Well, I didn't think I'd see it for a while, but my Nomad Jukebox was sitting on my doorstep when I got home tonight.

I've only spent a few minutes with it, but my initial response is mixed. The unit itself is nicely made as consumer plastic goes, and the package is fairly complete. I think they figured out that they had a battery hog on their hands, since it came with not one but two sets of NiMH AA's. The other usual stuff was included, carrying case, power brick, USB cable, headphones. It also came preloaded with about 2G of music, along with audiobooks of Frankestein and Robinson Crusoe. If you had to deal with the PC software before you could play with the thing, you'd probably return it before you heard the first note. More on that later.

The UI on the unit isn't bad, though I don't quite know why they picked the paradigm that they did. You have an active queue and a library. You can go to the library and add tunes, albums, or playlists to the active queue. In the library, you can search by genre, artist, album, or playlist name, but not by title.

It's much slower to move around the menus than the empeg, and it takes a minimum of 25 seconds to boot, longer if the database has to be updated. Shutdown take 8 seconds.

There are warnings about shutting down before connecting or disconnected power or USB, which seems inconvenient. I've ignored the USB warning without any ill effects, I'll take their word for power, though.

It does have the capability to record to disk (44.1/16 WAV), and it looks like it will play file taxi, as there is documentation on moving files back and forth between the PC and the Nomad, and a note that you cannot move MP3 files from the Nomad to the PC. (But you can move other files)

But the PC software fails the most basic test:
You can't load directory structures. This means I have to manually walk the directory structure, copying all the files over to the Nomad. This probably didn't matter much in the days of 64MB players, but with 100 times that capacity, it's an issue. It does, however, automagically build the Artist, Genre, and Album structures based on ID3 tags. The PC sofware also wants to maintain it's own copy of the music library, so there are three views: Nomad, PC Music Library, and My Computer. I can only think that this mess has to do with SDMI, for which the Nomad is "Hardware Ready", whatever that means.

Connectors are as follows: Two stereo 1/8" jacks for Line Out (it has the EAX DSP, so you can do room effects and get 4-channel output, or just configure the rear channels to duplicate the front channels, give two identical line-outs), one for headphones, one for line-in. DC 12V on a coax plug, and a USB 'B' (slave) port.

The form factor is actually slightly smaller than a portable CD player.

All in all, a nice first pass at a "consumer" player. If the next rev of PC software can better cope with the reality of a 6Gig device, this just might be the product that convinces the masses that HD-based players are the answer, and CDR[W] is a waste of time.

It's not an empeg, but it's not >$1k, either.

Anyone have links to "aftermarket" or open-source managment software for Nomads? I think this one uses the same protocol as the flash-based Nomads.

-Zandr
Mk.I #150
Mk.II #39