Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 MP3 Player Sucks!!!

I bought a Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 MP3 player. It's a 20 gb hard drive based MP3 player. I paid over $300 for it.

I want to return it.

It has the absolutely worst interface of ANYTHING I've ever used. Some of the most basic functions are virtually impossible to perform.

Want to just turn it on and hear some mp3's? You can't. You can play one song. Then you have to go thru multiple keypresses to select another song. Try that while driving your car. Sure, you can use the shuffle function. Problem is, it picks like 12 songs and plays em over and over. Even though I have thousands of mp3's on the drive.

I've had to reboot mine like 200 times? And I've only had it 2 months? Sometime, I can't even turn it on without removing and replacing the battery. Don't ask.

There are multiple levels of the interface that look the same. But you can only perform certain functions at certain levels. Confusing as hell.

The buttons to fast forward, reverse, and skip forward and back are the same. So, if you want to fast forward a bit, and you don't hold the button down long enough, you will go to another track. At least, I think you will. The thing is so damm confusing, and I have a Masters Degree and worked with computers for a major university....

It's very difficult to delete recordings. The reason for that is on recordings, you cant name a song. You just get a time stamp like a dos file. Useless since you can't set a real time clock like on a PC, and your system crashes daily. So, it's easy to delete, you just don't know what the hell you are deleting. Retarded interface asks you if you want to delete a song, where it should say "Delete Dixie Chicks?" or something to that effect.

The thing has actually duplicated files for no reason. That's right, it copied 'em for no reason.

The moronic software likes to double the subdirectories you make. For example, I made a subdirectory or folder for my Beatles mp3's named "The Beatles." Ok, I use the scroll wheel to go to music library, click, then artists, then Beatles. Ok if I click on Beatles, then open, do I see my Beatles mp3's? No! I see another subdirectory called Beatles. It's like using Windows Explorer to click on the Windows subdirectory, have no files in that folder, then have to click down another level to another subdirectory called Windows. It's totally stupid, a waste, inefficient, maddening,....

Using the car power adapter causes the player to lock up. Not everytime, not immediately. But enough that I don't use it, I just rely on charging my player at home and running off the batteries. I find if I try to use the power adapter, the player will crash in about 30 minutes. Scratch that last, tonight the power died so I used the cigarette lighter adapter. After about 3 minutes, the player locked up. I reset with the paper clip, same thing. Reset a third time, same thing. Who ever heard of a device that crashes when you take it off battery power!?! POS!!!

Oh, some songs I want to delete I can't, because the player crashes. I'm screwed there, no solution.

It does have good points, however. Sound quality is excellent. It's easy to record with the player from any audio source. And battery life is excellent. I think I can run the thing for 7 hours on 1 battery, and it can take two. Well, now the battery life has fallen down to about 5 hours after some use, sigh....

I wouldn't recommend this thing to Sadaam Hussein. Did I mention I was supposed to get a $50 rebate, too, which was never sent! That for over $300 dollars Creative was so cheap you get NO printed manual of any kind - just a PDF file on the CD. And that it come with NOTHING to carry it in at all?

Absolutely the worst interface of anything I have ever seen. I'm amazed any company could release a product this bad.

I just discovered another major flaw with the Nomad 3. Summer has finally come to Los Angeles, and it's hot outside! Yesterday it was in the high 90's where I live. The point is, it got so hot in my car that the Jukebox would boot up, maybe run for 5 seconds, then turn itself off again! This has happened again and again. Once the car cools down, the Junkbox, er, Jukebox will work normally. If you live in a place where it really gets hot, like Las Vegas or Arizona, this high tech wonder would be virtually worthless.

Bruise

Wow, thats a shame for what is hawked as a premium product! I recently got a little early birthday credit and got myself one of these:



It's a little bit more expensive, but it actually works. This is a very nice piece of gear. I highly recommend it! And the new ones have a USB2 in addition to a firewire interface for our PC friends /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

eBay the other thing and put the money towards one of those!

I have to admit, I hate Apple, but the only product that is actually good IMO is their iPod. I need one...

Dan

The NJB3's most interesting feature is it can record. If you don't need that, get a different unit (e.g. iPod).

The latest iPods have a record option in their debug menu. Right now it's totally useless, you can only record into memory for something like 6 seconds. Uses the headphones as a mic in the case of the test.

While they don't record, that proves that the hardware is all setup to do it and that we're just a firmware update away from recording capability! There is no proof that Apple will decide to actually do it. But they have already gone to the trouble to make the hardware work. I personally expect the next software update to enable it on the iPod.

There are a bunch of mp3 players that can record low quality voice samples for note taking and stuff like that. The NJB3 is a high quality music recorder with good A/D converters. I don't think Apple would have put hardware like that into the iPod and then not enabled it or advertised it. Also, the NJB3 can record and play back uncompressed (PCM) samples. The iPod is MP3/AAC only. Maybe they'll fix that in a future firmware release, if they do enable recording (it's not so important unless you're recording with the device).

paulr, you can look up the hardware in the new iPods (don't be confused by reading sites referencing the old design as it most certainly did not have this capability) but the A/D converter in the new iPod is fully capable of CD quality encoding and the encoding chip is fully capable of realtime mp3 encoding of it to disk. You'll have to google ipod take apart sites as Apple doesn't advertize what the chips are inside, but folks have already taken these apart and figured out whats in there.

Apple may very well have put that into the hardware with the expectation of enabling it with a future firmware update. You're right they wouldn't have done it unless they planned to use it. But rather than wait until the firmware is complete, they released the hardware early.

Certainly, don't buy one at this point on my say so that I EXPECT them to do it. They may never do it for many different reasons, but the fact that they used these chips and have a test for them in the firmware now leads me to believe that they are planning to use it.

I didn't buy mine for recording, I bought it mostly for playback in my car and audible.com audiobooks while working out or riding my bike or something. It works beautifully for that. But I will certainly take advantage of the recording when they add it /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

I've been chatting with some companies that make 3rd party prodducts for the iPod. The connection specs (there is a serial line for the remote control for example that can be used for much more than just that) are not published, you have to get Apple's blessing for whatever project you're working on before they will give you the info you need to develop extra products for it at that level. The point is that they are building it up to be the best MP3 PLAYER right now. They may be delaying recording to keep it from confusing their marketing or something stupid like that. But they are quite invested in it I would think

If you guys want to do some serious portable live recording, invest your money on a minidisc player/recorder and a nice microphone. That's what i did and i am getting CD quality recordings. I dance filipino folk dance and we needed some new music to dance to; i gathered our musicians, setup my stereo mic and minidisc and cut the first recording to CD without modification...it's that good (and easy). There are no A/D converters, line converters or battery boxes...just plug and play (or record).

BruiceLee, thanks for the review of your Creative Jukebox 3. I was looking for another MP3 player to replace my RioVolt SP250 CD/MP3 player...i guess i won't be spending my money on a Jukebox 3, or even the new Jukebox Zen for that matter. The Zen looks like it uses the same interface as the other units. Besides, it looks so much like an ipod that i might as well just by the ipod. I tried one and i liked it.

I wanted to move on to a hard-disc based mp3 player because 1) sorting and burning 200 songs per disc gets a little tiring. Believe it or not, but 200 songs just ain't enoegh for me on one disc. I think 5,000 songs on one hard-disc would suffice. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

2) memory based mp3 players are very limited in space and getting an mp3 player with even 256Mb will cost you a lot of money...you might as well save up a little more for a hard-disc based unit.

Anyway...thanks for the review.

P.S. there's a 10GB iPod for windows on eBay going for $250.

wow, i'm reading this thread and a 30gb Ipod comes to my office door. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/buttrock.gif Damn shame that it isn't for me /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mecry.gif

Geoff

30Gb?! I don't even have 30Gb of music OR information on my computer. That's sweet!

[ QUOTE ]
LEDagent said:
BruiceLee, thanks for the review of your Creative Jukebox 3. I was looking for another MP3 player to replace my RioVolt SP250 CD/MP3 player...i guess i won't be spending my money on a Jukebox 3, or even the new Jukebox Zen for that matter. The Zen looks like it uses the same interface as the other units. Besides, it looks so much like an ipod that i might as well just by the ipod. I tried one and i liked it.

Anyway...thanks for the review.

[/ QUOTE ]

/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gifYour welcome! I definitely don't think you will regret spending the extra money for an I-Pod. If you don't like it, I know a guy who would be willing to trade you his Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 for it! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smirk.gif

Should be able to give you a mini-review of the Creative Zen in a few weeks. This guy I know ordered one, despite my warnings. Who knows, maybe it will be good, but I wouldn't bet money on it. I'll let you know what he thinks of it once he gets it.

I am convinced the guy who writes the software for the Nomad is a relative of the owner. It's the only possible explaination....

I'm glad I was able to save someone a few hundred bucks and A LOT OF FRUSTRATION.

Bruise

i have the archos studio 20

it is really nice, with 20gigs or mp3 space, and it doubles as a hard drive. firmware upgradable too /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

it was a gift from my uncle several years ago...if i were to purchase myself, i would have gotten the recorder to take advantage of recording, usb2, and doom (some hackers make a doom download for it! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/eek.gif )

browsing the archos site will show you lots of really wierd/cool stuff!

I just used up a few hundred meg on my iPod to install a bootable system on it. Now THATS cool! It will operate like a battery powered firewire/usb2 drive.

I've not needed a seperate boot disk for anything in the last few years, but it's worth the space to have it with me if it's ever needed for repairs...

In reading what Steve Jobs had to say about these things, he doesn't seem to think that the screens on these units are large enough to make it worth while to play movies on. However, he did say that they would make excellent delivery devices to other things. Meaning that you probably won't get the ability to play movies on your iPod in the future, but that it probably will get an SVideo out plug... (not these units obviously, they don't have the hardware necessary but future versions might get that ability)

I still think it would be neat to play movies on the little screen, but he's right that beyond the wow factor it's of little practical every day use. Unless you want to download your daily news and watch it on the bus or something /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Does anyone else use their Pocket PC to play music?
These dedicated players seem like such a waste when the Pocket PCs can do the same job PLUS.

Using a pocket PC to play music isn't that great because the batteries drain after just an hour or so. Also, you have to use very expensive flash cards or a microdrive to hold the music. I'm sorry but a pocket PC cannot do the same job as a 30 GB iPod.

I have thought about using a PDA for music purposes but, like paulr said, it can get very expensive. i think you can get a maximum of 5 hours on a current PDA battery. Microdrives are expensive, and if you want to compete with hard-drive based mp3 players, you would have to get at least a 1GB microdrive, that can easily run 300-400 dollars, but if you can only get 5 hours of music on the battery, then what's the point of storing 24 hours of music?

Of course, if you actually USE the PDA, then this would be fine, but for 200 dollars, i say skip the memory cards and buy yourself another mp3 unit, like an ipod. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

The iPod has some PDA functions built in to it. When I sync my music, it also syncs all my contacts in my address book, my calendar and todo list as well as a folder of "notes" which are just small text files that you can read on the screen. This is really useful as I've got all kinds of notes and info in there now. This covers probably 75% of what I would use a PDA for. You can't enter info into the iPod, it can only display it. It even plays solitaire /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

I'm not sure about syncing that stuff to a PC. The only part that would need special software though is the calendar. The address book is just a vCard stack copied into the address book folder on it's built in drive, so any PC app that could export vCards will work with it and the notes are just text files, so they will work also even without the fancy Apple software.

OH SHoot! I just remembered that most of my archived CDs are converted to the WMA format. I personally think that WMA sounds better than MP3, also, Windows Media Player 9.0 makes it so easy to just rip CDs into WMA format.

I don't think the iPod can play WMA...unless there's a hack or upgrade for it. darn...it was such a nice player too. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif

Nope, no WMA. MP3 is questionable quality. AAC though, which is what iTunes rips to by default now, is far better than MP3. I can make a 128k AAC file that is ALMOST indistinguishable from the source CD. I've actually been re-ripping ALL my CD's to AAC format and throwing away the MP3's they sound SO much better!

It supports various WAV formats, AIFF and MP3 and VBRMP3 but no WMA.

AAC is the audio encoding format from mpeg4 I believe.