Nomad Jukebox can play 100 hours of non-stop music

Nomad Jukebox can play 100 hours of non-stop music

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Forget about Napster, forget about MP3.com. I'm
already hooked on MP3, almost to the point of being addicted. And
the culprit is Nomad Jukebox from Creative Technology in
Singapore.

At a glance, this device looks like a Sony Discman. Upon
closer inspection, you'll notice there is no slot for any
removable medium. Instead, there is an LCD with seven lines of
text. It can run on four AA batteries, but Creative included two
sets of NiMH rechargeable batteries in the box. The Reviewer
Guide claims that, fully charged, these batteries provide four
hours of playing time.

The control panel has the Play and Stop buttons, which also
function as the Power Up and Power Down buttons, respectively,
when pressed for a couple of seconds. There is also the Scroll
button and the Skip Backward and Skip Forward buttons. There is a
button for entering the library of music files, and another to
call up the EAX (Environment Audio Extension) menu as well as the
settings of the entire system. Just at the bottom of the LCD
there are three so-called softkeys. The functions of these keys
change, depending on where you are on the on-screen menu.

Nomad Jukebox could be called a small computer in itself. It
comes with a lot of music stored on its 6 GB hard disk, including
collections of the best pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Bizet, Mozart,
Verdi and Vivaldi. The demo playlist includes my favorite Eine
Kleine Nachtmusik, which sounds as crystal clear as the CD
because the file was encoded at the 128 kbps rate. There are two
line-out jacks that allow the MP3 player to be connected to four
speakers to create realistic surround effects. A line-in jack
will enable you to record music or voice from an external source.
If you are a journalist and you have a microphone with a pre-amp,
you can use this device to record interviews or live coverage.

After adding several tracks from my favorite Engelbert
Humperdinck and Jimmy Cliff CDs, I still have a little bit less
than 4 GB hard disk space. Creative states that Nomad Jukebox can
store 100 CDs worth of music, and you can have more than 100
hours of CD-quality music to listen to should you ever have
nothing else to do for four days and four nights in a row. You
would need the power adapter, of course.

Ripping the music

The beauty of this gadget is that it easily allows people to
create MP3 files from CD collections.

Thus, the idea of being able to create collections of music
files for personal use -- not to exchange them over the Internet
with other people -- sounds really appealing. There is a strong
reason for that.

"The record companies often mix great tracks with some really
boring ones," says Sim Wong Hoo, Creative Technology's CEO and
chairman in his keynote speech at a media event last month.
"Creative's Nomads give us the flexibility that allows us to
listen only to the music that we really like."

The company emphasized, however, that it did not intend their
MP3 players to be used to pirate copyrighted material, but that
it would be difficult to control as this gadget can also be used
to store MP3 files downloaded from the Internet.

Creating an MP3 file from a track on a CD is called "ripping",
and it is almost like a drag and drop activity. Nomad Jukebox
comes with software called PlayCenter 2.0 for PCs or SoundJam MP
for the Mac. The unit itself connects to the computer via a
supplied USB cable. When the software is loaded, the PC takes
control of the Jukebox.

When I popped a Ray Charles CD into the PC's CD-ROM drive,
clicked on the Audio CD button on PlayCenter, the list of the
tracks appeared on its left panel. However, since the compact
disc did not contain the name of the individual songs or the name
of the artists, I had to type them in manually. An easier way
would be to download the list of names and artist from a special
website called CDDB, which has a public domain database of CD
titles and their lists of contents. PlayCenter can be set to
connect to this site automatically.

Once the tracks were properly encoded and selected, all I had
to do was click on the Transfer button. The ripping process was
extremely fast -- partly thanks to the power of my newly
assembled Pentium III 733 MHz machine. It took only a couple of
seconds to convert a 3-minute track into an MP3 file. When the
ripping process was completed, the tracks -- now in the MP3
format -- existed on both the PC and the Jukebox. I could have
set the software not to leave a copy on my hard disk.

On the Jukebox, the special Music Disk Operating System (MDOS)
automatically stores the music files in alphabetical order. Three
categories are provided to make searching easy. You can group all
the stored MP3 files based on the artist names, the music types
(jazz, classic, rap and so on) or the album titles.

To play the music, you have to locate the songs that you want
to include on the playlist manually first, and then press the
Queue softkey to add it to the list. Once the list is ready, you
can press the Play button, sit back and enjoy the music. The
active playlist can be saved for later use, and new playlists can
be created easily. Entering the name for the playlists with the
Plus and Minus buttons will be quite a hassle, unfortunately. It
is worse than having to enter names into the phonebook using your
cell phone's keypad.

The EAX audio technology allows you to adjust several audio
parameters, including boosting the bass, midrange and treble
frequency ranges. It can create a 3-D sensation if used with
headphones. It can even slow down the playback of music without
altering the pitch. This is really an amazing breakthrough in
audio technology. It is a great feature if you want to transcribe
a recorded conversation, for example, as you can slow down the
speech without changing the pitch of the voices.

An infrared port is already built in, although there is still
no use for it today. Creative is working on a remote control
device that will utilize this port. In the future, it may also be
possible to transfer music files using the infrared connection.
In addition to MP3 and WAV formats, Jukebox can be programmed to
store and play any future music file formats.

Some Imperfections

The Nomad Jukebox is still imperfect in many respects. To
start with, it is difficult to really use the device before
reading the guides and manuals, and that means usability needs to
be improved. The PlayCenter 2.0 software is not very intuitive,
either. For example, there is no drag and drop as well as copy
and paste facilities would normally be taken for granted in a
Windows program.

More annoying is the fact that there is no way to rearrange
the sequence of the songs on the playlist. Once a playlist has
been created, the only way to change the order of its contents is
to delete it and create a new one. The LCD screen could use some
improvement in readability.

The choice of the command Open instead of Enter is quite
unfriendly. The assignment of the Open key is confusing, too, as
sometimes you have to use the center softkey for Open and
sometimes you have to use the one on the right. The Plus and
Minus commands also sound rather strange; I don't quite
understand why Creative does not simply use the words Up and Down
instead. The good news is that the firmware can be upgraded with
software downloaded from their website.

Creative Technology has introduced a new category of
electronic devices that they call Personal Digital Entertainment
(PDE). Whether the market will accept them remains to be seen.

Creative was not the first to come up with a portable MP3
player, but their Nomad line has been the choice of editors,
particularly Nomad II and the newer Nomad II MG. The US$499.00
(RRP) Jukebox is the top of the line model, and, for now, it
seems that the Nomad Jukebox does reflect how we are going to
listen to music -- or even audio books -- in the future.
(zatni@cbn.net.id)