Installation and Setup

Installation and Setup

Although the NiMH batteries must be charged for 12 hours the first time, you can get started right away with the bundled AC adapter. As with most USB devices, installation is painless, even in Windows 2000. The drivers install Creative PlayCenter and two system tray accessories, which automatically launch the application when the Nomad Jukebox is connected to the PC, or if a music CD is inserted. We downloaded PlayCenter2 off the 'net and were eager to get started.

Size does matter

PlayCenter is the software you must use to transfer MP3s over to the Nomad Jukebox. Although the ability to see the Nomad Jukebox as a drive in My Computer would have been nice, PlayCenter allows drag-and-drop transfer of individual MP3 files and is largely similar to an FTP program. Although the Jukebox is SDMI-ready, Creative Labs leaves MP3s untouched and so you are free to transfer your files to and from the device. The PC takes full control when the Nomad Jukebox is connected to the PC. That is, the buttons are disabled on the Jukebox itself.

All your base are belong to us

You can configure everything here

Old School

When I was young, we didn't have Napster or Gnutella. We didn't even have WinAMP. Back then, the only way to play MP3s was with WinPlay3, and no one knew what ID3 tags were. When ID3 first came out, few people actually used the format since few programs actually read the tags, and the limited length of the tags made it tedious to use.

Over the years as my MP3 collection (of CDs I owned) grew, I organized my music in sub-directories, perhaps describing the genre, artist, or album title. The titles of the songs would be the filename. This is probably how most of you organize your MP3s as well.

Transferring Files

Unfortunately, if you've organized your MP3s this way, PlayCenter2 will not be very friendly when transferring the files over. The interface mimics an FTP client and it's only natural to select all the files and directories in your "root" MP3 directory and transfer it over. PlayCenter2 doesn't like this - you can only queue one directory at a time.

Initially, this doesn't seem like too much trouble since it would seem as if you would just have to select one directory at a time in the root directory. PlayCenter2, however, does not recognize sub-directories. So if you had your files organized something like:

\MP3\Beatles\Beatles Blue\*.mp3
\MP3\Beatles\Beatles Red\*.mp3

you would not be able to transfer C:\MP3\Beatles\ to the Nomad Jukebox; you'd have to manually select the Blue album and then Red. This becomes particularly problematic if you've got deeper subdirectories such as

\MP3\J-Pop\Ayumi Hamasaki\ayuromix\*.mp3
\MP3\80s\New Order\Technique\*.mp3
\MP3\Classical\Piano\Chopin\*.mp3
\MP3\Videogames\Final Fantasy\Final Fantasy Pray\*.mp3 

When transferring directories, PlayCener will ask you if it should read from ID3 tags or if you would like to provide the song title, artist, album name, and genre for all the files in the directory. These elements, along with song title, are the only information that is stored on the Nomad Jukebox - the unit cannot read ID3 tags directly. The information is stored in a separate database on the machine that is updated when the file is uploaded. Interestingly, there is no option to have PlayCenter use ID3 tags when it is present in the MP3 file, and ask for the information when it is not. So, if some of your files have ID3 tags and some don't, you're in for some trouble.

One last thing

If your MP3s are organized into too many subdirectories it'll take you a long time to queue the MP3s for transfer. If your MP3s are sorted with fewer subdirectories, but you do not have ID3 tags, you'll spend an enormous amount of time entering song information manually. Essentially, the only easy solution is if you're ripping CDs to MP3s for the first time, or if you have ID3 tags for all of your MP3s and keep everything lumped together in a handful of directories.

With so much trouble, you really don't notice the 20MB/minute transfer rate.