Rating: 
Summary: Software/Junkware!
Review: After putting a few albums in this infernal machine, playlists started disappearing, songs started disappearing, everything started saying "Error!" Creative needs to actually BE creative when it comes to making an MP3 player, because they STILL have not gotten the firmware or software right on this contraption! I notified technical support of their faulty machine and they responded with the infamous "uninstall and reinstall the software." Ok, and when it still messes up, what then, Creative? What then? Well, if you paid 400 dollars for it, then using it as a hockey puck would be stupid (unless you are related to Bill Gates or something). No, you just have to "play" with it and re-re-rearrange your songs and playlists (did I mention that they disappear?) again and again and again, hoping that when you actually try putting songs into the machine they will go. You almost have to talk to the machine and tell it nice things to make it work for you. But then the software is a waste of time because I am eternally receiving "Microsoft Error Reporting" messages because the playcenter um... is garbage. I am thinking about using RealOne player and see if I see any difference. Oh, did I mention that your songs and playslists disappear? Oh yes, I did. Well, I suppose I am mentioning it again and again because they continually disappear and you have to re-re-rearrange the music and playlists. Oh, and don't you just love when you are transferring the music and after it transfers a few songs the ever so popular error message "Nomad is no longer connected" appears? I think it should say "Nomad is no longer connected because we at Creative cannot make a software that goes with our hardware. We should just stick to soundcards only because they are the only thing we are good at. Oh, you might want to check your Nomad because I think we deleted your playlists, mixed up your music, and caused your player to become useless yet again. Yes, you have to do it all over again. But hey, thanks for the 400 dollars... sucker!" Well, that is my take on the Nomad Jukebox 3, which in reality is no better than the Nomad Jukebox 1 or 2 or any Nomad whatsoever. I owned the 6 GB one and it was junk too. Before you buy this machine, get a written statement of promise from Creative that it will not mess up or delete your music or playlists... I'll guarantee right now that they will refuse. Creative, maybe try making the software compatible with XP, ME, 2000, NT, etc., for a change and maybe you will actually NOT Create another lemon. I began by giving the player 2 stars, but after coming to my senses, I gave it 1. Would have gave it zero, but we can't do that yet.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but Broken
Review: This is for the Nomad 6gig Jukebox, but I wanted everyone buying a Creative Nomad product to know my story, in case these things use the same firmware:I liked my Jukebox, I really did, but it flaked out after 6 months and died after a year. And now, after some monkey business with the support team, it's dead and I'm done. The short story: It worked great for a while. 6 Gig IS a lot of music, even when I ripped at highest quality VBR. It played anything from 32 to 320 kbps as well. I loaded it up and swapped songs nearly every day. I think the first downfall was when I updated to the newest firmware. In doing further reading after that, MANY people had similar skipping/freezing problems. Basically, the player would freeze, returning an error, which meant that you had to run the equivalent of a "scan disk" to patch it up. This happened with greater and greater frequency until I basically had to do it every 100 Meg of songs or so. Sometimes even after 2 songs! With 6 gig, you can guess I didn't want to babysit my player as it loaded songs. Part of this might have been because I was deleting and adding 300 meg of new songs almost every day. I think that exacerbated what otherwise might have been a dormant or relatively harmless problem. But it still should have handled it. Eventually, it stopped playing songs all the way through. And that wasn't because of the tune because you could reboot the thing and it would play that tune just fine the next time. No, there was something really wrong. I sent it to their help desk and for [a few bucks] they took a look at it (because it was a month out of warranty!). They reported nothing really wrong and the guy ran the clean-up process and returned it. Apparently, he neglected to read the two page letter I had included that said that I had already done that and even re-formatted. I sent it back, with a disc full of MP3s of various sizes and shapes and asked them to load the disc on in it's entirety. Guess what! It failed! They couldn't figure out what to do, so they sent me a new one. Normally this would have cost me [serious cashola] out of pocket, but since their last fix was warranteed for 30 days, I got lucky. Watch those warrantees people! Anyway, this one worked for a while, but still froze up when I was loading too close to the "full" mark. I had to leave 50 meg free, then 75 meg, then 100 meg free. Finally, it choked all together and now I have a nice handy [mucho dinero] paperweight. I could send it back I guess, but I'm not interested in paying [wads of dough] for a new machine that will only last another 4 months. No thanks. It had it's good qualities:
- Played any MP3 I fed it, random, repeat.
- Nice organization of stuff on the machine, by artist, album, genre and playlists.
- Easy to get tunes on and off (when it wasn't malfunctioning)
- Solid feel. Nice button response. I liked the weight of it.
- It had playlists which you could upload, but I hated that. Plus, it slowed it down while booting up. What I used was the track numbers built into the tags of the MP3s. It used that to order them. Criticisms:
- It broke. And not just for me. Look around in the newsgroups, you'll see plenty of people with similar problems. Honestly, being in IT, I have a bit of a knack for debugging problems, and I think this was probably some sort of problem with their delete function. I hope they read this and try to fix it.
- It tried to be robust by using ID3v2 and v1 info AND this weird thing called Lyricsv3, which nobody's ever heard of. Unfortunately, it always defaulted to v2, even though I prefer v1, and then this Lyrics thing which I had a hard time finding a program to strip out. It would have been nice to force it to use ID3v1.
- Needed a "Queue everything" selection
- Took forever (30secs+) to boot up. When I read why, it was a totally stupid reason too. It had to rescan every MP3 or something. Wasted time.
- It broke. Twice. Did I mention that? I'd certainly think twice before buying one of these, or their higher-priced, larger HD cousins, as they use the same firmware. ...
Rating: 
Summary: This was one of my best choices on buying electronics!!
Review: Last week I was just reading reviews of other peoples experiences for the MP3 players and myself I was trying to figure out which 'spacious' mp3 player to buy! It was either Ipod, Nomad or Archo's player. I looked at Ipod, but decided not to buy it because: 1st was too fragile, glass faceplate(but they come with protector kits anyway) 2nd the most was 10gigs and I needed nothing less, but a 20 gigs to load up my extensive CD collection. So eventhough Ipod is considered to be good I dint buy it because it was too ... and too small (10gigs) I looked at Archos (or I dont remember how u spell it) and it was small(good) but the quality I dint really like and options on it were limited. I ended up focusing on the Nomad, seemed a bit too big, but I was up for the challenge because I am planning to buy the remote for it. People wrote some descent reviews on it, which I liked. And were honest, the bad/good sides were all exposed. The headphones are not that good, I bought the Sony MDR-EX70LP, which are great earbuds, eventhough they cost $ for regular headphones, I decided I would buy them [$$$] Theyre awesome, comfortable and sound is fantastic (Thnx to someone who posted about them in one of the reviews) The thing with shuffling/random play is working fine, I been using it for only 5 hours now and already know the shuffle mode and I dont know what people were talking about before about that it dint have shuffle. It has shuffle and play lists and search and browse(albums, artists, genres, all songs etc) The firewire is very fast, but the USB connection isnt that bad either. People said that they get error (frozen computer sometimes) when uploading to the player, I dont seem to have it and I am running on Windows XP and have tried both the USB and firewire, work just great. Extra battery compartment is great, its not even external just another slot, Ill buy the extra battery cause I forget to recharge things sometimes (my phone goes dead during a business day, oh my!) And the remote should be cool too, will have FM radio and also a microphone, I can record my guitar lessons on it straight into MP3 rather than on WAV like I do on PC and It can go higher than 192bpsdont know till when, but 128bps of mp3 sound awesome on the player (they will charge around 50$ for it, I called em, coming in two weeks) And I thought it would be bigger, but small, well I have one of those sony round cd players, used to carrying it in bbag/hands and its just the same sizeexcept a little bit heavier, and with the remote coming ill throw it in the bag :) Anyway its a great buy, imagine shuffling through your favorite artist's (Tool) 5 albums on the go. So choose visely and read these reviews theyre not lying thanks a lot if you want you can send me an email at: yevdokimovs@hotmail.com and im a Dude, eventhough the account name is Tatyana's lol later all
Rating: 
Summary: Close to perfection, but still no cigar
Review: It's good - yes, it's actually very good, as it bloody well should be for 400 clams. In a nutshell, if you want the best, this is the best. I don't do the Apple thing, so I can't compare it to the iPod (which a lot of people seem to also like.) All reviews of the iPod indicated it wasn't too Windows-friendly, so I stayed away. The Nomad Jukebox 3 is just a tiny bit heavier and larger than you'd really want for a true "carry it anywhere, listen to it anywhere" device. But that suits me fine, because I bought it to listen to when I travel in my airplane, or on the airlines. I'm not going to jog with the thing. So let's get the important stuff out of the way. The battery life... ahhh! Yeah, 9 hours, not 11. Close enough. Two battery bays: gentlemen and ladies, you are splendid! Can't get a second battery yet: damn you! Can't get a leather carrying case or something to protect the unit with: damn you twice! Sound quality: excellent! Interface: it's okay, but it has some problems. Features such as firewire, yadda yadda - heck, I use the USB. It's fast enough. I've filled up about 10GB of the 20GB available so far. My last mp3 player was a Personal Jukebox that I bought about 2 years ago. 6GB was *huge* for MP3 players back then, and using hard drives for portable music was extremely cutting edge. It finally bit the dust (and it was sort of problem-ridden anyway) so I decided to give Creative a shot. Big improvement over the old. Despite the fact that others hate the Playcenter software, I actually kind of dig it. It's pretty easy to yank my MP3s off my computer (yeah, I stopped using CDs a long time ago, thanks... so no need for the "ripping" function except for when I buy a new album.) Definitely, the organization is the problem. I have no idea why Creative decided to list tracks the way they do. It's sort of hard to find what you want, and playing more than one track at a time is not intuitive - you have to learn how to do it. In other words, if you find a song you like and just play it, that's it - it'll play through the song, then stop right there. Or you can select an album and play - and it'll stop playing at the end of the album. With the PJBox I just picked a spot where I wanted to start listening and it played on until it ran out of juice. With the Nomad, you pretty much have to use the Playlist feature. I can just imagine my wife trying to futz with this thing while I fly the plane. The scroller is okay. I am surprised so many people like it. It's sort of awkward to operate with one hand this way. Also, what's with the volume being controlled by two buttons on the top of the unit? In the dark you would never guess that those buttons controlled volume. Again, visions of my wife fumbling with this thing enter my brain. Get rid of the EAX. I don't see the use for it. I upgraded my firmware from Creative's site and now I can create my own EQ settings, but it's rudimentary. Why is this sort of feature always weak on mp3 players? Just give us basic equalization features that are easy to access with one button push. Really, though, these are nitpicks. The sound quality is excellent. The battery life is fantastic. The unit does everything it claims to do. The problem is truly interface, software, and organization... hopefully Creative will address this with future releases. For now, I can live with it. Overall, I highly recommend it and am pleased with mine.
Rating:
Summary: Go with something else.
Review: Creative really needs to update their line of mp3 products. This is just an old jukebox with a bigger HD. Plus it has a usb connection. I would go with an iPOD, Arcos, or the Rio Riot before this.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent MP3 Jukebox
Review: This is a great unit. Switched from Rio Riot, which just does not compare. 40GB means I don't have to woory about running out of room (I have 19GB on there now). Option for second battery means I won't have to worry about running out of power on the road. Great sound quality. I also love the recording features, which allows me to record streaming radio shows from the Internet and listen to them later in the car. Scroll wheel makes finding things a lot easier. Firewire transfer is quick and easy. No crashes or glitches yet (unlike my Riot).
Room for improvement: more control over equalization (EAX doesn't cut it); ability to search albums under each artist; more robust Play Center software features. If Creative can fix these in updated firmware they will win more customers.
Overall, though, I would recommend this unit without hesitation.
Rating:
Summary: Best player I've owned
Review: I've owned 3 flash players before (Rio 300, 500, Samsung Yepp 64MB). None of them compare to the CL NJ3, never have I been able to take all of my music with me. Fortunately, all those warnings from other people about XP freezing with the Firewire is BS. I had absolutely no problem with the Firewire and watched the 3GB of my music go by in 5 minutes... Amazing! As well, the software is better than any other I have used, very simple. Transfers songs like a Palm Pilot transfers information, using a sync. Playlists work great, too. The only thing I'm disappointed with is the fact that the title of the song selected doesn't scroll when you're browsing, it's a pain when you have a bunch of remixes of one song. I can get past that. All in all, this is a great player.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Player with only a few minor gripes...
Review: Great player! 20GB, Firewire for very high speed transfers, excellent battery life, nice sound. Like others have said, the headphones the unit comes with are pretty poor... put them in the drawer and get some good ones! EAX? ... The pre-set settings are for the most part awful. Cannot combine multiple EAX settings, no way to set your own equalization.. no bass or treble at all for that matter. Creative can do away with the useless EAX and just add a simple 5-band EQ and perhaps a good, clean bass-boost and a few decent effects. Bottom line, give the user some control over the sound! Don't assume your pre-set settings are so great we don't need bass and treble or an EQ!! Also, the amp/volume could be a little better... volume is inadequate when you are using the unit in an area where external noise is high... an airplane for example. Others have mentioned there is no randomization, repeat play, etc. Well, it does have these options... just learn how to use the menus! It really is pretty easy to navigate once you work with the unit a little. The scroller is quite good and works quite effectively. Lithium-Ion batteries were a smart choice, Creative! Having that second battery bay was a nice touch. (Could have given us the second battery though!!) Hopefully, future firmware updates will address the inability to have more control over sound parameters. I've had no crashes as others have complained about...perhaps the current firmware resolved those issues. Overall, a great unit with amazing amounts of storage. (I considered the 40GB version but...I would never use that much space. 20GB should be more than adequate for most people.) Had it not been for the inability to customize sound parameters, and, inadequate maximum volume, it would have received 5 stars. Still gets a strong 4!
Rating:
Summary: The best u can buy
Review: I did my research and decided to buy the Nomad Jukebox 3. I've had it for three days and I've only found one problem with it. On some CD's that I tried to load again (because i messed something up the first time) the software would freeze up and i had to Ctrl + Alt + Del out of it. My only other complaint is that the accesories that Creative claims to have I can't find for sale on the Website. But the player is great it only takes about two and a half hours to charge the battery and then plays 11 hours. I have about 300 songs on it already and i love all of it's features. I use the best quality you can use and i haven't even filled up 8% of the memory. It preforms as advertised and is awesome. And in case your wondering it's worth the $400 price tag.
Rating:
Summary: music lovers
Review: creative lab jukebox 3 is ideal for the music lover but all your music in and sit back and relax to your music you want to hear
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