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Nomad Jukebox 3 Officially Out
An Anonymous Coward writes: "It seems that the long awaited Jukebox 3 is officially out. Features include time scaling, to play files at different speeds without affecting pitch, multichannel effects, optical input, wireless remote and two battery ports. Probably not an iPod killer yet, although it has many, many more features and welcome firewire port. Now when will this thing be available?"
Is this one of those paid advertisment/article things????
if common sense was common, wouldn't everyone have it?
why people buy mp3 players shaped like cd players; the circular design is not nearly as convanient as a small rectangle. is there something I'm missing here?
I think I must be caught in Steve Jobs's Reality Destortion Field.
...because I still want an iPod over this thing!
Actually, this thing is great, certainly better than the first two (of which I never really liked), but it's still too large to be truly portable.
I don't mean this as a flame, but articles like this do beg the question of whether or not advertisers are paying to have the products promoted as a Slashdot story. Especially when there's nothing really that insightful here. Furthermore given the financial strugges of Slashdot's parent company, its not unthinkable to see them accepting advertising funds in exchange for Slashdot hits.
Just wondering, I guess....
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
no sale...
better luck next time, creative.
Is it like (or compatible with) IEEE 1394?
AKA FireWire/iLINK.
Anyone else find it funny that the non apple version is called 'iLINK'?
I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
Lets see.... $21 per gigabyte, if this tariff passes. $21 * 20 = $420 + retail. Somehow I doubt Canadian consumers are going to be shelling out around $1000 for something like this. How long before companies like Creative step in to try to put a stop to our new proposed levies?
I wonder if the battery life is really anywhere near 22 hours, and also if it is turned into a brick with two batteries.
Also, can it act as a normal hard drive?
I just wish the empeg group of SonicBlue would release a hard drive portable player. But with the Riot out, it dosen't look overly promising to have a linux hackable MP3 portable player anytime soon. The iPod is nice, but I doubt it will just get OGG support, dynamic compression, a web server, and other interesting features hacked into it. OGG support on the empeg-car will be so nice.
The source for all Creative Labs news, and not paid for by CL! www.nomadness.net
Avoid The Rush, Hate OU Early!!!
A lot of people who have used the original Nomad Jukebox do not like the software that comes with it called PlayCenter. An alternative that has become very popular in the Nomad community is Notmad Explorer.
It provides full Windows Explorer integration, access to the Jukebox via a built-in webserver, and search and report generation features using a built-in SQL database.
There's a free trial version. Notmad Explorer is also mentioned in the first full review of the Jukebox3 at TBREAK.com.
According to their page it seems to only support WMA, MP3, and WAV formats.
I'm aware that Ogg Vorbis hasn't reached 1.0 yet, but still, you'd think they could include support for it pretty easily. Anyone know if you can upgrade the software on these things? Their site doesn't mention anything about it.
Is there any techincal reason why no one supports vorbis yet? I know... I know... it's not as popular as MP3 and therefore probably not worth the money, but in terms of the purely technical, why isn't there a portable ogg player? The project is in the 1.0RC phase, and we all know it's a high quality product. Given that the software itself is free, how hard would it be to put the decoder in to one of these things? I just don't understand.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
from the specs page:
Memory
16MB DRAM buffer
20GB hard drive storage (333 hours at 128kbps MP3 encoding)
Microsoft® Windows® 98 (Second Edition required for SB1394 transfer)/2000/Me/XP
Intel® Pentium II 233MHz or AMD K6®-2 266MHz (Pentium III450MHz or higher recommended for MP3 encoding)
SVGA graphics adapter (256 colors, 800x600)
Internet connection for Internet content downloading or CDDB® support (any charges incurred are the responsibility of the end user)
64MB RAM (128MB recommended)
USB or SB1394 port (found on Sound Blaster® Audigy(TM) series of audio cards)
30MB free hard disk space (more for audio content storage)
Installed Mouse
Sound Blaster® Audigy(TM), Extigy(TM) or Live! for EAX® enhanced MP3 encoding
CD-ROM drive with digital audio extraction support
end thieved content from NOMAD page
I have to buy a new SOUNDCARD to use this thing? I just got my 5.1 Platinum six months ago. I'm not sure a lot of people are going to be up for paying $100 for a new card just to be able to use "SB 1394."
I can get an 10GB iPod with XDrive for under $450. Yes, the storage site is only 10GB, but with true Firewire I can shift files on and off in minutes rather than the hours USB1 takes.
Come on Creative, give us REAL Firewire support!
20GB storage space holds up to 8000 songs encoded in WMA at 80kbps or 5000 MP3s encoded at 128kbps
ika:/home/derek> bc
8000*80
640000
5000*128
640000
Derek
Reasons the iPod rules over the Nomad:
-iPod is way smaller.
-iPod software (iTunes) rocks.
-The iPod is a pretty rugged little box.
-Proven to be extensible.
-Works as a standard IEEE 1394 external disk.
Reasons the Nomad rules over the iPod:
-Holds 20Gb of MP3 data (as opposed to iPod's 5 or 10GB).
-You can add a second battery and double the life to 22 hours. The iPod only is good for 10 or so.
-Safe assumption - the Nomad works better with Windows, no 3rd party software needed. No Linux drivers for either.
-Both USB _and_ 1394 on board. Hopefully the port isn't some kind of funky "almost-standard" version.
Reasons the Nomad may kind of suck anyways:
-Size. Why make it look like a CD player if it relies on a hard drive?
-Ruggedness - every Nomad I've seen yet has been kind of flimsy. Until proven otherwise, I'll assume this one is, too.
- It uses a Sound Blaster for "enhanced MP3 encoding". Requiring an add-on product for best results is lame. Though I guess to some a Mac is an add-on product for an iPod...
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
It holds enough megabytes that if a football pitch sized colony of ants were to hold one bit per ant and stood on top of each other it would reach to the moon in more time than Concorde could fly between London and New York if all the passengers were listening to inferior MP3 players during take off and landing.
I copied this sig from someone else (but where did they get it from?)
When will people learn that WMA and MP3 support isn't enough anymore?
.001% of the music population that even knows what Ogg Vorbis is, but most folks buying this stuff only know MP3.
but it is enough. there may be
I suspect most people wind up with windows media files more by accident (because the media encoder does them by default) than because they know anything about the format...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
yes, LAME is an add-on product that will produce the best mp3 results...
Just raise the taxes on crack.
One advantage of Archos Jukebox players is that they double as hard drives. In practical terms, what this means is that you transfer .mp3 and other files back and forth between the Archos Jukebox and other PCs. As far as I know, the Nomad units can only receive files from PCs - I guess as an "anti-piracy" measure.
I think that the previous version had Mac support.. what's the Mac support like with this thing? I looked at the site but didn't see anything about the Nomad 3 being supported under the MacOS.
I just love it when a company takes Apple technology (firewire) and then doesn't support the Mac.
...could set ogg vorbis back twenty years! ;)
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Okay, for all the "no linux software" posts:
libnjb is a fantastic Linux library for interfacing with the Nomad Jukebox. There are lots of links that take you to software.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
As of 17:22 Tuesday (PDT) it's not on:
Creative's online shop
Amazon's "Nomad Jukebox"... All Results page
Any even of my local retailers (check here).
I'd really be interested if anyone could tell me where to get one online.
Cheers!
Is it just me, or are they deliberately making fun of so-called audiophiles? "Enjoy audiophile quality playback anywhere" and "5000 songs at 128kbps" send two very, very different messages. I'm not an audiophile (I spent around $50 on my stereo receiver), or even someone who puts much effort into mp3 encoding... and I found 192 to be the range where my sucky hearing stopped detecting problems.
So are they going after audiophiles, or are they going after losers who believe Creative hype about what audiophiles use, need, and buy? For that matter, given Creative's history, why am I even asking this question? :-)
Bah. As soon as they or Rio start posting the weight of their devices when they begin the hype, instead of doing their best to make it look small, I'll pay attention. Until then, I know without picking one up that it's not what I want.
--Matthew
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Video Game cheats, hints a
That being said, I don't quite understand why adding firewire support suddenly makes the new product newsworthy.
To quite a few people, myself included, the one drawback to the Nomad2 that killed its chances was that it could only interface over USB. Transferring even 5 or 10GB over USB is painfully slow compared to FireWire. However, with FireWire capability, the Nomad3 is a real option in my eyes now.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
The first hands on review of the nomad 3 is available here.
I have a Nomad Jukebox and I have been very, very, VERY disappointed with the "user-interface" on the thing. There is no quick access to songs (by first letter or such), so you have to scroll down linearly through your entire collection to find an album, artist, or title. This is made even more painful because the thing becomes very sluggish and the scrolling has "hiccups" while a song is actually playing. Mine takes over a minute to boot (not an exaggeration), frequently will hang with a "Please Wait..." message for a good 20-30 seconds when switching modes (normal/random) or navigating a large playlist.
Not to mention that the interface menus are laid out inconsistently, and it has two modes you have to switch back and forth between just to create a playlist. The physical button layout is very inergonomic and difficult to manipulate without looking while driving.
I just took my Nomad on a road trip and I honestly had to spend several minutes explaining the interface to my friend (an engineer) just so he could operate it while I was driving. In terms of ease-of-use, it's the exact opposite of an iPod. By the end of the trip we were ready to chuck the thing into the Grand Canyon.
The point of this tirade: don't waste your money on a Nomad 3, at least not unless they've spent a lot of time improving what must be one of the worst interfaces ever designed.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that the unit locks up playing some mp3's (possibly the mp3's had encoding errors, but still...), and the Creative PlayCenter software you use to download songs crashes constantly when transferring, even after several upgrades to both it and the Nomad firmware.
While they're at it there's a couple of more "free" as in software-implementable features to add:
1. USB audio profile, making it an extigy.
2. Small host software to select songs on the
connected computer using the jukebox.
2. Firewire external storage.
>> "Another good thing going to the Jukebox 3 is the upgradeable firmware meaning possible support for more audio formats like Ogg Vorbis."
I think every player out there has said this. It's in the boilerplate promo kit that is sold by hardware based digital audio companies everywhere. Bottom line is to read between the lines --- "If we really wanted to support OGG we would out of the box -- but by saying that it is possible in the future we move 10% more units, then so be it, because the lifecycle for an individuale portable mp3 model (in the marketplace) is akin to a 2001 calendar in December of said year...."
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.