Creative was the first manufacturer to launch a hard disk-based MP3 player but, as innovative as the original Jukebox was, it wasn't quite innovative enough.

Too big and heavy to fit in a pocket, it barely ran for four hours before needing a recharge and its 6Gb hard disk took forever to fill using the USB connection. A couple of years on and Creative has had a rethink; the result is the Nomad Jukebox 3.

Creative has clearly tried to address many of the criticisms levelled at the original Jukebox but, at first glance, it doesn't seem to have tried quite hard enough.

The Jukebox 3 is around a third smaller and lighter than the original model but it's still the size of a CD Walkman and as such, too big to fit comfortably in any coat or jacket pocket.

Part of that bulk is due to the 20Gb hard disk, and this can store 333 hours of MP3s encoded at 128Kbit/s. In plain English, that means you can listen to near-CD quality music 24 hours a day for two weeks solid without hearing the same song twice.

That's a lot of music - more than most people's CD collections, in fact - and getting it onto the Jukebox 3 in the first place is made a darn sight easier thanks to the inclusion of a FireWire port.

Providing you have a FireWire card in your PC (or a Creative Audigy sound card with its own on-board SB1394 port), you can send tracks to the Jukebox 3 at a blistering rate. We transferred 60Mb of MP3s in 30 seconds.

Don't worry if your PC doesn't have FireWire as the Jukebox 3 has a USB port too, but this is considerably slower at transferring files.

Unfortunately, the Jukebox 3 doesn't recharge when the FireWire cable is connected, unlike Apple's iPod. A separate mains adapter is included but the rechargeable lithium polymer battery lasts for 11 hours and there's room for a second battery.

Creative has revamped the Jukebox 3's menu system to make it easier to use, not that it was particularly tricky on previous models.

If anything, even more button pressing is needed to do anything and, since there are eleven buttons plus a scroll wheel, we can't help wondering why Creative didn't focus its efforts on cutting down on those instead.

Sillier still, the one button that was needed - a 'hold' button to stop buttons being pressed accidentally when the Jukebox 3 is being carried - has been removed and instead you have to click and scroll through the menu system to activate it.

Once you start to use the Jukebox 3, however, these niggles are almost forgotten. The sound is crisp and clear and, thanks to that huge capacity, you'll never be stuck for something to listen to.

There's a line-in socket for recording to WAV and MP3 files and two line-out sockets for connecting to external speakers. You also get an infrared remote control so you don't have to get up to start and stop the music.

Given the Jukebox 3's size though, we would have preferred a wired remote control to let you carry the player in a bag.

The bundled PlayCenter application covers just about every base there is for digital music management. It can play MP3, WMV and WAV files, rip them from audio CDs and edit a track's information, or 'tag'.

Two windows show the contents of two music stores and you can transfer files between them. For example, with an audio CD in one window and a hard disk folder in the other, pressing the Transfer button rips the CD to your PC; with MP3s in one window and the Jukebox 3 in the other, the button transfers the files.

PlayCenter also acts as an MP3 librarian that lets you organise your MP3s by their tags rather than just their filenames, so you can view your collection by artist, album, genre and so on.

Unfortunately, it is a touch on the flaky side and both locked and crashed our Windows XP PC a number of times, which is no mean feat.

Price: £350 (inc. VAT)

Contact: Creative
www.creative.com

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