Last month my Archos Jukebox FM player died. It went out pretty
dramatically. Its had problems for the last 6 months (note, I had the
player for about a year). It would get stuck when playing and it forced
you to shut it down and restart it. But then it got flakey and wouldn’t
start up. Last month, the LCD display got flakey and would blank out.
If you pushed on it, it would briefly show up. So I took the player
apart. I found the problem, but couldn’t figure out a way to fix it.
But pressing on the LCD wasn’t the way to do it. I ended up cracking an
edge of the display. Ugh. So I kept fiddling. And now only the top
couple lines of the display works.

Now I absolutely loved this player. At least when it worked. Because
when it worked, it worked great and had a TON of features. It had a ton
of features because of an open source operating system project had
developed and built their own operating system for the player. It
rocked. But it can’t rock if the player doesn’t work.

So I’ve been listening to 100.7 and 92.3FM here in Cleveland. They both
suck. They seem to have a list of “music that works” and don’t seem
excited to play anything else unless its new and needs a marketing push
(for example, when the band has an upcoming Cleveland concert). When it
becomes obvious a station is doing this, it becomes really hard to
continue listening. Since I no longer had an MP3 player, I would just
put up with the two stations (switching between the two when the song
list got old). Funny part of all of this is just about 2 weeks ago I’ve
been getting radio survey phone calls. I’ve listened to about 36 song
clips and given them my opinion about each one. I’m not sure if it was
coincidence or not, but I had heard more of my “favorites” in the
following days after that phone survey. Hmm…

Back to the Nomad. I did some browsing around on the ‘net for
opinions. I wasn’t in the mood for mail order so it was going to be a
gadget that could be found at Best Buy, Circuit City, or MicroCenter.

The Apple iPod was out immediately. The price, marketing, and hype made
me sick just thinking about it.

I’ve had 2 Archos players. The first one was an Archos Jukebox 6000. I
loved that thing! The batteries were worn down to the point they were
useless, but I didn’t care. I always had that gadget plugged in. It
skipped every now and then but it immediately picked right back up where
it left off just like how your CD might skip in the car. But this
Jukebox got stolen out of my car (stupid me!). Figuring I had good luck
with this player, I tried Archos’ Jukebox FM 20 Recorder. Tons of
features and such as I mentioned above. But this player had issues (and
I didn’t appear to be the only one having problems – Best Buy realized
they had too many returns on it and stopped carrying a number of Archos
gear, at least from what I was told by a Best Buy employee). The GMini
looked really tempting. It had all the features of my previous Archos
and was still in my price range. But the reviews online kept saying
something like, “its great if you get one that works.” Um, no thanks.

The next choice was iRiver. They look like they might have something
going. Best Buy doesn’t get a lot of returns on them which means either
people like it and/or it doesn’t fail often. iRiver has a player with
almost all the features of the Archos FMR which would have been cool.
But I looked back at the 1 year I had my FMR and I never used all the
features (FM and recording is great, but for me, I didn’t really need
it). The price point for the iRiver 20gb FMR was too high for me to
give them a shot. The reviews seemed mostly positive with some firmware
complaints.

Then I checked out Creative Lab’s Nomad Zen Xtra 30gb player. At first,
I wasn’t a fan of the style and layout. I’m still not sold on it, but
its growing on me. The reviews seemed to be all good except for a few
that hadn’t looked at the feature set before buying. This player
doesn’t have the bells and whistles of the Archos or iRiver, but the
ones it doesn’t have are ones I don’t think I need anymore. One feature
I’m sort of bummed out about is it doesn’t connect to the PC as a drive
(although you can still copy data over to it). And it doesn’t do
directory listings. But what it does do is sort all your music by
genre, artist, and album. This wasn’t available in the Archos so I was
a bit confused. But I think I’m getting the hang of it and its actually
kind of nice. I’m discovering music I didn’t know I even had! The
battery seems to be holding up great! I used it all day yesterday and
it died finally by the end of the day. I even behaved and charged the
battery BEFORE using the player (I hadn’t done this with the 2nd Archos
I had and I think that might have caused it some problems). The sound
quality on the Nomad seems to be great. The only complaint is I’m not
sure I can find a compatible cigarette lighter power adapter for it.
But that’s minor as long as the battery keeps holding out like it
appears to. All in all, I’m happy with the Nomad.