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a full year before the iPod, I remember getting the Creative Nomad Jukebox (https://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/technology-flashback-creative-nomad-jukebox-2000/

by swyx 4y ago

a full year before the iPod, I remember getting the Creative Nomad Jukebox (https://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/technology-flashback-creative-nomad-jukebox-2000/ https://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/technology-flashback-crea...) with its whopping 6GB of space and showing it off at school. it had a great display and the icons on the physical buttons were worn off from me pressing them. more importantly as a kid from a tiny country, Mr. Sim and Creative Technologies showed promise that you could make an impact in the global tech scene and become a billionaire without being in real estate or oil or some other calcified industry. thank you and RIP.

creamyhorror 4y ago
Good old Nomad Jukebox and Zen Touch (loved them) and the Soundblaster cards of the '90s. It's too bad Mr. Sim didn't manage to tack the right course to keep Creative a continuing player in personal entertainment devices and then smartphones. Maybe it was a failure to hire/empower people with the right strategic vision, amidst dramatic changes in consumer preferences. RIP Mr. Sim and thanks for inspiring us Singaporeans to dream bigger.
bayindirh 4y ago
Some of their Jukeboxes have great sound quality and character. I still have a Muvo^2 (Square) which has a very nice character of its own. Their Gigaworks speakers also very nice. I have their T20 series II and it's sound stage is amazing for its size. I have used their Live!, Audigy and Audigy2 ZS cards, which were sounded nice for their time. However, I still won't forgive them for being strictly Windows only and refusing to cooperate with Linux explicitly. I now have an Asus Xonar D2X, and this thing sings, and it has native Linux support.
sbarre 4y ago
In the late 90s I had a little 32MB(!) Creative Nomad player that I carried around in my pocket for a long time in the early days of MP3s... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Creative_Nomad_MP3_Player.JPG https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Creative_Nomad_MP3_P... This was the first thing I owned that really felt like it was from the future.
- HNDen21 4y ago
  I had a RIO 300.. then later got the 500... would compress to wma 64 K so I could load a decent amount of songs.....
grendelt 4y ago
I wanted one of those so bad. I opted for the Diamond Rio CD Player (SP250) I loved that thing. That was an exciting time in tech because prices were falling into the affordable range for a lot of portable/mobile tech. (It was clunky and prohibitively expensive prior to that.)

by swyx 4y ago

creamyhorror 4y ago

Good old Nomad Jukebox and Zen Touch (loved them) and the Soundblaster cards of the '90s. It's too bad Mr. Sim didn't manage to tack the right course to keep Creative a continuing player in personal entertainment devices and then smartphones. Maybe it was a failure to hire/empower people with the right strategic vision, amidst dramatic changes in consumer preferences. RIP Mr. Sim and thanks for inspiring us Singaporeans to dream bigger.

bayindirh 4y ago

Some of their Jukeboxes have great sound quality and character. I still have a Muvo^2 (Square) which has a very nice character of its own. Their Gigaworks speakers also very nice. I have their T20 series II and it's sound stage is amazing for its size. I have used their Live!, Audigy and Audigy2 ZS cards, which were sounded nice for their time. However, I still won't forgive them for being strictly Windows only and refusing to cooperate with Linux explicitly. I now have an Asus Xonar D2X, and this thing sings, and it has native Linux support.

sbarre 4y ago

In the late 90s I had a little 32MB(!) Creative Nomad player that I carried around in my pocket for a long time in the early days of MP3s... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Creative_Nomad_MP3_Player.JPG https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Creative_Nomad_MP3_P... This was the first thing I owned that really felt like it was from the future.

HNDen21 4y ago
I had a RIO 300.. then later got the 500... would compress to wma 64 K so I could load a decent amount of songs.....

grendelt 4y ago

I wanted one of those so bad. I opted for the Diamond Rio CD Player (SP250) I loved that thing. That was an exciting time in tech because prices were falling into the affordable range for a lot of portable/mobile tech. (It was clunky and prohibitively expensive prior to that.)