Bought a Jukebox 3, 40GB. I had to wear cargo pants just to fit the thing! Kept it until it broke, but even then had a hard time letting it go. Worth every penny. thanks for the memories

There are a bunch of tantalum capacitors on that unit, they're known for spontaneously going bad, check with a multimeter and see if any are shorted or open, it should be very easy to diagnose a bad tantalum.

I always wanted one of these back in the heydays. But being in my early 20s and having a minimum wage job, it was hard forking out $500 for one. But I always appreciated the idea since I love music and technology. Napster and the likes and underground pirated MP3 sites got me interested in a wide range of music. My pirated music collection was vastly growing. So the idea of having more than 18 tracks on a disk was enticing. Eventually I saved up enough and got onboard with everyone and got the iPod 3rd gen. What a truly great device at that time.

I had a Creative Jukebox Zen, it had amazing sound compared to the iPods of the era. Also better battery life and capacity.

5:05 Someone's been in 'ere.

Damn, I had a Nomad exactly like that, it brought back a ton of memories just from seeing it! My late stepdad gave it to me along with his CD collection. He was a huge audiophile and bought it at launch, by the time I got it was around 2007 or 2008.

I cannot explain how revolutionary this was going from a nomad II holding 6 songs to this thing holding the equivelent of my 25 lb cd booklet. I actually used the recording feature while in London to catch and record radio 1 and also Radio 538 in the netherlands when I was out there in college.

I had the Creative MuVo NX courtesy of my old man 3 years later, absolute beast! LOVED the fact it doubled up as a driver-friendly USB flash drive, made school a breeze. + the swappable AAA battery pods are raaaaaad

I LOVED my nomad.. Everyone in school thought it was to big but I loved to have basicly all my mp3s with me

I still have mine, its the blue version and its still working, very good audio and the recording function was great when I was recording my friends band, very nice unit.

oh boy, the childhood memories. had the jukebox in blue. It was so heavy.

When I was younger I had a creative zen micro. I believe that was during the Gen 4 ipod. Unfortunately I Got a dud and because of that I ended up jumping on the ipod bandwagon. Thanks for the video and history!

Ive been watching for a few years now and just now subbed. IDK why it took me so long but have been really enjoying your content, specially your investigative work on how/why things work in order to fix things. Rather than just tossing new capacitors at it with no explanation like a lot of retro repair videos tend to do, its fun watching and following along how you handle a fix while giving tidbits about the history of the device.

Now that's a cool empty tree player!

I still have my Nomad 3. It was quite a cool device at the time. I even used mine to play backing tracks with a live band I was in!

I had that blue Rio cd player in high school. It was so cool that I could burn cds as data and finally use that massive 700 MB!

Good old late 90s/early 00s silver plastic. You will not be missed.

I had a Creative Nomad Jukebox. Absolutely loved it!

My first MP3 player is now called vintage 😆 I guess that makes me vintage too!

11:37 top right corner "BT1", I assume thats some kind of rtc/volatile data battery (like in a PDA), I wonder if these won't boot if it's flat?

I carried one of these everywhere I went when i studied abroad in london. It was very very rugged and survived many drops in the London underground. I swapped out the batteries at the time with larger capacity ni-mh's (I want to say 2300mah) and remember it lasting quite a long time. The only drawback was its size and its usb 1.1. Before leaving on my trip to London I had upgraded the drive from 6 gigs to 20 and loading my music and filling up the drive, I want to say took a few days. It was somewhat picky when charging non creative labs ni-mh's so i just packed along a regular ni-mh charger and swapped them out. It still sits on my bookshelf in my home office. I dont use it but it holds many many memories of discovering new cutting edge music while living in London, and when I returned. Coincidentally, after nearly a decade of collecting dust. I powered it up and was shocked to find out it somehow had the correct date and close to the correct time. Baffled on how it could do this, I discovered a small battery on it. nearly 20 years and it still not only kept a charge but kept the damn date!

Great video. Haven't thought about these in years. I had a Nomad Jukebox 3 that I put a large (for the time) drive in. It was a beast in its day. Prob still have it somewhere in storage.

A friend of mine had one like the one on this video. We beacme fans of Creative, we ultimately bought the Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra, and that was the bomb! 40gb of music and great battery life, everybody was impressed when they saw it for the first time.

I still have my jukebox 2, with a 20gb hdd.

I had this thing. It served me well in my college years.

I still tell people about my Nomad Jukebox, had it in the blue color and loved it, also remember the $500 price tag.

Wow man I had that exact same CD/mp3 player at around 2:00 .. That took me way back. I freaking LOVED that thing. I used it every day on the way to/from school. I can't really remember what happened to it though.. I think it was stolen out of my backpack.

I still have my Nomad Jukebox 3! I bought it to do remote sound FX recordings around 2003. I ran a Core Sound Mic2496 microphone pre-amp into its optical input. I later discovered the Nomad only accepted a 16-bit word, so it would drop the bottom 8 bits coming from the 24-bit signal of the Mic2496. I later replaced the Nomad for an HP iPaq with a Core Sound PDAudio to record up to 24-bit/96KHz audio into a tiny 2GB Compact Flash HDD, which was removed from an mp3 player and resold for general storage. It's amazing how much things changed in just a few years after that.

I had a Panasonic portable CD MP3 player in 2003. Seeing your thumbnail brought me back to that.

i love retro tech tear downs... back then i was to young to care about the insides :D

11:40 - That round item standing up next to the AA terminals looks like a coin cell backup battery for volatile memory... I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s dead and the player won’t boot without it.

I never owned this Nomad, the one I had was the Nomad Jukebox Zen XTra. It was $250 at the time when I bought it and it had a capacity of 40GB in 2004. I absolutely loved this device and kick myself in the rear all the time for killing it. One day I went to update it's firmware and it lost connection to my PC during the update and bricked the device and I was unable to get it working again. If you're looking for an MP3 Player that went up against the iPod back then It was totally the one. I was the envy of my classmates when I showed them it.

Plug that hard drive into a linux machine instead of windoze !... If it still can't mount by default, simply install _njbfs_ from your package manager.

I still have 2 of these, 1 of them unused, I used to leave 1 of them plugged in all day playing music, never faltered, good bits of kit in their day

I also forgot one other point that would wouldn’t have been able to easily discover without getting it working: the software supported ID tags in MP3 files! The reason it used proprietary software rather than mounting as a USB drive was that their software extracted the MP3 metadata and therefore the on-device menu could list artists, albums, track data and other information whereas nearly everything else on the market just sorted by file name (and maybe read the tags on a current song). The hardware just didn’t have the power to do it on-device, but the computer could do it faster than it could transfer your library over USB 1.1. This might seem trivial today, but it was a huge improvement you didn’t really understand until you used a typical filename-based unit of the day. It was more like carrying a disc changer in your pocket, whereas most other players were more like carrying mix CDs.

I love these creative juke boxes. They're so much fun.

Omg this was a really high quality mp3 player

Before I moved to an iPod, I used the Archos Jukebox running RockBox and it was amazing, you should check one out, the little units with the blue bumpers. It was also small and easy to carry around.

I think I still have my Nomad Jukebox from back in the day. I drop it once. It still worked. The dial was pushed in but still worked.

I really enjoy these videos they are calming and enjoying when I learn more about old tech

Ha ha! I had the same Sony MP3 player. I loved it. I think it was $145 at the time. I kept it for many years. Dropped once and the hinge fell apart, but I kept using it with a rubber band, until flash memory got cheap.Stuck with creative for a while. And now phone does everything. The brand doesn't even matter.

I still have my Nomad Jukebox, and still works and looks like new.

I still have my Nomad, it got upgraded with a 20GB HDD and later a 64GB SSD, was still using it well into the smartphone era due to the amazing battery life but ended up retiring it when smartphones got music streaming services so no to store a library. It was an amazing device in it's day, and no faffing about with iTunes required to get music on it either

Had one of these back in the day.

When these got released I remember them well as I was in my senior year of high school, and I was walking down the hall of my local mini mall(now closed) with my cousin, and we went into Sam Goodies looking at the Anime DVD, and some other stuff, then we came across these near checkout with security tags on them, and wondered why they where hanging so high up, we ask the manager who was working that day, and was a nice guy, he said I doubt you 2 could afford it, they are almost $500, and our jaws dropped. My first MP3 player was a generic 2GB stick around 05, before that I had imported GBA media player from HK that converted the music into a very compressed wav. format, and stored it on a CF card, and the largest CF card I ever had for it was was 2GB.

Had the follow up version of this with the FireWire interface that you’d shown. As you’d said, by default you had to use special software to do transfers but there was a company named Red Chair Software (I remember this because of the icon) that made a great bit of shareware that made transfers drag and drop. Just as described my Nomad just up and died one day despite my taking great care of it (Lord knows it was expensive enough on a college student’s budget) and I suffered with my Philips CD/MP3 player for years after.

I still have a RioVolt (CD player) and Rio Karma. (20gb HDD player with 32gb Compact Flash mod) All still work to this day. Rio had some real gems just before they closed in 2004.

I wanted to share that the likely issue is the BIOS chip which will erase over time. The KZfaqr Borderline OCD did a video fixing a Nomad 5 months ago and shares a person who still burns new BIOS chips to repair the units.

I had one of these in my early teens and I used it clear up until the late 2ks. it was great for the large library of music I had collected and listening for hours without ever hearing a song twice.

Hey Colin, it's going not too shabbily thanks.

I owned a Jukebox 2 10GB. Was my prized possession. Was the first thing I ever owned that had USB 2. I had to get a PCI expansion card to get USB 2 on my Cyrix 686 board! I loved that thing. I bought it used from a rich friend who got an iPod. Still cost me ~$200 or so. I was working a minimum wage job at the time. It took me a week to earn that! Sold it in college when I got my first iPod (3rd gen). Still wish I had it, though. I doubt anyone was in there, considering the in-tact warranty sticker. I bet it was dropped on a soft surface from a high distance (like on to carpet from a high shelf) and the stands broke because the plastics aged. There's probably some sort of circuitry fuse broken. Could likely be fixed by checking continuity. Also, you can follow the traces on that mystery chip to see where it connects, but you're probably right. It's likely just controlling the IR.

You know what? I think I just realized why one of my old Creative sound cards had a Firewire port on it.

1:49 my buddy had that blue Rio SP90 and I had the black SP250. I still have it. I love it. It's part of my high school years. At the time it blew me away with it's nice black and white display with loads of settings and functions. The only CD player I got later to rival it was my iRiver SlimX IMP400, the only screen was in the inline remote, it was similar to Rio's user interface but could display lyrics that you would have to set up using a small little program you would download and it had a secret 'snake' game. the whole thing ran off two thin gum stick rechargeable batteries. It got terrible battery life compared to the Rio SP250. It was super thin for the time. I wish I still had it but I sold it on ebay to buy the RioRiot 20gb Jukebox. That thing was a beast. Used scary slow USB 1.1 to transfer music from my windows PC. It used MusicMatch Jukebox which I hated at the time. I've been waiting for this video for hella long, I'm so excited.

Your videos are somehow so relaxing. I love this channel

Your b-roll is always amazing, great video!

Did you check the SMD fuse(es) for continuity?

10:11 that Nomad IIc's playing Darude - Sandstorm, lol. Nice touch.

With all the chips in the device, many not optimized for battery power, plus a hard drive it’s no wonder that it had 4 hour battery life.

I had the Nomad Jukebox 2 back in 2003 with a 20GB HDD. Good times with this player. I would love to find one in working condition.

Total bummer, I definitely remember these players and giving all of my hard earned allowance for a Rio volt

I loved mine. I traveled around Europe and SE Asia. Every bar had a place for me to plug it in and I got to play hands free DJ with my traveling library of songs.

I got an Archos Jukebox Recorder 20 when it came out and I really enjoyed it. Having 20 GB of storage was unheard of and I could fit almost my entire CD collection on that thing! I might still have it, buried in a box of old technology bits somewhere in my garage.

I have a Creative Muvo 2 mp3 player with a 1.5gb hard drive, it whas called the ipod mini killer :p crazy how far technology comes!

Creative was a cool company, imo. They were not afraid to try anything. That 3DO Blaster comes to mind.

Archos jukebox 6000 6b player. Out before Ipod in 2000. This player still works as well and is over 20 years old!

I had one. The EAX FX feature was a novelty. It was basically a bunch of preset reverb effects that you could select with no customization options. A "ROCK/POP/JAZZ" button that was typically found on cheap CD players, but for reverb effects. As far a the "line in" recording feature; I think it could only record in WAV format. It would've probably taken 10 hours to transfer 10 minutes of recorded audio off the player. My Nomad quit working about 4 years ago. I suspect it was due to some bad capacitors.

Great video Colin! Keep up the good work!

I found one of these at a local thrift store, and yup, you guessed it. It also wouldn’t power on. I never did find out why

My first MP3 player was also a Creative Nomad, though a Nomad Zen Touch, 20GB model, bought in 2005. Loved that thing! Changed the battery on it twice and it served faithfully until around 2010~11 when came time to retire it. By that time the volume down button had stopped working, the play button increasingly failed to register presses, and the storage was starting to get too small for my growing music library. Still got it around though, simply couldn't get rid of it just like that. The last time I tried firing it up earlier this year it using the AC adapter (battery's long dead and removed from the unit by now) didn't go too well. Seems the hard drive's just about to fail, ad it mostly liked to boot loop, only occasionally managing to start up properly, and on those occasions I only got a few minutes of listening until it resumed boot looping again.

I loved the Nomad's pixelated LCD screen. The aesthetics of it puts me back to when I had to copy 1CD at a time, and then empty my HD (Quantum 650MB), to start again, or even copy the second half of a long CD..

A quick note that I don’t see in the top few comments, that is actually an IrDA, there was no remote and it wouldn’t have been especially practical to release one. Creative never really had a plan for it, although there were rumours of integration with full size stereos that could use the IrDA port to retrieve track information and other things you could do with two-way communication. But it never happened, the firmware development ceased before anyone had a good enough idea. I wonder if the unidentified chip was part of that? Battery life was meh, but Creative’s batteries actually were a bit special for the day, they had some of the highest mAh ratings in their price point, to the point that they were worth importing into Canada vs buying other brands locally. I may still have a set. Back in the day Creative had a NNTP server where some of their staff (including engineers) participated, and they fostered a small but interesting set of third party tools. This was such an amazing unit for its time, and I bought a couple more Creative MP3 players because of how well engineered this beast was. MuVo 2, and later a ZEN Micro and ZEN Vision:M 30GB depending on my plans for the day. If you want another interesting dive into related history, find out why the Creative MuVu 2 was so popular (aside from being a great MP3 player - It had a unique bit of hardware inside that made them more valuable than their retail price).

My first dedicated digital music player (aside from my sony clié) was the creative muvo tx fm. It has 128 MB of memory and a built-in FM radio. It was smaller that a disposable lighter and it was powered by a AAA battery. It was excellent. I had hours of music enjoyment and I had always a playlist on my PC for every day of the week and it was as easy as drag and drop since it was just a glorified USB thumb drive. Good times. The included earphones weren't half bad as well.

Borderline OCD just released a video repairing one of these.

I also have an MP3-CD player that I still own from around 2000. An iRiver IMP-250, also sold by SonicBlue in the United States under the Rio Volt name. Great player as burning MP3/WMA to CD/CD-RW was at the time far cheaper. Also had buffer for anti skip, FM radio, carious equalizer settings and even a snake game playable on the display using the inline remote. Also great for storing low bitrate files which was good for fitting media like Audio Books on the one disc. Thankfully I never left the Original rechargable AA batteries in it, which are lng since dead anyway. So still works.

My first "mp3" was a Samsung Yepp YP-E32, later i got the Creative rumba...such a cool devices back in the day !

It's important to remember that while the iPod 1st gen was cool and innovative it was only Mac compatible. And you had to have a Mac with firewire. That wasn't super common yet. A lot of people like me would've needed a firewire card to use it. Not to mention 5gb advertised at 1000 songs wasn't enough for me even back then. A CD with mp3's could hold up to 250 songs if they weren't too long and were all encoded at 128kps. I carried with me a binder with like 15-20 discs that held a lot of mp3's. You could store a lot of audiobooks as well because they were encoded with a lower bit rate. For 500 bucks Apple gave you 5gb but almost all other companies offered 20gb for half the price if not cheaper. The ipod didn't really become practical until the 2nd gen when windows formatted ipods came around. And it was the 3rd gen when they started adding bigger sizes like 15gb, 30gb, 40gb. Also the 3rd gen had the dock connecter which used firewire to transfer/charge on the mac and usb to transfer on a PC if you didn't have firewire.

I had both the original Nomad Jukebox and the Jukebox 3. Great machines. I even managed to replace the disk in one after dropping it and crashing the disk.

I had that older CD-only Walkman with the G-Protection which you briefly showed on a pile. There was nothing like confidently whacking it against your palm to test the G-Protection... and having the music skip.

I had a Nomad. The batteries lasted about 4 journeys to and from work on the train which took around 45 minutes, so 3 hours maximum. Ridiculously bad, but such a cool device. I seem to recall it had a 20gb capacity. Mine was a blue and silver one rather than all silver.

I paid about $500 for one back in 1999. I still have it and works fine. In a less than a year or so I bought the blue one for my niece for less than $100 with extra batteries. I love the headphones. The looked very futuristic.

This was my first MP3 player, I think it cost £200! The sound quality was incredible, and it was ridiculously loud. I cable-tied an old car speaker to the bottom of the saddle of my bicycle and spent a summer riding around to music played on that thing, fun times! Unfortunately mine failed too, it wasn't very durable in the long term.

One thing I love about the CD/MP3 players is that as long as they work you can still burn discs full of music for them. Unlike the hard disk players that will eventually stop working right or all together. And they're limited to the size of the drive. With CDs you can just keep burning to more discs and they play standard CDs as well.

I had one of these, not this model, but Similar. Loved it, started me listening to files.

Brings back memories of my Nomad IIMG and MuVo2...

I never had the means to afford an iPod of any kind when I was young, so my life revolved around Creative MP3 players. I still have most of them and they are all working just fine. My Nomad IIc still works, as does my Muvo TX FM, Zen Nano Plus, Muvo 2 (with a 16GB compact flash card replacing the 5GB Seagate Microdrive), and Zen Micro (battery died but found out Oppo makes a battery that is 100% compatible, so that problem was solved. I also threw in a 32GB CF card to replace the Microdrive.) Over the years I also owned the Zen Vision:M, the Zen Vision W and the Zen X-Fi. Sold them off because I found them to be a little to chunky. In hindsight I should have kept them as well. Creative did make some great stuff, but also a good number of stinkers. Software support was laughable at best, though I can still run the Creative MediaSource sync software properly in a Windows XP VM. I'd say stay away from any of their hard drive-based players unless you're prepared to convert them over to flash memory and venture onto the minefield that is Creative's firmware downloads and flashing experience. I can almost guarantee third-party web downloads(with free viruses) will be a must in order to find firmwares for certain models.

The Jukebox used the Oasis operating system. You could buy 3rd party 30GB upgrades. They were not available in Australia, so I asked nicely and I was emailed a HDD image that you could copy onto the Hdd with a hex editor. When rebooted the system would reformat its self using the full capacity of the drive. Man that think got slow when scrolling through 30GM of MP3s. I believe you could also get a boom box accessory. There was also awesome 3rd party apps such as Nomadness to upload the mp3s. I think nomadness can be found on internet history archives. Sadly my Jukebox was stolen out of my car several years later. I wonder if the thief even knew what they stole.

For a couple years, any time my parents went to Fry’s, I would b-line to where these were on the shelf and just look over the box and covet it. I had a CD player that could use burned MP3 CDs, but black CD’s were like $8-10 each and behind the barrier of entry of having to buy a big spool, not super practical for a kid with no real job. By the time I had saved up anything close to be able to purchase the Nomad, the iPod+HP had come out and I got that instead and never looked back. It was still pretty common to have “that kid” with the big backpack with a 500-cd book and pulling that out between classes and flipping thru it to pick out what CD to listen to on the way to the next class. Boy, can not be understated how amazing having an MP3 player was at that time, especially as an “indie kid” that listened primarily to home/amateur recordings downloaded from artists MySpace/pure volume/blogs. New song from that band? Don’t burn a new cd with it, just drop it into the folder. At one point I had an unbroken play count from the time I got that first iPod in 2003 (?) all the way to probably 2016 when my iMac died without effective backup. Some tracks had WELL over 10,000 plays. Wild. Thank you for joining my ted talk.

One of my early Player. Loved that thing!

6:41 circuitry on left side of the Cirrus CPU look to me like it is burned. Look at the AT49LV001 memory chip for example.

I wanted the Creative Nomad Jukebox in my teens. I'd still love one... I've been thinking of building something with a Pi, but have not found software I like for one yet.

I once had a Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra, and decided that it was better it had a bigger hard drive to add more music. Also didn't use any Apple products. I enjoyed it for many years.

I had one of these, it was fantastic. It could record .wav, the quality was very good. I remember some friends with some CD's with songs I liked in high school, we'd hook up my Nomad to the line out on their portable CD player before class and I'd steal a song or two. Too bad you couldn't get it working. I had the 10GB model, and I remember it taking fooooreeeeveerrr to transfer stuff to it from my old DeskPro.

I used one of the Panasonic mp3 CD players with a cassette adapter in my car back in the day :) :)

Most likely the ATMEL chip has lost its BIOS data. They did have a data retention expectancy of 20 years. And it is a common problem with Nomad Jukebox players now,.

I had a Creative Nomad, I got it for around $150 just before it was completely discontinued. That was a purchase I soon regretted. Having all that hard drive space wasn't worth the trade off of size, weight, and poor battery life. Not even close. It sat around largely unused for about 5 years before I donated it. If one didn't need portability, and it would mostly be sitting on a desk, it was fine, but that's not what the market wanted. I instead got a small mp3 player that fit in my pocket and took one AA battery which was much more useful, even if it didn't hold as many songs. And it was less expensive.

Wow someone finally acknowledges this fact. Ive always hated the fact people think ipod was first and apple created the smart phone.

For me, I actually had the Compaq iPaq pocket PC 3650 which to me was also like the iPod before the iPod. I remember buying that also in the summer of 2000.

I had one a Jukebox 3 20GBs!, Everyone thought it was a CD Player, I was like no, I have thousands of songs. And my brother had a MiniDisc player. We thought we were so cool.

Yesss! I wanted one of these so much back then. I ended up getting something much better but I didn't know that at the time.

I wanted one of these so hard.