Creative's Dap Jukebox is not your common-or-garden MP3 player. About the size of a CD Walkman, it can handle any current music format. As new formats are developed you can simply download a Bios patch from Creative's website to get your Dap to recognise them.

Within its curvy shell lives a 6Gb notebook hard drive that, if you choose to rip your tracks to MP3 format, will hold the equivalent of around 150 discs. The real bonus, however, is that with so much capacity at your disposal you will not need to use such a low bit rate that it sounds like your music's coming through on a short-wave radio - you can choose anything from 20 to 320Kbits/sec.

Ripping is such a quick process, averaging around 4.5x speed, and the software lets you store a copy of everything it rips on your hard drive.

If you're connected to the internet the ripping software will grab track names from CDDB (CD database), which shouldn't have any problems finding just about anything you can throw at it, and this information is used toindex your music on the player. All ripped tracks are indexed by artist, album or genre, allowing you to construct playlists when it comes to playback.

At the front there's an infrared port for a planned remote, and it comes bundled with rechargeable Ni-MH (nickel metal hydride) batteries, which Creative claims should have a life of around five hours, although with our beta test unit this proved slightly optimistic.

The unit comes in blue or silver, and opinion in our office was pretty much split as to whether or not we found it attractive. Whatever our conclusion, though, someone likes it - there's one in London's Design Museum.

Contact Creative 01189 344 744