Promising Hardware, Immature Software
Written: May 10 '00 (Updated Jun 10 '00)
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Pros: Fantastic hardware, promising future
Cons: Software is lacking, slightly weak volume
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| pancreas's Full Review: Creative Labs Nomad II (64MB) MP3 Player |
The Nomad II is a fantastic piece of hardware, with nowhere but up to go in the software department.
Creative delivers on the promise of an MP3 player with all the right pieces in place to make a “whole product”. With its USB port, firmware upgradeable CODEC’s, and license management compatibility, your hard earned cash is well spent. But its lacking software keeps it at arms length to all but the most patient user.
Sound Quality
The Nomad has nice tone controls for bass and treble with 5 presets (plus a “USER” setting for precise control). The sound quality is well above average with no noticeable hiss. In side-by-side comparisons, the Nomad II easily outperformed Creative’s own SB Live! Value Edition in Signal to Noise ratio and general audio quality. In fact, the only real complaint I have in this regard is the lack of volume from this single AA powered unit.
While I’m nitpicking, the fantastic headphones don’t fit my large head. While they sound excellent, they’re designed to wrap around the back of your head instead of over it. If you consider yourself a bigheaded individual (not metaphorically speaking), you may find yourself looking for a new set of headphones. Also of note, some may prefer something a little less bulky, even if you do give up some of the sound quality gain.
Ergonomics and Convenience
I found the Nomad II’s controls to be decent, but not great. If you’re like me, you’ll rip this puppy right out of the box and start playing with it. If you use out-of-box experience as a benchmark, the Nomad II doesn’t fare very well. The controls are a tad cryptic as Creative was probably trying to keep the button count to a minimum. Even after you learn what each of the buttons are for, you’ll still find yourself guessing at what to press next.
For example, you have to be listening to music before you can select what DSP (really just tone) setting you want. If you want to adjust the treble and bass manually, you keep pressing until you reach USER. Once you’re there, pressing Up or Down on the volume changes the level of the bass, but how do you get to the treble setting? It took me a while to figure out that the skip forward and back buttons are used. Also, in the main menu, you can scroll forward and back using the skip buttons, and down using the stop button. The button layout would lead you to believe that the play button would let you scroll up, but in fact it’s used to select the menu item. All this may seem trivial, but try explaining to a friend what to press to get it to play and you’ll see what I mean.
On the very bright side is the fantastic remote. It connects between your headphones and the player, and nothing could be finer. It has all the necessary buttons: skip forward and back, play, pause, stop, and volume. It even has a clip to keep it close to where you can reach it. The clip also serves to reduce the “microphone effect” headphones get when the cord rubs against your shirt. Nice for when you’re jogging.
And of course no review would be complete without mentioning the FM radio, which was the big seller for me (are you listening Diamond?). I consider this an essential feature (like air-conditioning on a car), and the Nomad II’s works well.
Support Software
I would like to be charitable in this regard, but the Nomad II’s PC software is immature, at best. It is packaged with MusicMatch, which makes up for some of its shortcomings but in general it is pretty poor. The Nomad II Manager software facilitates the transfer between the PC and your Nomad II through a USB port. It offers no support for transcoding, crashes when you have too many files in one directory, and doesn’t do a very good job of keeping your file names in tact. Do you remember 8.3 filenames? Well, it seems the Nomad II supports nothing but, and the Manager turns “01 - Dancing Queen.mp3” into “01-DAN~1MP3”. Puke. Much could be improved in this regard.
I should mention that with the supplied MusicMatch you can transcode your files into a lower bit rate, but this process is tedious, awkward, and broken. First you load MusicMatch, click options->file->convert. Then you select the source directory (why not let me drop files from anywhere?) and the file type to transfer from (why not any supported type at the same time?), select the destination directory (why isn’t the Nomad II’s flash card one of the available destinations?), select the destination data type, and select start. I found destination Data type to be inaccurate when dealing with Variable Bit Rate (VBR) MP3 files as the source. For example, you can select as an output type “MP3 VBR” and set the bit rate to anything between 1% and 100%. Well, selecting 1% is exactly the same as 20% and there is very little difference between 20% and 50%. Also, selecting “MP3 CBR” (Constant Bit Rate) at a setting of 64 KBS yielded files that were encoded at 320 KBS… not what I had in mind. And to top it all off, transcoding your files means you loose the MP3 tag. Now those crappy 8.3 names are all you get to determine what’s on your flash card.
In general, the software looks like it was programmed in Visual Basic with its non-standard glossy interface that isn’t functional to the task at hand. Winamp does this, but they pull it off. MusicMatch doesn’t, and neither does Creative’s Nomad II Manager.
Value
I think $329.00 for the Nomad II with a 64MB card (it comes with no onboard memory) is a bit steep. You can purchase the unit for $99.00 with no flash card, and buy one separately. This is probably the best option since I’ve seen 64MB cards for as low as $120.00. The 0MB version is only available from Creative’s online store. Go to http://buy.creative.com, pick your country, and in the search field type “nomad ii”. Unfortunately, you can’t find the Nomad II through the site’s navigation; you must enter through the back door.
UPDATE: Thank you deltagrp for pointing out the URL for the $99.00 version, which is http://buy.creative.com/product.asp?sku=007348
Odds and Ends
It seems that WMA support is forthcoming but not included, and Microsoft promises to support the Nomad II in Windows Media Player Version 7, but doesn’t as of yet. Like many products and technologies surrounding the world of digital delivery, this product is young and has a lot of room to grow. But the happy thing is that the Nomad II’s problems are fixable, and Creative has an excellent foundation from which to build a fantastic product. Would I recommend this to my mom? No. To a fellow technocrat willing to tough it out through a few more firmware/software releases? Absolutely. Nothing beats it.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 99.00
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Epinions.com ID:
pancreas
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Member: Andrew Starks
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 18 members
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