AFTER MORE than 15 years of trying out computers, software and electronic gadgets, it's hard to get excited every time something new arrives in the mail. But I still get a kick out of digital music players.
These devices are revolutionizing the way we listen to music. They're built around technology that makes it easy to "rip" a digital audio track from a compact disc, compress it to a fraction of its normal size and store it on a computer's hard drive. From there, it's easy to transfer a tune, an album or thousands of songs to a portable player.
Players that store music on flash memory cards are small enough for a shirt pocket and light enough for joggers, but they hold only a few hours of music. Players with internal hard drives aren't as tiny - but can store a suitcase full of CDs.
For a couple of weeks, I've been enjoying one of the best hard drive players, Creative Technology's Nomad Jukebox 3. About the size, shape and weight of a portable CD player, the $400 gadget is built around a 20-gigabyte hard disk that can store more than 375 albums, or 5,000 to 8,000 average tracks.
You can play those tunes through headphones at the office or the beach, or hook the Jukebox up to your home stereo or your car's cassette player. Creative doesn't recommend it for joggers but says the Jukebox is perfect for long walks. In fact, you can walk across a couple of states without repeating a song.
Although it's not as small or elegant as Apple's slick iPod player, the Nomad Jukebox holds twice as much music and sells for $100 less. More important, its playback quality is superb and highly tweakable.
The latest Jukebox offers several improvements over its predecessor. It's smaller, lighter and holds more music. The lithium ion battery can play up to 11 hours on a charge, and there's a slot for a second battery ($50) that will double playing time.
For transferring music from a PC, the Jukebox 3 adds an IEEE 1394 (Firewire) interface to the original Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection. Firewire, standard on Macs and increasingly common on PCs, is 10 times as fast as the original USB, able to transfer hundreds of megabytes in minutes.
This is primarily an advantage when you first load the Jukebox. On my home PC, the standard USB connection transferred a typical album track in 3 seconds. Moving a thousand tunes takes a little under an hour - hardly a major inconvenience. After the original load, adding a typical album takes about a minute. So the Firewire connection is useful if your PC has one, but isn't necessary.
The real problem with assembling music on this scale is organizing it. Do you want to play an entire album or create a custom playlist? How do you find a particular song, all your jazz tunes or your Eminem tracks?
Apple's iPod is still the best at this, thanks to an intuitive control panel and excellent Mac-based iTunes software. The Jukebox 3 controls are usable and better than previous versions but not as elegant as Apple's. With a readable, if undersized, LCD-based control panel, the Jukebox uses a combination of buttons and a side-mounted scroll wheel to create a menu-based music manager.
It organizes songs by title, artist, genre and album, assuming that your digital music files have that information encoded (not all do). From these you can build and store playlists that include individual tracks, entire albums or other playlists.
This is a bit awkward to manage on the Jukebox itself. Luckily, you can use Creative's PC-based Play Center software to manage playlists on your computer and download them to the Jukebox, along with the music tracks themselves.
The Play Center will create a Music Library from the tunes already on your hard drive and search out album and track information from the Web if you're online. It also offers a fast and efficient "ripper" to convert audio CDs into compressed MP3 or WMA files on your computer. For an old guy like, me, the Play Center is too cluttered to be called intuitive, but it works.
As a music player, the Jukebox 3 is outstanding. With a 98 dB signal-to-noise ratio, it produces the crispest, cleanest audio I've heard from one of these devices. Nor can the competition match Creative's sound manipulation software. It can change the ambient environment, so that you can listen to your concerto in a simulated concert hall, a cathedral or even a bathroom. There's an equalizer with eight presets that adjust the volume of different frequencies for jazz, pop, rock and other genres. These work well, but I wish I could change the tone settings manually.
Other nifty features include dynamic volume adjustments for different environments, such as a plane or car (the worst places to listen to music) and a control that varies playback speed without affecting the pitch of a recording. I've always wanted this for audio books.
Some bells and whistles look better on paper than they are in reality. The Jukebox 3 is the only device of its kind that can record directly from outside sources, such as a CD player, radio broadcast or even a remote-control microphone, and convert the audio to MP3 or WMA format on the fly. Unfortunately, there's no way to control volume levels or automatically separate an audio CD into tracks.
The device will automatically synchronize songs with multiple PCs, which makes it a snap to transfer an entire music collection from one computer to another. Of course, this may well be illegal if one of the computers doesn't belong to you.
The bottom line: It may not be flawless, but the Nomad Jukebox 3 is a great player for serious music buffs and well worth the money. For more information, visit www.nomadworld.com.