I have wanted the Nomad Jukebox player for a very long time. However, I didn't think the $500 price, in the past, was worth it. Recently, Creative has reduced the suggested retail. I was able to find the Jukebox C player at buy.com for $259.99. I just happened to visit on a day they were having a $25 off coupon for items over $250. I got it for $241 with shipping. However, Creative has reduced the extras with the Nomad Jukebox C. They no longer have an extra set of rechargeable batteries and there are no headphones. They still sell the Nomad Jukebox which includes an extra set of batteries and headphones. If you're like me, you probably don't need the headphones.

It is well worth the $241 price paid. The sound at 128k sampling is excellent. The unit itself is very intuitive and very easy to use. Navigating through a library of music was a snap.

My biggest irritation was the Play Center 2 software. First, the CD supplied with the device was only the v2.0 software. This version didn't like Windows 2000. It gave an audio com error everytime it started. The patch on line was for v2.2. So, I had to download a 16meg file to update the software to the most recent (v2.5). If I didn't have a cable modem, it would have taken forever. After upgrading to v2.5 everything worked fine. The firmware on the player was up-to-date (there was a more recent version on the website but that was only a few days old). It seems they must have had some old software CDs laying around--version 2.0 is at least six months old.

I have lots of music that I encoded with MusicMatch. All of the music was in folders by artist and album So, naturally I wanted to import the information into PlayCenter music library and then transfer it to the player. You can't select a group of folders and import the folder and subfolders. You have to go to each folder, select the music, and then import. Would it surprise you to find out that PlayCenter stores the music it rips into folders, also? It does. This is a minor irritation, but adds uncessary work for the end user.

A nice feature of the software is that you can rip a CD directly to the player with a copy stored on the computer. Naturally, the music library is automatically updated. This works great! So, if you haven't ripped all of your CDs. Wait until you get the software and then do the ripping.

Some other notes: The DSP (digital signal processing) features are nice, but I probably won't use them much. Battery life is short (4 hours). It is heavier than one might expect--14 oz.



Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 241.00