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By Gerard Mascio- 10/7/99 Several months after introducing its first MP3 player, Creative Labs has released it's second unit, the Nomad II. The Nomad II, which will sell for under $300, aims for the top end of the MP3 portable player arena with a new USB connection for faster file transfer, an FM tuner that hold 32 presets, and voice recording capabilities. More important, it will be one of the first players to support digital music formats other than MP3, specifically, SDMI-approved formats with rights management-enabled technology to limit music piracy. |
You can purchase the 64 MB Nomad II from Amazon |
Creative announced future support for Microsoft's Windows Media Audio codec (WMA) on these units. They are expected to also add Real Player's G2 music compression format, which is presently supported on the newly released RCA Lyra.
The Nomad will come with no internal memory. Instead the units will rely solely on removable compact flash cards which can be collected like cassette tapes. The unit comes with one 64MB flash card, which will hold about an hour of music at the highest MP3 quality setting.
Not only does the elimination of internal memory save space and weight, but new 234MB flash cards were introduced in the first quarter of this year. At roughly 3MB per music track, the new cards will be able to hold 80-90 songs each. The ability to hold that much music, in such a small unit, with superior sound quality to tape (higher db's, no hiss) means this second wave of portable players already offer more flexibility that cassettes. As prices drop, we may see cassettes go the way of 8-track sooner than we thought.
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