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.