) Umm, the Jukebox isn't that complicated. The manual pretty much covers anything. This is after all a fairly SIMPLE device for playing music.
2) Yeah, I have the same problem. I don't use the jukebox as a battery device. I use it as a portable music station. I have a plug for it in my car, a power plug at work, and a power plug at home.
3) I never even listened to the pre-loaded music, but I have a ton of "concept" albums, where the tracks blend fluidly into each other. In every case, I've never heard a gap between my tracks (since the songs never really end). Winamp always has a slight gap between tracks... and its noticeable... I've never had a problem with the Jukebox.
4) Ummm, there IS a fast forward and rewind. You press the "next track" and hold. This is very similar to most stereo system cd players. And for rewind, you press "previous track" and hold. It'll start to rewind.
5) I've never had a problem with tracks stopping in the middle. My guess is there's something about that encoded file it doesn't like. I would probably consider this a bug, and you should try to create an mp3 that does this and send it along with a bug report to Creative Labs. I've already filed two bug reports with them concerning their lousy software, and have received confirmation that these are bugs that'll be addressed.
6) I agree. The case was lousy. I didn't even know I was getting it when I bought the thing so it wasn't a big loss for me.
I think the product is amazing. Has front and rear line outs. Headphone jack. DOES store 6 gig of mp3s, and if you know what you're doing you can very easily upgrade the laptop hard drive in the thing to a 20 gig IBM drive. Out of the shortcommings you mentioned, I've never experienced the major two (pauses between tracks, fast forward). The other stuff really are just personal gripes based on your usage. My usage is different and I have no problem with how the Jukebox functions in those areas.
Um No...
You said:
In this case, a company has created something.
As creators, they own it, and they can do what they want with it.
Uhm no... They own the design, and own the protocol as their proprietary knowledge. I own the product if I buy it
If they refuse to improve it, that is their prerogative - without them, the thing wouldn't exist, so surely they should be given the freedom to do what they like with it, without fear of hackers undermining them?
Yes If the manufacturer refuses to improve the product or event to support it, that is their perogative. It comes down to a cost/benefit analysis. Creative, in this case has to analyse wether it is worthwhile for them to participate with the part of the user community that wishes to get better use out of the product.
The only time that any third party is undermining the producer is if they decrypt or reverse engineer the thing, and sell that information, or another product that uses the reverse engineerd information. If I decrypt and/or reverse engineer something, and use it to improve how I personally use the product, am I doing harm? I think not. If I share my knowledge (at no cost) with other people who own the same product and have the same interests, am I causing harm or detracting from the companies revenues? Again, the answer is no.
I think people have to be responsible here - these people should see that their actions are damaging things for everyone, and that they should not just rip other people's work off
Thease people are not stealing anybody elses work, they are trying to understand and therefore get better use of a product they bought and paid for. Creative's lack of participation to the user community in divulging the USB protocol, or in participating with users who want to improve things is IMHO just another form of poor customer support.
Companies like Chilton regularly purchase new cars, dissasemble them, and re-assemble them. They then make money off of the sale of the books they write as a result. They have not stolen anybody elses work.
The latest firmware of the NJB allow you to take music off the device and back to your hard drive, but only if it doesn't have any digital rights management set up. Your collection of MP3 files can be shuffled back and forth from the NJB, but some WMA files can't.
The PJB-100 has been hacked to do all sorts of stuff, including upgrading the hard drive inside to 20 gigabytes. You can even talk to the PJB developers on the mailing list.
If you are worried about the price of the PJB-100 then I would wait for the treoplayer which will be out near the end of this month. The Treo includes all of the advantages of the PJB and is only $399 and has a smaller form factor.
I'm the guy that started the effort to reverse enginner the Rio600, A couple of weeks ago I kicked off a project to support multiple mp3 players under linux/whatever:
See here.So far we have info for, or access to:
So join the mailing list if you have a player you want supported!
On the other hand, if I licensed music this would work fine too. In that case I would have the ability to go buy a tape, or pull out some old eight track tapes, and exchange them for the CD's with whatever record label I had to deal with. Licensing could work well for that.
What it boils down to is that the RIAA wants to have their cake, eat it, then take your cake and the cake from the bakers themselves. It's just a scam and should be dealt with by the government just like any other pyramid scheme since the consumers can't do much about it. And "not buying their products" doesn't help because we don't have the support of a large number of people. The RIAA companies would simply forget about our money.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
1. The manual which comes with this product is very poor and does not go into detail about ANYTHING.. It is a small booklet and leaves you with a billion questions.
2. Battery problems. Just like the manual said, you must charge your batteries for 12 full hours before using them. I charged mine for over 12 hours the first time (did it over night while I was sleeping), and then in the morning I took my jukebox out for a walk with me. The batteries died in a half hour. Lovely. I decided to check out the support newsgroups on this product and apparently I am not the only one who had this problem. It was suggested that I try the 2nd set of batteries that comes with this jukebox. So I did. However, there is no indication on this product as to the status of your batteries charging, you just have to GUESS and ASSUME that they are in fact charging! There is no "meter" which shows you the progress. After 12 hours of charging my 2nd set of batteries, I turned on my jukebox and it read 85% charged... I guess I'll have to accept it. The support group tells me that even though it says 85%, that it really means 100 %. How lovely. How much did this thing cost again? ANd why are so many other people in the support newsgroup experiencing battery/charging problems?
3. Sometimes there are huge pauses between tracks, while the jukebox loads up the track into memory. (very annoying.. it's like a 10 second wait until your next track; mind you not all the tracks experienced this delay, just the pre-loaded music that came with the jukebox)
4. No fast forward or rewind, you can only skip to the next track, or go back to the previous one.
5. Some of my tracks just completely stop playing in the middle, and it moves on to the next track. Yet, the same file will play fine on my pc. And no matter how many times I reboot the jukebox, it will stop playing this file after a minute, as though it got corrupted.
6. The carrying case that comes with it is really not a convenient way to carry it around for walking or listening on the bus, because you cannot access any controls on the jukebox without taking it out of its case - not even the volume! And why I should go out to a store and buy a special case for this jukebox is beyond me, considering how much this thing already costs!
The support group tells me that my 1st set of batteries may be defective, and that I should try charging them in an external charger. Why should I go out and buy one?! My bottom line is that for the money they are asking for this product, it better come with EVERYTHING i need!
In conclusion, the only thing amazing about this product is the fact that it holds 6 GB worth of mp3s. That's all. There is nothing else out of the ordinary, and in fact, everything else about this product is ordinary. Even the EQ settings and spatialization is nothing special.
Does anybody have a recommendation for a similar product without all those shortcommings?
Cui peccare licet peccat minus. -- Ovid, Amores.
Pirating a device designed for pirating.
You hackers have gone too far.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Try this link for a working version
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