I also knew what I was going to get for my husband. He wanted a CD Burner. So we had our shopping mapped out for us. Then my husband happened into Best Buy one day and found an HP CD Burner boxed with a free Diamond Rio MP3 player.

I had ideas of what I wanted to use the MP3 player for, but had never had a chance to test those ideas. In essence, I wanted to carry some relaxing music on the plane when I traveled. I wanted some upbeat music to set the pace when I did my fitness walking. Both uses called for lightweight, rugged and portable. The Diamond Rio seemed to fit the bill and it was hard to beat the price (or lack of one). So I ditched the Jukebox for a free Rio (and a new travel wardrobe.)

One of the arguments against most MP3 players excepting the Jukebox is the limited amount of music they hold. (About 16 songs.) While this limitation does pose problems, it does not render the MP3 player useless.

My favorite use of the MP3 player is to test music combinations as I do other things. I develop playlists for different purposes, such as walking on pavement, working out on the elliptical machines at the fitness center, lifting hand weights, and relaxing on the plane after a frantic 30 minute connection in the St. Louis airport.

Out of the playlists I create CDs for use in my car or while traveling. The great thing about making these playlists is that I have fewer CDs because all my favorites are compacted on a few discs. They’re great for in the car because if the Texas heat melts a CD, I have backups at home.

Whether downloaded or recorded from other media, MP3s may have several faults. They may be too loud or too soft. They may get cut off. Or you may not like the particular version of the song. One of my favorite Beach Boys songs is a quiet, meditative tune called “In My Room.” Rather than mess with a 45-RPM single, I downloaded it from Napster. I hated it. It was a live performance. Who wants to hear people whistling and hooting when someone is singing about meditating in the safety and solitude of their own private room?

Also, the songs may not turn out to be as appropriate for the occasion as you thought. The song may be so soft that it gets drowned out by the drone of the airplane engine or the clatter of the machines in the fitness center. Some songs I projected for walking were either too fast or slow in tempo to be useful.

I use my Palm Pilot to make lists of songs I want to get or those I want to use for specific purposes. Then I make notations as I test them out. Thus far, I have come up with one great playlist for relaxing, a Jazz playlist for hand weights and a fair walking program. And I can either burn the playlist into a CD or use the super-simple Diamond Rio software to install it on my MP3 player.

 
Mossberg, Walter
Mossberg’s Mailbox
Wall Street Journal
February 1, 2001.

Walter S. Mossberg
New Nomad Jukebox Stores Lifetime's Collection of Tunes
Wall Street Journal
September 14, 2000

It isn't cheap, and it isn't perfect. But, in my tests, it worked fine, and the effect of using it is dramatic if you love music, or merely like to pass the time with songs on a long flight. With the Nomad Jukebox, you no longer have to carry a pile of CDs, or decide which of your favorite songs to take along. If you have $499, and a Windows PC or a Mac with a USB port, you can load up your Jukebox and carry all your favorite music in one hand.

This isn't the first MP3 player, of course. Many companies have introduced small, portable players that can be loaded with MP3 song files via a cable connected to a PC. But these players, which now typically cost between $100 and $200, usually hold only about an hour of music. They store the songs on special memory cards which have limited capacity and are very costly.

The jukebox uses a compact but copious six-gigabyte hard disk. Hard disks can be fragile, but this one is rugged. In my tests, I shook the device repeatedly, and even dropped it four or five times onto a wooden desk and onto the floor. It never skipped and never stopped working.

There have been a couple of earlier hard-disk-based players, but they were hard to find, tended to cost more than the Nomad, and didn't carry a familiar and trusted brand name like Creative, which has long been a leader in computer audio. Here's how the Nomad Jukebox works. First, you have to obtain the songs and convert them to MP3s on your PC or Mac. This is easy to do. Using the software included with the jukebox, or any other common MP3 program, you can put your favorite commercial CDs into the computer's CD drive, and "rip," or convert, the songs you like to MP3 format. If you have an Internet connection, you can also gather songs in the MP3 format from a host of Internet sites, such as MP3.com.

Then, you connect the jukebox to the PC with the included USB cable, and the songs are transferred to the hard disk inside the jukebox. The transfers are rapid, and the songs are immediately available for playback.

In my tests, I transferred 1,363 rock, pop and folk songs to the jukebox and still had over 850 megabytes of storage left on the device. The songs I selected included famous tunes from famous artists, as well as songs from a self-published CD by my favorite unsigned band (my son's), the Arthur Dent Foundation. I also successfully transferred songs from my favorite Web-based singer, Susan Greenbaum, available free at <www.susangreenbaum.com>. All of these songs, from all the diverse sources, played perfectly on the Jukebox.

The Jukebox can also record music directly from your stereo system, without a PC, though the resulting digital files are much larger than MP3s. And, while it's mainly designed to be used with headphones, the jukebox can also be connected to home audio receivers and speakers.

With this many songs, organization is crucial. So the jukebox includes an LCD screen with a menu that allows you to see your collection organized by artists, albums, or genres. You just drill down in the menus and select songs, or whole albums, and they are added to the queue of songs that are playing. You can also create permanent play lists of any mixture of songs, in any quantity or order. You can build these play lists right on the Jukebox, but an easier way to do it is to create the play lists using the Nomad software on your PC, and then transfer them to the Jukebox.

There are some downsides. Hard drives take power, so the four rechargeable AA batteries can run the unit for only four hours. But Creative includes two sets of these batteries, which should cover any long flight.

Also, because of voluntary restrictions imposed by the music industry, you can't use the jukebox to transfer songs from one of your PCs to another, even though this is perfectly legal. And, the software crashed on me a few times during my initial transfer of the 1,300 songs. It choked when I selected too many songs at once to transfer, forcing me to quit and restart the software, and to restart the jukebox before resuming the transfer process.

But, all in all, the Nomad Jukebox works. It's available at electronics stores and Web retailers such as Amazon.com. And more high-capacity players are coming. ReQuest Inc., and Lydstrom Inc, are introducing larger and costlier MP3 jukeboxes that are designed to be attached to home stereo systems. And Philips and others are selling special CD players that can play home-recorded CDs containing up to 150 MP3 tracks each.

So the revolution advances. And consumers are the winners.