CREATIVE LABS NOMAD MP3 PLAYER.(Brief Article)(Evaluation)

Portable, personal stereo systems were all the rage back in the early 1980s when Sony first introduced the legendary Walkman. Those devices, and similar ones from other vendors, featured a cassette tape player in a handheld package that used headphones for speakers.

Over nearly 20 years, portable stereos became smaller, fancier, more complex, and even cheaper in general. Today, many portable stereos can even play CDs. But all portable stereo systems contain moving parts, which tends to make them rather delicate and power-hungry. But thanks to an Internet-driven development, that might soon be a thing of the past.

By now, most have heard of MP3. MP3 audio is basically MPEG-compressed audio, which can package a typical song in about one tenth the space that the same song recorded on a CD would occupy. As an example, a 40-megabyte song on a CD can be converted to a 4-megabyte MP3 file. Now whole albums can fit in roughly 64 megabytes of space, as opposed to the 640 megabytes of space on an audio CD. The sound quality of MP3 audio is about the same as CD audio.

For some time now, MP3-encoded audio has been available on the Internet, from both legal and illegal sources. While record companies and amateur recording artists enjoy being able to distribute music samples via MP3 over the Internet, they do not like it when somebody takes a brand new album, converts it to MP3, and posts the entire album on the Internet for anyone to download. It is easy for people who know where to look to locate nearly any song or album they want--especially new releases. Software MP3 players are also available on the Internet for free, so that any PC can play back the music. But a desktop computer, or even a notebook, is not nearly as portable as a Sony Walkman.

But a portable MP3 player is, and this holiday season will likely see a number of them on the market. One example is Creative Labs' new Nomad MP3 player. Not only does Nomad play MP3 audio, but it also features an FM tuner and recording capability so that it can be used as a dictation device--one that lets the audio be uploaded to a PC for safekeeping and future reference.

Creative Labs Nomad

The base Nomad player contains 32 megabytes of built-in memory and has a slot for flash card memory modules to increase the unit's capacity. The Nomad 64-megabyte version includes a 32-megabyte memory card. With 64 megabytes of memory, Nomad can store up to two hours of CD-quality audio or four hours of voice recording. Included stereo earphones are used for listening. Nomad's LCD readout displays the title of the song being played.