batteries, when hard drive is full can take a little while to load, no mic input, software limitations.

I'm a strong advocate of this unit and I believe in it. I go to school at the University of Arizona, and I live in Cincinnati during the month of December, and during the summer.

I have the 20GB model, and after I get back to Tucson I plan on sending in my nomad jukebox and upgrading to a 30 gig hard drive, because I have less than 500 Megabytes.

One thing I want to point out is that it takes a hell of a long time to load music. I remember spending an entire week of just sitting by the computer loading in CD, after CD. I definitely am glad I did that looking back, but that was a week of hell.

At the time I had a DVD-ROM drive that ripped at 4X. I upgraded my CDRW drive recently to a 16X drive, and it will now rip an entire CD in 5 minutes. It used to take 20 minutes to rip a CD.

I am a huge music fan that is into metal, blues, jazz, and classical. Those are extremely diverse tastes and I own over 400 CD's. I'm a guy with ADD, my mind wonders in 50 directions. I'm a very moody person. If I am in my car I like to listen to heavy rock music. If I'm relaxing at home I love listening to classical music, and jazz. I'm the type of guy who will buy a CD, listen to it once, and then six months later will listen to it again.

The nomad jukebox is perfect for me. I remember countless vacations where I would go out of town and I would have absolutely no idea what CD's to bring. I remember going on vacations and being in the mood to listen to a song, and then not having that CD.

With the nomad jukebox I never have that problem. I have all 400 of my CD's in one device that is a little wider than a portable CD player.

The nomad jukebox also has a line out jack so wherever I go my music collection follows minus the hassles. Since I'm only in cincinnati, 4 months of the year I had an old boombox that I bought back in 6th grade that was my source for listening to music. I recently bought a Sony "bookshelf system" because it had an audio input so I could plug my Nomad Jukebox into the line out and now I have the equivalant of a 400 disc CD player.

One thing that I like about the nomad jukebox is that you can customize playlists in seconds.

The nomad jukebox also has a line in jack that allows you to record at 44.1 KHz, which is CD quality and even at 48 KHz which is DAT. A weakness is that these are recorded as .WAV files without the option to record them as .MP3 which limits the recording time. This is very effective for transfering VHS tapes to computer. I have some great concert videos that I never bothered transfering them to CD because I felt it would be such a hassle to connect a VCR to a computer. With the nomad jukebox you have a portable device that will be recorded as a .WAV file. The one drawback is that when I boosted the input gain it added noise so I had to adjust the volume through Sound Forge. Unfortunatly there is no .mic input. I eventually went out and bought a portable minidisc recorder for taping concerts.

I should stress that if you buy this device that the CDDB database will read track information and that's how information gets stored on the Nomad Jukebox. One problem with that is names will get screwed up. For instance half of my Beatles collection got labeled as The Beatles in all capital letters, while the other was catagorized as Beatles. This is easily editable, but it can be annoying when you have a bunch of CD's. You are away from the computer while you rip some CD's and then when you go to listen to Abbey Road you can't find it because it's not under The Beatles but under Beatles. I also have given up on my Genre classifications. A lot of those are inaccurate an example is the band Queen is listed under Alternative. Guns N' Roses is listed under Alternative. Al DiMeola is listed under Data. I think that genre feature would be great but I have a hard time labeling different styles since it's subjective. Al DiMeola could be classified as Fusion, Jazz, or Latin. Eric Clapton could be considered Blues, or Rock.

New firmware has allowed the Nomad Jukebox to be used to backup any type of file. I have never had to use this feature, but I imagine it could be a great feature.

One person pointed out that the battery doesn't last long, and that's true but I keep the extra set of rechargable batteries charged up in case I need them. This unit regular batteries in a half hour but I bought 4 "photo batteries" from Energizer and they lasted an entire 5 hour car ride, which says something since the included NiMH batteries only are supposed to last 4 hours.

I think a big flaw in the software is that you can't edit track numbers. A lot of bootlegs that I downloaded off napster, back when you could actually get decent stuff on it didn't have track numbers programmed in the mp3 files so I had to go through the trouble of opening the files up in real jukebox and then changing them. There is no excuse why the Nomad Jukebox doesn't offer this feature. Another feature that would be a big help would be a feature allowing you to make files smaller. For example a file that's 196KBps, if you want to shrink it to 128KBps that would be nice.

Somebody complained about portability. I think there are some valid issues, but you should remember this. I have 400 CD's in a unit the size of my hand. To use this to hook up to a stereo, or for travel, or for recording it's a great unit. If you want to be able to carry a lot of music wherever you go this is a great unit. I own a Nomad Jukebox, a Sony portable minidisc recorder, and a Samsung Uproar cell phone with a built in MP3 player.

The nomad jukebox is something I use as a substitute for bringing 400 CD's to cincinnati a few months out of the year, something I take with me when I travel, something I take with me if I need to record through a line in jack. There's a lot of things that I use it for. Not to long ago I took my car for an oil change and while I waited an hour I had 400 hours of music in the palm of my hand. The portability of this unit depends on what somebody considers portable.

If you want to listen to music while you jog I recomend a smaller MP3 player, or a portable minidisc player. There are many cons and pros to each of these units but that's another rant.

Overall I love this unit. I use it everyday. I'm sure I've probably forgotten to list some of the things that I use it for.

Of course that's just my opinion I could be wrong.

Remarkably fast interface for USB, massive capacity, integration of ID3 tags

No mic-level input, cumbersome menus, bagbiting software (SoundJam)

I was amazed with this product when I first got it, and I still am. It does have some problems (like an uninformative battery indicator, slow charging), but most of its shortcomings should be able to be fixed in firmware. One good thing about the Nomad 6G is that it forced me to finally get my ID3 tags in order... although the one thing I'm still wanting is a way to browse all tracks. I'm sure Creative will eventually get there.

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Pontis MPlayer (very very old)

Massive memorybank

Slow menusystem and no sidewayscroll...

Software included is not as good as you would like yet!

Creating albums in lib only creates one Folder on disc - Album.

But it still is one heck of a player

capacity, software

battery life sucks, slow, heavy, not meant to be REALLY portable

this jukebox is definitely an amazing piece. although, for some damn reason creative hasn't made a car charger for it, and the battery lasts about an hour. that sucks. it takes a while to move between songs, and is too heavy to be really portable.

Similar Products Used:

none

Storage (6GB)
Skip-Proof
Easy to Use Software

Weak Bass Control
EAX Sound Effects
Size
Battery Life

I baught this product looking for the ultimate MP3 player. The software provided is easy to use and install. The music quality is average, but could be better. The EQ included as part as the unit itself does little to boost the bass. If you turn the Bass DB setting on the EQ up you get a distorted sound. The headphones that came with the unit didn't meet my needs, so I upgraded to the Sony MDR-V700 headphones. This helped the sound quality a great deal. The Jukebox is heavy and big, it's not something you can run or exercise with. The unit is GREAT to put in your car, it's like having a mega-cd changer in your car without the skiping. The batteries don't last long, but the nomad came with two sets. I can't complain since the people at creative provided two sets of batteries, but it's a hassle to change them. An overall good unit.

Huge 6GB capacity (some people replace it with larger laptop harddrives to bust capacity to 12+GB), can play mp3s, wma, and future formats, can store ANY file type (handy for transporting movies to other computers).

Headphones are decent but not great, battery life is limited. The software sucks.

This is a great mp3 player. I used to think I would never buy an mp3 player because they all had such small flash cards, but this one can actually store a good portion of my mp3 collection (a little less then half) not just an album or too like the other players. This is a pretty expensive player, if cost is an issue, I would get one of the mp3 players that reads burned CD-Rs and CD-RWs (it is REALLY nice to be able to just add and drop songs from my Nomad, unlike burning a whole CD). Battery life is an issue and Creative Labs knows this and gives you two sets of four batteries for this reason. I normally get about 5 hours from each set. The volume is not amazingly loud, but it is only a problem for me when trying to listen to classical music on an airplane (other types of music sound fine), also if you have larger headphones this may not have to power to drive those real well. The unit comes with a pair of “backphone” which I am not a huge fan of because of the way they press on my head, but they have the benefit of letting me wear a hat and wear the headphones (oops, I mean backphones). The worst part of the package is the crappy software that is needed to manage the software from the PC. One thing that has impressed me is the constant upgrades to the software and firmware that has happened in the 10 months I have owned the device. Something I like is the almost seamless transitions the player makes between songs (no annoying gap like when listening with WinAmp), this is great for those huge trance/techno mixes that are separate tracks. I end up using my Nomad mostly for walking between classes across campus and hooked up to my decent computer sound system (this is cool for listening to music you like while playing computer games without hurting your framerate, because the Nomad is playing the mp3s not the CPU). Overall, I love this product, but if the price seems a little stiff (which it was when I got mine) check out the good CD/mp3 players out there.

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None, this is in a class all by itself. Well, I have used the Rio CD mp3 player (I forget what it is called)

Same as all praise above and below

Same as all complaints above and below

TIPS:

I won't rehash all that's been written here except that I think this product is on its way to being great. I did want to address a few things to the frustrated users here and potential buyers:

1. Battery life. To increase the battery life, turn the EAX settings to OFF. Don't just set them all to neutral, but select the bypass option. This is especially helpful if you're running Nomad through your car stereo or home amp. You don't really need the internal EQ then anyway.

2. Headphone output. Yep, it's low. If you'd like to crank it up a bit, as well as increase the overall sound quality through any headphones or through an external amp, consider buying a small headphone amp (right now Headroom.com is selling their Airhead amp for $99 -- small, light, runs on AA's I think, makes a big difference. You can use it on all your other portable stuff too to get a little more fidelity). Or, find a headphone that supports a low output. Sometimes those big Sennheiser's and other home phones are just too power greedy. Lot's of info at Headroom.com (no, I don't work there, but you gotta love a merchant that sells products but tells the buyer if they are unmitigated crap or not). Check all of this stuff out at AudioReview for further info.

3. Bad software. No kidding. What I've done to get around this is to get download one of the better shareware/freeware programs like RealJukebox or Music Match (personally, I hate RealJukebox because it seems so unstable), do all of my ripping and file organization through it, and then only use the Creative Play Center (what comes with Nomad) for the final playlist creating. Make sure that you name any tracks that have the same song title (regardless of performer or MP3 tag)1 and 2, etc. PlayCenter is ditzy.

4. If Nomad crashes, it has a handy, tiny reset switch at the bottom. Just the end of a paper clip through the hole and you will usually save all your data and get a clean restart.

Good luck. For what it is, I think this is a great little box if you're willing to finnesse it a bit.

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Rio 500 for spoken word stuff, otherwise I like old-fashioned sound systems

Audio in/out, support WAV

- Ridiculously short battery life
- Big and heavy
- Very low headphone output level
- Overprice
- Stupid and slow user interface

This has got to be the most over-rated audio product in audio history. With all the hype I rushed out and bought this product right away. Despite the fact that I am a happy owner of the Rio 500, I craved for the big storage that it offers.

I guess this product was never meant to be portable. The unit is big and heavy, and I never managed to get the advertised battery life of 4 hours, it last more like 1.5 hours or even 30-45 minutes occasionally. What's even worse is that the battery meter is always wrong and the unit will mostly likely to dir when it reaches about 60%. So this unit is only pratical to use as a desktop unit plugged into AC. This thing reminds me of the old (80s) compaq "luggable", big clunky and made to be obsolete.

However, its user interface is slow, it takes many steps to perform an operation and even advancing a song is as slow as 3 seconds. Worse yet there is no remote control so plugging it into a stereo system is impractical.

The other annoying thing is the low headphone output level. Compare to the Rio 500, this thing is impossible to listen to in any environment with some ambient noise.

All and all this thing is way overprice and stupidly engineered. One example is that the carrying case does not allow the headphone to be plugged in because of the location of the jack.

I think most people who uses this unit probably uses it at home plugged into a stereo system, and they probably have limited experience with a much superior unit like the Diamond Rio 500, which is a dream compared to this.

By the way I bought the highly rated first generation Creative Nomad with parallel port interface, It refuses to work with any IBM thinkpads (I tried 4 different ones) and I was so angry after spending hours with tech support that I threw it in the garbage.

I can only give the Jukebox one star for its build quality and ability to record from line in. But I never got to use that feature because the unit is stowed away somewhere forgotten.

If anyone is interested in buying this off me please email me at jyow@yahoo.com.

Similar Products Used:

Rio 500 (Way better but 128MB Max)

lots of storage; easy connection; small package

must use a computer

Buy it. What better way to have all of your you music with you all of the time. If you are an Audiophile, look into the 40 GB version. Hard to find but worth it.

Capacity, can be mounted as an extternal hard drive from Linux.

Awkward shape, low battery capacity, SLOW!

Not the best experience. The capacity is great. But it is a very slow machine, with a huge delay (up to and beyond 100 secs)to startup and an annoying one to switch between songs. My battery would not recharge and they [creative] suggested I buy batteries and a charger to charge seperately. Battery capacity now nearly appropriate (~2 hours). Linx support was slow, but I believe you can now connect it as an external hard drive using Linux which is pretty neat. The design style is uncomfortable and all of the extras need to be bought seperately. I would reccomend the PJB100 for a faster, smaller, larger capacity and longer life player.

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PJ Box http://www.pjbox.com