Product ReviewsMusic/MP3 players
Creative Labs' JukeBox is a little pricey but if you have any interest in MP3 music, you'll find it's worth every penny. Looking very much like an ordinary portable CD player, the JukeBox is actually an MP3 player with a thumping 6Gb hard disk built into it. It can store a huge amount of music - around 100 hours if you use a sampling rate of 128K/sec for your MP3 files. It connects to any Mac or PC via a USB interface and has a built-in headphone jack, volume control, line-in and two line-out connectors for use with external stereo or quad speaker systems. There's a small LCD display on the unit and a set of buttons for accessing the on-screen menus that help you sort through all your stored music. There's also a button marked EAX, which allows you to activate a feature that Creative Labs calls 'environmental audio'. When you press it, the LCD displays a menu containing options such as Auditorium Arena or Club, which reproduce the musical ambience of different types of venue. We've absolutely no complaints about the JukeBox's hardware design. It looks and sounds good, and it's easy to use. The hard disk needs a fair amount of battery power, but Creative includes a mains power supply and a set of rechargeable batteries that provide about four hours'-worth of continuous playing time. Unfortunately, we weren't impressed by the Mac software Creative has bundled with the JukeBox. It has opted for a modified version of the SoundJam MP3 player-encoder program. SoundJam is undoubtedly one of the most popular MP3 players for the Mac, but its interface is a disaster. Fortunately, the modified version
At least, you could if you could make sense of SoundJam's interface or help system. There's a confusing array of windows that pop up all over the place as soon as you start to create your own playlists. And SoundJam's help system turns out to be no help at all, as it pops up in a dialog box all of its own, which means you can't look at SoundJam while the help system is on screen. This forces you to constantly open and close the help system while you experiment with SoundJam to figure out how it works. This is irritating, but once you've figured out the basics, you won't need to rely on the help system. However, we were very disappointed to discover that the version of SoundJam provided with the JukeBox is actually a trial version, rather than the full program. After 14 days, it reverts back to the free, cut-down version that anyone can download from the Internet. This disables many useful features, such as the ability to sample at rates above 128K/sec or to use variable-rate sampling. Admittedly, there's nothing to stop you from using another program to encode your MP3 files and then using SoundJam to transfer those files to the JukeBox. But when you're paying over £300 for a piece of kit such as this, we think you're entitled to a proper MP3 program, not a cut-down bit of freeware. The PC software provided with the JukeBox doesn't have this limitation, so Mac users are simply being short-changed. But even though its Mac software is a bit of a letdown, the JukeBox itself is still a totally desirable bit of kit. It's neatly designed in a blue-and-silver case that wouldn't look out of place next to an iMac or G4 Cube, and its storage capacity leaves just about every other MP3 player on the market looking like a toy. Sony and other electronics companies might as well take their 64Mb MP3 players and throw them out of the window. By Cliff Joseph |
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