<!–#set var="article_header" value="Tom's Favorite Gadget –
The Nomad Jukebox from Creative” –>
Introduction
Since the Fraunhofer Institute invented their digital audio compression method MPEG Layer3, today known as ‘MP3’, millions of people around the world started using their PCs to record audio-CDs to ‘MP3’-files. The big catch of MP3 is the fact that it requires only 3-5 MB of storage space for a CD-title, yet still offering excellent digital quality. This opens great opportunities. Hundreds of CDs recorded in MP3-format can easily fit on a modern hard disk and once you hooked a good audio system to your PC you can enjoy hundreds of hours of high-quality music without the need of bulky and expensive CD-changers. Due to its moderate size MP3-files can easily be distributed over the Internet, offering every Internet user the chance to listen to his favorite music without having to spend the money for a CD.
The Music Industry And Legal Issues
Above I simply told you what’s possible, but it is a different question if it is legal. It does of course make sense that record companies as well as artists want to get paid for their music, so they don’t appreciate if people have access to their products free of charge, because they are losing money. Therefore it has been made clear that offering copyrighted music titles on the Internet free of charge is illegal. There’s still no doubt that you can find almost any song somewhere on the net as long as you look hard enough, which is one of the positive results of the archaic nature of the Internet. Still there are major legal battles going on and unless you are in a safe spot I advise against putting up music-titles on your website. Look at what is going on with Napster or RIAA and you get an idea of how touchy the music industry is about free MP3 sharing on the net.
Consumer Electronic Audio Devices Adopt MP3 Only Slowly
There has been one other problem that kept MP3 from becoming even more popular and it is also due to the music industry. So far MP3-fans are restricted to using either their PC and/or one of the few MP3-devices that are available. Most people are either storing their MP3-files on the hard drive of their PC, or they are burning CDs with MP3-files. Those CDs, which can store about 10 music albums, can either be played on the computer or in some of the rare MP3 CD-players that are slowly becoming available. I wondered more than 4 years ago, why commercial MP3-recorders didn’t replace the highly useless tape decks that can still be found in most stereo systems. I couldn’t understand the idea of 120x CD-changers when you can store the same amount of music on merely 12 MP3 CDs. The same is valid for car stereos. One MP3-CD offers more storage than the 10 CDs that typically fit in a car CD-changer. If this CD-changer could play MP3-CDs, you could benefit from some 100 hours of music while driving along.
Today MP3-enabled audio devices are slowly becoming available. However, e.g. consumer electronics giant Sony is still not supporting MP3, simply because Sony owns a large record company as well. This condition keeps people that don’t use computers from taking advantage of MP3 and basically those people are cheated from an inexpensive and convenient way to store and play their favorite music.
I personally don’t appreciate the stance of the music industry, which is the reason for the slow adoption of MP3 in the non-PC consumer space. Where is it written in stone that music artist as well as record companies are supposed to make millions of dollars? Are music artists worth that money? I am sorry, but I highly disagree. Making good music is a nice thing, but it doesn’t justify that those artists become multi-millionaires. The prices we pay for CDs are way beyond their production costs, because record companies finance less successful albums with that money (which is justified) and successful artists have to become millionaires to have enough money to pay their shrinks, plastic surgeons and magnificent parties. Do I feel the urge to finance Madonna’s psychiatrist? I certainly don’t! The same thing is actually valid with MP4 and the movie industry. Are actors worth the millions they make? I fail to see what makes them special enough. Go and try to talk to one. You’ll be rather disappointed about the meaningless conversation you’ll have. As long as we consider Intel pricing their CPUs too high, we should realize that CD and DVDs are also way overpriced. Let’s be a bit reasonable, folks, shall we? I won’t adore any celebrity that hasn’t impressed me personally. Plastic surgery and comments like “Oh my life’s so difficult! Nobody has ever taught me how to be a celebrity!” show how sad many of those people really are.
MP3 On The Road And In Your Home
For me personally, MP3 opened a great way of taking my favorite music along on my travels and to make sure that all of my music is available to me in each of the different places where I happen to live. Yeah I know, good old Tom has become one of those sad jet setter too, as much as he hates it.
My requirements for a decent MP3-device are high. It should be small, so that I can take it with me wherever I travel. It should store at least 100 CDs, if possible even all of my CDs. The device should not permanently require a computer system and you should be able to hook it up to a normal stereo system. The device should be easy to use, so that Kate can take advantage of it too without the need to have major computer skills.
As you can see, MP3-devices as Diamond’s Rio Player or Creative’s previous Nomad products as well as all the portable MP3 CD-players were never able to fulfill my requirements. The Flash-card based players can store one or two CDs, which I consider as rather minimal. Portable MP3 CD-Players are shock-sensitive, can store only 10-12 albums and you’ve got to burn the MP3-CDs before you can use the thing. That’s all not good enough for me. Thus I was rather stunned when I read Patrick’s article about Creative’s upcoming Nomad Jukebox. I knew that I had to buy one as soon as it came out and that’s exactly what I did. I better don’t report the price I paid, because it was several hundred dollars higher than its actual price now.
The Nomad Jukebox
The Jukebox is about as big as a portable CD-Player, although it’s a bit higher (thicker) and quite a bit heavier. The Sony Discman shown in the picture weighs only 210g (about 7 ounces), while Creative’s Nomad Jukebox is more than double of that weighing 440g (~15 ounces). From that point of view the Nomad Jukebox isn’t likely to ever become ‘Jogger’s Best Friend’.
The Nomad Jukebox, Continued
Here are some more views of it:
The package contains of the following items:
Headphones
The headphones shown below are of rather average sound quality and should be replaced with better ones if you want to experience the full quality of the Nomad Jukebox.
Creative calls them ‘backphones’, because they wrap around your neck rather than you head, which makes them a bit more comfortable to wear.
Batteries
As you could see, Creative provides two sets of rechargeable 1600 mAh AA NiMH batteries with the Nomad Jukebox, which I consider as rather thoughtful. The batteries are of course one major factor that makes the Jukebox so much heavier than a portable CD-player, but they are necessary to provide the four hours of playtime per battery set. You can recharge the batteries either with a not-included battery charger, or within the Jukebox while it’s hooked up to the external power supply.
USB Cable
The included USB-cable is used to store music on the Jukebox. It’s 2 m or 6 ft 6″ long, which I consider as another generous idea of Creative. Often enough USB-cables provided with printers are significantly shorter, although many people like to put their printers in a different spot than their computer system. With Creative’s long USB-cable you can make sure that your Nomad Jukebox can rest in a good place while it’s hooked up to your PC.
Pouch
The pouch is nothing much and merely useful to transport the Jukebox from one place to another. It doesn’t give you access to the buttons and its strap is much too short to fit around your shoulder. It also doesn’t offer space for the headphones. The pouch is of course not made of leather but some cheap artificial material, so that I doubt it will withstand a lot of heavy-duty usage.
Remote Control
The Nomad Jukebox has an IR-port in the front of it, which is supposed to be good for a remote control. This remote control would make a whole lot of sense, since you could easily hook-up the Jukebox to your stereo system at home and enjoy the 100 hours of music stored on it. However, so far Creative isn’t providing a remote control. I hope, though doubt, that Creative will equip all Jukebox owners with a free one once it’s available.
Buttons
The buttons of Creative’s Nomad Jukebox are large enough and easy to handle as well as pretty self-explanatory, making the usage of the Jukebox pretty simple.
Connectors
The Jukebox comes with one headphone output, which I consider as a bit unfortunate, since this device seems to have been designed for egoists (probably by egoists). Unfortunately you won’t be able to share the music with your partner on the beach.
You’ll find a Line-In connector in case you want to record analog music and two Line-Out jacks for Creative’s ‘Four-Point-Surround’. For a normal stereo system you simply use only Line-Out No. 1. Additionally there are of course the power connector for the 12V needed by the Jukebox and a USB-jack for the USB-cable that connects to your PC.
What I miss is an optical in/out for digital recording or playback. I hope that Creative will equip future versions of the Jukeboxes with this useful feature.
Display
Creative’s Nomad Jukebox comes with a backlit monochrome 132×64 pixel LCD display, which is very sufficient to list all the things you need to see.
It has different levels, such as the Library View, listing your play lists, albums, artists or all the songs alphabetically. From here you decide what your Jukebox is supposed to play.
Then there is the Active Queue List View, which displays which songs the Jukebox is actually playing.
Finally there is a Settings View, where you can adjust stuff as e.g. a parametric equalizer, your EAX-settings and more.
The Specs
The most important spec of Creative’s Nomad Jukebox is clearly its storage capacity. The internal hard drive offers 5.7 (real) GB, or about 6 billion bytes. This is enough space for over 100 hours of MP3-files compresses at 128 kbit/s, which is a considerable amount. However, most of us have more than only 100-120 CDs and so we’d like to have even more capacity to store all of our music on the Jukebox. We are all hardware-nuts enough to realize that this is only a question of the hard drive size, which clearly raises the idea of possibly equipping the Jukebox with a larger hard drive to increase its storage space. You can see from the first display picture above that my Jukebox was successfully upgraded with a 12 GB hard drive. I will get to that later.
The rest of the specs reads like this:
Functionality of the Software
Creative ships the Nomad Jukebox with ‘Playcenter 2’. This software allows you to rip CDs, organize all the music files on your hard drive, create play lists and upload all of that to the Jukebox.
The Auto-Scan Feature And Its Bugs
In case you are big into MP3 already, you have probably used a different CD-ripper so far and have folders full of MP3-files already stored on your hard drive. Due to the fact that Creative’s Playcenter 2 is currently the only software for uploading files to the Jukebox you will need to organize all your music with Playcenter 2 as well.
This is not much of a big deal, because Playcenter 2 has got an ‘auto scan’ feature that checks your local hard drives for MP3 or WAV files and includes them into its own database called ‘library’. This feature has two major flaws though. First of all I consider it as very annoying that the ‘auto-scan’ feature would not scan network drives for music-files. I happen to store all my music on a special server, which makes it impossible to use ‘auto-scan’.
The second problem with the ‘auto-scan’ feature is more serious, but only interesting to Windows 2000 users. Under Win2k, the underlying database software used by Playcenter 2 for its library seems to be unable to organize music collections of more than 500-600 titles. Auto-scanning under Windows 2000 returns errors and a re-start of the database software each time the library has stored some 5xx entries.
This bug made it impossible for me to use Playcenter 2 under Windows 2000, because I happen to have almost 3000 MP3-titles stored in my system right now. I was forced to use Kate’s Windows 98 system to operate the Jukebox, because the database works just fine under the toy OS.
CD-Ripping
Converting your CDs into MP3-files is very easy. You only need to adjust the settings of Playcenter 2 once. From this time on you only need to put a CD in your CD-drive and Playcenter 2 accesses CDDB over the Internet (you should obviously be connected) for the right artist/album/track information. Then you can choose to either rip directly to the Jukebox or to your hard drive. Should you want to rip straight to the Jukebox the software is giving you the opportunity to leave a copy of the MP3-files on your local hard drive as well. Due to the CDDB-access, each song will have the proper MP3/ID3-tag, so that you don’t need to worry about tidiness. The ripping process depends on your CD-drive and your CPU, but with a reasonably fast system a CD can be ripped within about 5-8 minutes.
Uploading To The Nomad Jukebox
The most important feature of Playcenter 2 is obviously the transfer of music-files from your computer to the Jukebox. This can be done rather intuitively.
The left window shows the files on your computer, which can be sorted by play list, album, artist or just alphabetically. You simply choose a song, album, play list or artist and all the selected files get transferred to the Jukebox once you hit the transfer button. This procedure has also got a rather annoying flaw. In many cases you might have already transferred all the music-files you need on your Jukebox, but you want to create a few play lists on your computer, which is more convenient than creating those lists on the Jukebox. After you are finished making those play lists, you obviously want to transfer them to the Jukebox. The Playcenter 2 software is obviously not smart enough to realize that the music-files that you have chosen in your play list might already be available on the Jukebox, in which case Playcenter2 would only have to transfer the list and nothing else. Playcenter2 is always transferring the play list as well as the music-files in this list. Is a file already available you get the following error message:
If your play list is 200 songs long you might get very annoyed with this error message, because it doesn’t give you the option to ‘skip all files’ that are already on the Jukebox. The only thing that saves you from choosing ‘skip file’ and hitting the OK-button 200 times is choosing ‘Replace All Files’. This however prolongs the upload of your play list tremendously, because now Playcenter 2 is unnecessarily uploading all those 200 files to the Jukebox, although they are already there. I strongly suggest that Creative fixes this highly annoying flaw in the next release of Playcenter.
I almost forgot to mention the time it takes for an upload, which, as you know, is done via the USB-port of your computer. It takes about 3-4 seconds per MB and thus about 10-20 seconds per song. That might sound fast, but if you want to upload 200 songs you will have to invest no less than 35 – 70 minutes!!! Uploading a whole collection of 1000 songs will therefore last many hours.
Transferring Files From the Jukebox To The Computer
This paragraph will be short, because this re-transfer simply doesn’t work. So far the Jukebox is like a black hole. You can transfer music to it, but you can’t transfer it back. I am very sure that this can be fixed with a simple software hack, but so far I have neither found the trick myself, nor have I seen any hack anywhere on the net. It will only be a question of time however, until this problem is solved. After all there is the ominous transfer button from the Jukebox to the system that would have to be pushed if it could be enabled. Creative has definitely put this option into the software, but legal reasons must have kept Creative from enabling it. Please let me know if you’ve found the trick of how to enable the reverse transfer of files.
Playing Songs On Your Computer
Playcenter2 gives you of course also the option to simply listen to music files directly from your computer system. You can either play a CD or MP3 and WAV files. The latter two you can arrange in the above mentioned play lists, offering you many hours of music without any need to touch your system.
Functionality of the Player
Once the music is on the Jukebox, it’s pretty easy to play it. You either choose some titles, albums, or artists and add them to the queue, which then can be saved as a new play list, or you choose one of the play lists that are already stored on the Jukebox. The maximal output of the headphone jack is not particularly loud, but sufficient to enjoy the music properly in any but the very noisiest environments. I personally consider the EAX-settings of the Jukebox as unnecessary gimmick, because I don’t really fancy to listen to Anastacia in e.g. ‘bathroom’-sound. The same is valid for the parametric equalizer, which would be a good idea if the volume of the music wouldn’t drop as soon as you increase the bass level.
Let me remind you though that the Jukebox is much too good to only be used on the road. You can either hook it up to your car radio with one of those messy cassette-adapters, or you can connect it to your home stereo, which might be placed elsewhere than your computer system. Once Creative supplies the remote control the Jukebox could replace any CD-changer, although it is tiny in comparison.
Upgrading the Hard Drive
Now finally we got to the most interesting bit of this article, the upgrade of the Jukebox to a larger hard drive. This idea came to my mind long before I bought my Nomad Jukebox, but Kuren’s website helped me a lot to realize this project. He has put a special page together with all kind of links for Jukebox owners. One of them is his own upgrade to a 12 GB hard drive and another one the upgrade to a 20 GB disk using the same technique. Before I point out my own technique to do the upgrade (which differs from Kuren’s), I would like to thank Kuren for his helpful insights.
What You Need
Let’s first have a look at what we’ve got. The jukebox is equipped with a 6 GB 2.5″ notebook hard drive from Fujitsu.
This little disk is only 9.5 mm thick and an upgrade hard drive with a larger capacity is not supposed to be thicker as well. Notebook hard drives come in 9.5 mm, 12.5 mm and 17 mm thickness, so please be aware that you can forget the latter two. I suggest IBM’s DJSA-line ‘Travelstar 20GN’, which features a 20 and a 10 GB hard rive. Alternatively you could go for IBM’s DARA-line ‘Travelstar 12GN’, which features a 12 and a 9 GB disk. Of course you can also look for Fujitsu or Toshiba notebook drives, but I have always been a big fan of IBM hard drives. In my own upgrade I used a 12 GB IBM DARA disk.
Besides the hard drive we also need a 2.5″ disk to IDE-connector adapter, which you should get in any reasonably equipped computer store. It is required to hook up the little disks to your computer system in order to prepare the new drive for its future life in the Jukebox.
Warning
Before we start to take our Jukebox-player apart, I’d like to say a few words of warning. Although the Jukebox can be disassembled and assembled in a way that doesn’t leave any traces, I’d like to make you aware of the fact that Creative will most likely refuse any warranty if it is able to detect that you have been manipulating the MP3-player. Opening the housing and changing the drive is a rather simple task for experienced and manually skilled people, but it always bears the risk that you could break something. Especially the integrated circuits of the circuit board can easily be damaged from static interference. Tom’s Hardware Guide will not take any responsibility in case you should damage or destroy your Nomad Jukebox due to the procedure described herein.
The Disassembly Of The Nomad Jukebox
Now let’s start to dissect the Jukebox. Turn it around so that you face the bottom side of it. Remove the batteries and leave the battery cover. In the battery compartment you can spot three Phillips screws, which should be unscrewed with a fine Phillips screwdriver. The other two screws are underneath the rubber pads at the frontal bottom-area of the player. Remove the pads carefully and unscrew those screws as well.
The Disassembly Of The Nomad Jukebox, Continued
Now the upper cover is only held by two notches, which are in the area of the ‘LOCK’-switch and opposite of it between the volume adjustment and the headphone jack. Hold the Jukebox upright, with the top part facing upwards. Use one hand to hold the bottom half of the housing and apply some pressure at the side-part of the top half of the housing right above where it says ‘LOCK’ with the other hand. If you are careful enough you will now be able to lift the top half of the housing. Don’t worry if the button-unit slips out of the top half of the housing. You can easily put it back later. The same is valid for the ‘LOCK’-switch cover.
Now you look at the topside of the player’s PCB.
The Disassembly Of The Nomad Jukebox, Continued
Make sure that you are grounded before you touch the PCB and lift it out of the bottom part of the housing. Put it gently into the top half of the housing. You can now see the hard drive.
To remove it you need to unscrew the four brass screws that you can see on the topside of the PCB. Apply some gentle pressure to the hard drive so that it doesn’t fall off after you removed the four screws. Now you can easily slide the hard drive out of the connector.
The disassembling is finished; you only need to put it back together.
Preparing The New Hard Drive
Now you need to hook-up the little IDE-drive to your (turned-off) computer using the adapter. I suggest you use the secondary IDE-channel, so that you don’t need to change the drive to slave mode. Fire up your computer and make sure that the drive is found by your BIOS. Now boot into Windows. You won’t be able to access the drive, because it is not partitioned or formatted with any known file system. Even Linux cannot recognize it.
What you now need is a Hex/Disk Editor software. I used WinHex from www.winhex.com. You can use any other disk editor you fancy. What you need to do is to copy the first 65,536 sectors of the Jukebox drive to an image-file on your computer. In Winhex you need to use the ‘Tools/Disk Accessories’ menu item ‘Clone Disk’. Choose the Jukebox drive as your source drive and an image file as your destination. 65536 sectors need a space of 32 MB, so you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got 32 MB of free space on your system’s hard drive. To do this operation with Winhex you will need to register it. Now copy starting from sector 0 the amount of 65536 sectors to the image file you chose.
That’s it. Shut down your system and remove the original Jukebox drive. Replace it with the new drive you picked for your Jukebox.
Start your system again and run Winhex. Now you only need to copy the image file to the new hard drive. Choose the image file as your source and the new hard drive as your destination.
Copying the 32 MB will only take a few seconds. This is all you need to do. Shut down your system, remove the new hard drive and slide it into the connector of the Jukebox player. Fix the drive with the four screws, without forgetting to put the four distance holders back in place. Now you put the PCB back into the bottom half of the housing, attach the cover of the ‘LOCK’-switch, making sure that the little notch of the cover fits over the mini-switch. Put the top half of the housing back on, fix the five screws and put the two rubber pads back where they were, possibly with the help of a bit of glue. Voila, the operation is finished.
Formatting the New Drive
Firmware prior to version 2.56
First make sure that the player is connected to the AC Power supply, but disconnect it from the USB cable. Turn the player off. With the player off, we need to turn the player on. As soon as you see the words “Loading” in the top left corner of the screen, press and hold down on both the Play and Stop buttons at the same time. Continue holding both buttons until the player displays the request for format. At that point you can release the buttons. If you press YES, it will ask you if you are sure. Pressing YES a second time will format the player. Then turn the player off and reattach the USB cable.
Firmware version 2.56 and later
First make sure that the player is connected to the AC Power supply, but disconnect it from the USB cable. Turn the player off. With the player off, we need to turn the player on. As soon as you see the words “Loading” in the top left corner of the screen, press and hold down on the EAX button, the Down Arrow and the center display button at the same time. Continue holding all three buttons until the player displays the disk diag menu. At that point you can release the buttons. If you select format, it will format the player. Then turn the player off and reattach the USB cable.
Preparing Library …
Kuren had already pointed it out and it is something that might irritate you a bit too, although it is totally harmless. Once your upgraded Jukebox-player is completely full with music, the ‘preparing library’-procedure when you start the Jukebox will take a lot longer than with the 6 GB hard drive.
This is no error, but simply a sign for the fact that it takes longer to create the library database of the Jukebox from those many music files. The more files you have the longer it takes. In my case I have to wait 1 minute and 40 seconds until all the 12 GB of MP3-files are organized in the library. If you should use a 20 GB disk and fill it up it could easily take 3 to 4 minutes until your Jukebox has finished booting.
Some Details Of The Jukebox Hard Drive
I had a look at the organization of the files on the hard drive of the Jukebox. It might be that you don’t even need to copy 65,536 sectors for the upgrade procedure. It seems as if half of that is already enough. I haven’t tried that yet though.
I also found out how the MP3-files are stored on the hard drive. Seemingly the Jukebox OS is using a granularity of 256 kB for file storage. Music files are therefore stored in chunks of 256 kilobyte. This is not a very economical procedure that wastes a lot of hard drive space. The files are simply stored sequentially and it is easy to find their start and end, since each MP3-file starts with the entry ‘ID3’ and ends with another tag-entry as well. It would be pretty easy to write a little program that can read all the MP3-files from a Jukebox hard drive, but it would always require the previous disassembly of the player.
Summary
For me Creative’s Nomad Jukebox is the gadget of the year. It is not exactly cheap, but one of the few items that are really worth their money. Regardless if you want to listen to music on the beach, in your car or on your home stereo system, the Nomad Jukebox gives you the chance to do all that while choosing from at least 100 hours of music. Just imagine how much space 100 CDs would take and then take another look at the little Nomad Jukebox. It’s simply fantastic (and I think I have never ever said that about any product before!). The real kick however is the unwanted upgrade path that Creative gave its big MP3-player. It is really simple to equip the Jukebox with a larger hard drive. 20 GB of music equals over 400 CD albums!! Imagine carrying that much music around with you wherever you go!
Still it wouldn’t be a typical Tom-review if there weren’t at least some things that I have to criticize.
- Creative needs to get the Windows 2000 bug out of its Playcenter2 software and the upload of play lists could be made a lot easier and more convenient as well.
- An IEEE 1394 (FireWire) version of the Jukebox would be very helpful too, because it simply takes too long to load the Jukebox.
- I would also appreciate if Creative would unlock the transfer of files from the Jukebox to the computer. I can’t see any legal reason against that.
- Once in a while the Jukebox crashes, especially while you are uploading files. In this case you either need to cut the power supply (remove batteries) or press the little RESET-button. I hope that future firmware for the Jukebox will be less buggy.
- Finally I’m asking for headphones that are adequate to the quality of MP3. The headphone output of the Jukebox should be higher than those few 100 mW also.
In closing I’d like to say a few words about the usage of MP3. This audio format has already won, regardless how much the music industry might hate it. Thus I think it is about time that computer-illiterate people can start enjoying the huge advantages of MP3 as well. As great as the Nomad Jukebox may be, it still requires a computer. This leaves all the other music-lovers that don’t have a computer out in the rain. It is about time for a major change!
