Creative NOMAD

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The Creative NOMAD was a range of digital audio players designed and sold by Creative Technology, and later discontinued in 2004. Creative MP3 players now fall exclusively under the MuVo and Creative Zen brands.

The NOMAD range consisted of two distinct brands:

NOMAD and NOMAD MuVo branded players which used solid state flash memory.
NOMAD Jukebox branded players which stored data on miniaturised hard disk drives. The NOMAD Jukebox series of players and its derivatives are now known as the Creative Zen.

1 NOMAD and NOMAD MuVo models
2 NOMAD Jukebox Zen models
3 Related Software
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] NOMAD and NOMAD MuVo models

Nomad II. The Nomad II runs off one AA cell and uses SmartMedia memory cards.

For more detailed information on MuVo models, see Creative MuVo

The compact MuVo models appear as a USB mass storage device to the operating system so that the device can be accessed like any other removable disk, a floppy disk for example. Older MuVo devices and all Jukebox models use a custom protocol named PDE (Portable Digital Entertainment) that requires the installation of drivers before the device can be recognised by the operating system.

Creative's foray into the MP3 player market began with the Creative NOMAD, a rebranded Samsung Yepp YP-D40 player with 64 megabytes of solid-state memory.

IEEE 1284 Parallel port connection

Creative NOMAD

USB 1.1 connection

Creative NOMAD II
Creative NOMAD IIc
Creative NOMAD II MG
Creative NOMAD MuVo
Creative NOMAD MuVo NX

USB 2.0 connection

Creative NOMAD MuVo2
Creative NOMAD MuVo2 X-Trainer
Creative NOMAD MuVo2 FM
Creative NOMAD MuVo USB 2.0
Creative NOMAD MuVo TX
Creative NOMAD MuVo TX (Second Edition)
Creative NOMAD MuVo TX FM
Creative NOMAD Muvo Micro V200
Creative NOMAD Muvo Micro N200

[edit] NOMAD Jukebox Zen models

For more detailed information on Zen models, see Creative Zen

The Nomad Jukebox runs on four AA cells and has a 6.0 GB hard drive.

The first NOMAD Jukebox used the OASiS operating system while later NOMAD jukeboxes used Creative's own firmware. Most jukeboxes use a Texas Instruments TMS320 digital signal processor as their CPU and support some version of Creative's environmental audio extensions (EAX).

The Creative NOMAD Jukeboxes have varied in their use of connections. The NOMAD Jukebox 3 and Jukebox Zen were unusual in their use of the older USB 1.1 standard despite their predecessor, the NOMAD Jukebox 2, having used the newer USB 2.0 standard. Part of the reason for this was the inclusion of a FireWire connection, which is of comparable speed to USB 2.0.

NOMAD Zen Xtra (60GB)

Most Zen players feature easily replaceable batteries

USB 1.1 connection

Creative NOMAD Jukebox (Creative Digital Audio Player in Europe)
Creative NOMAD Jukebox 3 (also features a FireWire connection)
Creative NOMAD Jukebox Zen (also features a FireWire connection)

USB 2.0 connection

Creative NOMAD Jukebox 2
Creative NOMAD Jukebox Zen USB 2.0
Creative NOMAD Jukebox Zen NX
Creative NOMAD Jukebox Zen Xtra

A variant of the NOMAD Jukebox is also sold as an OEM product by Dell under the name Dell Digital Jukebox (Dell DJ), a USB 2.0 device. The Second Generation Dell DJ and Dell Pocket DJ 5 are also OEM products from Creative.

Future versions in the Creative Zen line exclusively use Microsoft's Media Transfer Protocol (also known as PlaysForSure), and some legacy devices have been supplied with firmware upgrades to support MTP. The first NOMAD player and the first NOMAD Jukebox use proprietary protocols, neither PDE or MTP.

[edit] Related Software

Besides the NOMAD Explorer or MediaSource programs included with the devices, there are other programs which can be used to manage the player and to transfer data.

Bundled software

Creative NOMAD Explorer - Software included with older NOMAD models and used to transfer music and data to the device. This has since been replaced by Creative MediaSource

Creative MediaSource - A fully featured audio player for Microsoft Windows that also manages NOMAD devices and can be used to transfer media to the device or to synchronise playlists with the device - a feature that was unavailable in the previous NOMAD Explorer software.

Free software

For early models

The NOMAD Manager Project is a program to control the original NOMAD player under Linux

The Nomad II Linux USB driver - for using the Nomad II under Linux

For NOMAD Jukeboxes

libnjb is the driver underlying most of the following programs

Amarok is a music player for Linux

Gnomad is a Jukebox Manager for Linux

Neutrino is another Jukebox Manager for Linux

XNJB is a Jukebox Manager for Mac OS X

Nomadsync is a Jukebox synchronization tool for both Microsoft Windows and Linux

Creative Nomad Jukebox KIO::Slave is an integration driver for KDE

JBHTTP is a webserver interface to Jukeboxes that is similar to what Notmad Explorer (see below) provides for Microsoft Windows

Proprietary software

Notmad Explorer by Red Chair Software is a jukebox management program for Microsoft Windows. The program is notable for fully integrating NOMAD devices into Windows Explorer, providing a web-based interface to the device and providing search capabilities using a built-in SQL database