Rating: 
Summary: Not perfect, but it sure beats the Archos Jukebox
Review: After two Archos Jukeboxes came, worked a few days, then seized up, I finally hit pay dirt with the Nomad.The Nomad isn't perfect, to be sure. The Archos had a nicer size and shape. Its ability to act as an external hard drive was great -- move your MP3s there and free up hard drive space while still being able to play them from the PC. And by far the biggest liability of the Nomad, its abysmal PlayCenter2 software (and the fact that you're locked into using it), was one of the great strengths of the Archos (MusicMatch Jukebox is great, and you can copy files to the Archos with just Explorer). Also, the Nomad is sensitive to "weird" ID3 tags -- about 1 in 10 MP3s needed me to rewrite the tags to keep the PlayCenter2 software from refusing to upload playlists with those songs in them, with no error message. But the Nomad definitely has its advantages. The screen and interface are light-years ahead. Lots of small usability issues make it a lot easier to use than the Archos. It's way better supported with a bigger online community. The preloaded tracks are even better! And while PlayCenter2's support for playlists is weak, even in the latest version which can import M3Us generated by more capable software, the Archos required me to edit playlists with a text editor and even then, keep them under 100 songs. But when it all comes down, what matters is, the Nomad works (knock on wood). The Archos doesn't. Simple as that. I'd like to see improvements to the Nomad, but even without them, it gets the job done. Great tunes, great sound quality, great portability, and that's what we're really here for.
Rating: 
Summary: Stock up on batteries
Review: As advertised the NOMAD is a great player. It works well with headphones, in the car (with an adapter) or with speakers. Unfortunately, the NiMH batteries supplied are awful. The first charge, according to the directions, is 12 hours. I charged both sets and it worked great, playing for almost 2 hours on a single charge. The next 4 charges failed to give me more than 10 minutes play time. When the company was contacted they never answered my questions or letters. My recommendation is to but ALOT of AA batteries or get a power inverter for your car to run it off the plug in adapter.
Rating: 
Summary: By far, the best gadget I have bought in a long time
Review: As you can tell by the rating and the title of the review, I am one happy camper with my Nomad Jukebox. Why? Well first off, 6GB of MP3's is a LOT of CD's. Next, because I am a music freak, I bought the 20GB upgrade for the Jukebox (search the web for Nomadworld). Anyhow, the dang thing just runs great, is slick, and now I have 500 CD's to cart around with me (yes 500 CD's on this thing!). The only drawback is that the battery power get's drained quickly, but Creative Labs has been kind enough to give you two sets of rechargable batteries so you can listen to 8 interrupted hours of music without a recharge. The software that comes with the Jukebox Ripps CD's in a flash, is easy to use, and makes managing all of this music a snap (thank goodness). Makes flying in an airplane just fly on by (yes, pun intended). Get it - it is well worth the money. Why waste your time with a 64 MB MP3 player... uploading, deleteing, uploading, deleteing. This thing will hold all of your music.
Rating:
Summary: Few minor limitations
Review: I *love* the space on this thing! I'll be able to load all of the songs that I would anticipate wanting to listen to while traveling and it's a good size. Now for the few drawbacks: The carry case that comes with it doesn't have a long handle for easy transport and doesn't provide room for you to put the unit in the case while the headphones are plugged in. The PC software is *not* intuitive and does not preserve track order so if you listen to an album, you get the songs in alphabetic order (at least, that's my current experience). There's also no automatic way to convert songs with the PC software. The Apple software I'm using is iTunes - free and excellent with only one drawback: you can't edit song information once it's on the jukebox (the PC version seems to allow this). However, it does allow you to both preserve and edit track information which is great for those multi-CD "greatest of..." albums - I converted Les Miserables and Best of Meatloaf into single albums and was able to preserve the original song order. The other thing I love about iTunes is that you can set it so that when you pop in a CD, it immediately gets the track info from CDDB, rips the album to mp3 and ejects the CD when you're done - great for converting a collection while doing other things. If you have the good fortune to be able to work on both platforms, use iTunes for conversion and only use the PC software if you need to edit info *after* you have copied your music to the jukebox.
Rating:
Summary: Great and constantly improving
Review: I got this for my birthday earlier this month, and loved it immediaately. I was able to load every album I had onto it, plus a lot of MP3's I had downloaded. The firmware and the unit and the PC software are both easy to understand. But best of all, just in the month I have had this, they have upgraded both the PC software and the firmware for the Nomad, and addressed many of the problems listed in earlier reviews. Tracks can be ordered in the playlists (non-alphabetically), boot times are MUCH shorter, battery life is longer (slightly), pretty much everything is an improvement (well, except the headphones).
Rating:
Summary: Good...maybe too good
Review: I have one of these and it's great to go hours and hours on random play without hearing the same song twice. However, it's sometimes difficult to find a specific song that I want to hear or set it up so that it plays one album from start to finish. One problem is that the more songs in storage the slower the machine works. Another problem is that the operating system and the computer software are buggy although Creative does produce upgrades and patches for both of those. Having said all that, it's really great for travelling, background noise or whatever.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but Broken
Review: 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 [dollar amount] 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 [dollar amount] 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 [dollar amount] paperweight. I could send it back I guess, but I'm not interested in paying [dollar amount] bucks 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. Peter
Rating:
Summary: Good, but Broken
Review: 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 [dollar amount] 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 [dollar amount] 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 [dollar amount] paperweight. I could send it back I guess, but I'm not interested in paying [dollar amount] bucks 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. Peter
Rating:
Summary: this little bad boy is great.
Review: i love this thing! its so cool. And you CAN ff or rw through the tracks. I do have a question for other poeple owning this, have any of you tried using normal bateries? i was thinking of doing this, but im kinda worried.
Rating:
Summary: KICK BUT MP3 PLAYER
Review: IF YOU WANT A GREAT MP3 PLAYER THAT DOES EVERYTHING IT SAYS IT WILL DO AND MORE, IS EASY TO USE, IS GREAT QULITY AND IS FROM A GRAT COMPANY THAT STANDS BEHIND ITS PRODUCTS 100% THIS IS FOR YOU! GREAT JOB CREATIVE I WILL ALWAYS RESPECT YOU AS THE #1 ELECTRONICS COMPANY! THRUST ME I KNOW I HAVE A NOMAD AND 5 OTHER PRODUCTS FROM CREATIVE INCLUDING WEB CAM ANS SOUND BLASTER EDUGY etc. I HAVE BEEN VERY EXITED AND OVERSATISFIED WITH EVERY CREATIVE PRUDUCT I EVER OWNED!
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