Complete failure in two months.
Written: Jan 11 '04 (Updated Aug 20 '04)
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Pros: Price (160 bucks), Capacity (20 gb), Thoughtful features.
Cons: Software problems, small screen, battery life, eventual complete failure.
The Bottom Line: Mine completely failed after only a couple of months, therefore I cannot recommend it.
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| gottleib's Full Review: Creative Technology Nomad Jukebox (20 GB) MP3 Play... |
01-11-04 Initial Review:
Bought to use in my truck through aux jack on receiver (Connector avail at Wal-Mart $4.). Jukebox locked up first two times trying to play introduction. Some trouble getting software to work on win98 at first - kept saying jukebox wasn't connected or was busy. Finally got working after 3rd re-installation and full defragment. Could likely be computer problem and not jukebox. Software is somewhat bulky and interface is a bit flashy. Pretty good audio and video tours. Appears to have filename length cutoff issues which can cause it to consider tracks as duplicates if they are named parts one and two for instance. Physical quality of unit is ok. Not designed to be knocked around too much. Buttons and functions are intuitive. Some features such as power-saving options are customizable. Ear-bud headphones are adequate. Screen is too small and should have option to stay lit when plugged in to power source. Navigation is good - you can search by artist, album, and track name. Should include connector and power adapter for use in vehicle. Perhaps the worst problem I have found with this product is the apparent lack of a random-play or shuffle feature. It is possible that I have not found out how to do it yet, but I don't think it is there. I can't imagine how someone could design a system that works so well for the price and fail to include such a basic feature. The jukebox did not come with any physical instructions other than a very basic quick-start guide. I have been playing with it for only a short time so I can only give my early impressions at this point. I have loaded nearly 100 albums on it in mp3@128 format and everything is working well.
Note that this in a 20 gigabyte player for about 160 bucks. The next player down in price at Wal-Mart is about 100 dollars for 128 megabytes. It almost seems too good to be true. I will write more later after I have had more experience with it.
UPDATE 1-14-04
It DOES have a nice random-play feature, you just have to be playing from a playlist, apparently. I have been really enjoying it for the past several days. Once I played with the EQ, I got it to sound pretty darn good. There are two annoyances at this point.
1. The player has locked up a few times, right when I first turned it on and tried to play a song. It does, however, seem to be fine once restarted about twice or so. This has not happened enough times to be a real problem thus far.
2. When loading tracks onto it from my computer, it has the annoying habit of completely stopping when it encounters an mp3 file that it doesn't like. In addition to stopping the whole process rather than just skipping the file, it does not give any indication of just where it left off. Consequently, when I encounter the strange error message telling me that the player is either busy or is not connected, I have to click OK, then start searching through all of the tracks I was transferring to see where it left off. Again, not a huge deal, especially if you are careful when you encode your mp3's so that you don't end up with any dubious files.
As a side note, save yourself a small headache and make sure that your mp3's have their id3 version 2 tags in good shape, as this is apparently the only version this player reads. It's accompanying encoding software probably already takes care of this if you use it, but I don't.
One more thing: I have found it useful to include the artist's name in front of the album title to make it easier to navigate in the 'album' field.
UPDATE 02-17-04
About two weeks ago I pressed the power button and nothing happened. I tried different wall outlets, and finally got it to turn on after "jiggling the battery" and "smacking" it. This was pretty scary as most of my music was stored on this thing. Some of the albums were not yet backed up because this was my transfer device. Also, it never would quite transfer or handle software files correctly. It would just give that annoying message stating that the player was not connected, especially with larger files. It also continued to clip and alter some filenames, and experienced intermittent problems transferring mp3's which I had just ripped with a reliable computer, and a good, solid encoding program (CDex). This is a shame, since the unit had plenty of capacity to carry all my music AND software, and supposedly was designed to do so. The battery was advertised to give up to 16 hours per charge. Even with the volume at half, I only ever got about six. Anyway, I returned it to Wal-Mart.
Though I was pleased with it in the beginning, I can't possibly give it a good rating now since it did experience a complete failure.
Please leave comments - I love reading them!
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 158. tax
Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection
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Epinions.com ID:
gottleib
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Reviews written: 16
Trusted by: 1 member
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