Creative Labs NOMAD Jukebox For further info, visit NOMADWorld or Creative Labs.

Needless to say, nobody took the bait...which is why you haven't seen any gear in the "&" department until now. Creative Labs didn't send us a NOMAD Jukebox (though that would've been a wonderful thing, and if anyone from Creative Labs is reading this, the rest of the staff still needs them). This sucker is mine.

In the past I've positioned myself as an opponent of MP3s, but mostly what I object to is the wholesale piracy in which a certain segment of the Napster crowd indulges. I also think MP3s are a poor way to "own" music -- they lack the obvious aesthetic and tactile rewards of vinyl and CDs. However, as a way to take your music "on the go", they're perfect...if you have enough storage space. I'm sorry, but the idea of toting a single album around on expensive media like Compact Flash cards doesn't exactly thrill me, and burning MP3s to CD-R or dumping them to MiniDisc is just too fiddly for my tastes.

So I'm guessing that one morning, someone woke up and said "Hey, why don't we get ourselves a bunch of those cheap 6 GB hard drives that they're putting in all the low-end laptops, and build an MP3 player around it?" and the NOMAD Jukebox was born. Packing 6 gigs of storage into a unit roughly the size and weight of an older portable CD player, the NOMAD Jukebox is capable of holding more than 100 hours of music -- they usually claim that you can fit about 150 MP3'd albums onto it (more if you encode as Windows Media Audio...but who wants to do that?). After a month, I've got about fifteen on it, as well as roughly half of the thirty-odd CDs that come preloaded (most of the preloaded stuff is pretty awful, but the large classical collection is nice). If I'm so inclined, I can load my entire "to be reviewed" pile onto this sucker and hit the road. I'd better plan ahead, though -- even with its 500 Kbps data transfer speed, putting a lot of music onto the NOMAD all at once is pretty slow going.

The unit sports a seven-line LCD screen, allowing you to keep track of your current playlist, add and remove tracks, set preferences, read information...everything. Full information (title, artist, label, etc.) is available for every single song, as long as the disc is listed in the CDDB online database or you're willing to enter the data yourself. The controls are fairly similar to what you'd expect from a standard CD player, with a few extra navigation buttons for the internal menus. The unit comes with two sets of rechargeable batteries, a set of round-the-back-of-the-head headphones (backphones) and a completely useless case.

Let's look at the minus column. For one thing, you can't fast-forward. Not yet, anyway, though the feature is promised for a future firmware upgrade. For now, you can only skip ahead to the next track -- awkward if you're listening to, say, a Godspeed You Black Emperor song and want to cut to the chase. The unit's volume is also an issue -- it can't manage the ear-abrading volume of which most portable CD players are capable, though this will only be an issue if you use it in environments with a lot of ambient noise. In the city, for instance, it's fine unless I'm near the train tracks when a train is passing. The navigation system may confuse you at first, especially if (like me) you're a "damn the manual" type, and I'm told that the battery life is a bit short, though I've yet to run mine down.

Cool features make up for these mild lapses. First and best, the unit can record! Plug a powered microphone (or any line-level source) into the "line in" jack and you're set to record about ten hours of .wav format audio, ready to be moved to a computer and burned to CD. While we don't, ahem, approve of bootlegging, we particularly don't, ahem, approve of the high-quality bootlegging that could be done with the NOMAD.

There are also a pair of line-out jacks, allowing you to plug the NOMAD Jukebox into your home or car stereo. A car stereo adapter is on the way, though it's just one of those cassette deck things. Those of us with CD players in our cars will still have to give the NOMAD a rest during drive-time. The fact that the unit can produce surround-sound output, tweakable with its EAX settings, is definitely impressive -- the NOMAD can deliver a big sound almost anywhere.

PC users win on the software side. Creative's "PlayCenter 2" software coordinates the whole process -- querying CDDB for each newly-loaded CD and downloading track information automatically (if you have a permanent net connection), allowing you to pick and choose which tracks will be transferred, how the music will be indexed on the NOMAD Jukebox and whether to store it on your computer first, or transfer it directly to the disc. It may not do anything that other software interfaces can't do, but I found it easy to use. Incidentally, I wish that the powers that be had managed to come up with a less tawdry term for MP3-encoding than "ripping". Whenever I hit the "Rip It" button I feel like I'm stealing one of my own CDs...

Of course, since I wind up listening to a lot of, with all due respect, "obscure" music, the whole CDDB query thing doesn't help all that much. But it's always a pleasant surprise when the work of filling in track titles is done for me.

For Mac users, the NOMAD comes with SoundJam MP, which seems nice enough but isn't quite as feature-rich as PlayCenter 2. I guess Linux users are left out in the cold.

I don't ever see myself switching over to MP3 in a big way. However, the NOMAD Jukebox is the first product to really get me excited about the format's potential. Finally, I can take a vacation and bring along a decent supply of good music without having to drag along a carry-on bag full of CDs! I can switch between several dozen albums during my daily walk to the train, rather than being limited to a single CD for the duration of the trip. And if I want, I can record Splendid's Feature interviews at CD quality, and perhaps even get some exclusive live audio (with the band's permission, of course).

If you have a big music collection, or if you have an extremely modest collection and want to carry every last minute of it around with you, the NOMAD Jukebox is your new must-have toy. I'm not pimping a corporate product here -- this is a really sweet piece of gear, and you should grab one if you can.

-- George Zahora