The 20-Gig Creative Labs Jukebox: 2 weeks of music -TO GO!!
Written: Mar 11 '02 (Updated Mar 12 '02)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Sound: |
 |
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
| Durability: |
|
|
| Portability: |
|
|
| Battery Life: |
|
|
|
Pros: Lots of sound. WILL impress your friends.
Cons: Expen$ive (but probably worth every penny if you love music.)
The Bottom Line: If you like music, you can probably put your whole lifetime collection into this little device and take it practically anywhere.
|
|
|
| Ed.Williamson's Full Review: Creative Technology Nomad Jukebox (20 GB) MP3 Play... |
This little electronic wonder is one of the miracles of the age, in many ways. It is for people who love music so much they spend an inordinate amount of time downloading song after song from the net. You can also put your whole neighborhood's CD collections on it and you still won't fill it up. The heart of it is that 20 GIGABYTE hard disk inside.
Is it DURABLE? I have to tell you a true story. I gave a friend a 6-gigabyte model very similar to this one about a year ago. The 6 gigabyte unit I gave to the friend was riding, with said friend (no not me), in the front seat of an '89 Toyota Camry late one night, going down a West Texas highway, in late October, 2001, when said vehicle went off the road at 70 miles per hour, hit an empty parked car, and flipped and landed back on the road, upside down. The crumpled Toyota was totaled. The driver was, thankfully, strapped in and unhurt. He crawled out and was checked out medically and was all right.
I retrieved the Jukebox from the floor of the wrecked Camry which was taken to a wrecking yard the next day. I found it in a pile of broken window glass and I feared for the worse. But when the power was plugged back in, it sang out with its songs just as good as ever. So I KNOW it can "take a lickin' and keep on clickin' ". This 20 GB unit is built from the same stuff as the 6 GB unit, and I expect it is going to be just as durable. I HOPE it is never tested for its durability in the same way, however.
Yes, that original Jukebox was and still is a revolutionary thing, as you can imagine. With 6 gigs of space, it has enough storage for over a hundred CD's in one little device the size of a portable CD player. The 20 Gigabyte incarnation of the NOMAD can hold more than 3 times that many CD's- 300 if you want to load them all into it. Do you have any clue as to how long it would take you to listen to the songs on 300 CDs? Let's see…suppose you average 12 songs on a CD…that's 3,600 songs. Now let's say, just for grins, that with song length and the space between them each song lasts 4 minutes. That's 3,600 times 4 minutes, which comes out to 14,400 minutes. That's 240 hours. Or TEN SOLID DAYS worth of unstopped music, all on this one little hard disk in one machine. Actually, that is a conservative estimate. The company says that the unit will actually hold 340 hours of audio, or over FOURTEEN DAYS (two weeks) of continuous sound. Anyway you figure it, it's a LOT of sound for a unit that sells just for slightly more than $300.00 US.
Does it sound good though? Two weeks of crummy sound would be awful. Au contraire, the Nomad sounds great.
Is it hard to "work"? Not really. Not any harder to figure out than your average computer these days. You may need a little coaching, but the instructions are pretty clear and once you have them down you will remember them easily.
Downloading is a snap, and a fast one at that. Here is where you run into ethics and trouble, of course. You are legally supposed to be able to make ONE copy of your own CD-type music as a backup. But downloading copyrighted music off the net is a legal no-no, even if probably tens of millions of people have done it. The sites like Napster that offer MP3 music are supposed to be the "outlaws" of the net, but like the "speakeasys" of Prohibition, these sites keep popping up and offering their products anyway.
Drawbacks to the Nomad? Yeah, as with the 6 GB unit, everybody wants to steal the 20 GB unit from the people who have them. For obvious reasons.
But there really are some drawbacks to the unit. For one, as with the "6", sorting songs into playlists is a drag (and I don't mean drag and drop either.) Second, there should be a way to upload all the music that comes with it onto a hard disk or other storage medium so you can save it if you want the space it takes up. And the biggie, again as with the "6", is the battery situation. It eats a lot of power to do its thing and so you better be ready for frequent recharging.
I had the feeling that the "6" was a sort of "beta" machine for a new revolution in MP3 players. "Beta" machines are always a little buggy, so you'll hear some gripes. But with these Nomads selling at a significant clip, they seem to be proving reliable as well as miraculous.
The price eventually dropped on the "6" and I expect it also will on the "20". Some day huge-mass-storage personal recorder-players will be so commonplace we'll wonder how quaint it was back in the past to be satisfied with a half-hour's worth of music when days-or weeks- worth of music will be commonplace. Of course in a year or two we may be getting it all wirelessly from some musical Spirit in the Sky (whose service we will rent like cable) and that will render personal MP3 players like this obsolete, but I rather doubt that is going to happen. Most people like to collect and keep their music with them in their own little machines. Sure, we all (many of us, anyway) may rent cable TV but we still own our own stash of DVDs and VHS tapes. The same logic applies.
It looks like a slightly oversized CD player, but there is a world of difference. It is a part of a revolution in electronics, and within the revolution its place is that of a pace-setter. Even with the taint of being a part of something a bit on the "outlaw" side of things, it is and will be a standard-setter in portable music devices for a long time to come.
To coin an original phrase, "Dude, you've got yourself a 20-gig Jukebox!"
Five stars
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 300+
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
Ed.Williamson
|
 - Top 200 |
|
Member: Ed Williamson
Location: Way Out West, USA
Reviews written: 607
Trusted by: 315 members
About Me:
Fight 'em till Hell freezes over, then fight 'em on the ice!
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.