Software

Creative bundles two specific pieces of software to access the Jukebox- the first is the Play Center and the version number of that is 3.02.09. Play Center is the central piece of software that lets you access the jukebox and transfer songs to and from it. You can customize the options of Jukebox mentioned earlier from Play Center as well. Transferring files is as easy as selecting them from the "My Computer" window and clicking on transfer to the Jukebox window. Just like the previous version of Jukebox/Play Center, a window pops us asking you to fill in the info of the track like the title, the artist, the album etc. or let it select from the ID3 tag. Progress of the song as well as the queue is shown for reference.

The newer version of Jukebox has both the aging USB 1.1 interface as well as the speedy SB1394 interface which can be found on Creative's Audigy cards. You can also use a standard IE1394 socket in case you don't have an Audigy card which is what we did to check for compatibility. Creative doesn't offer USB 2.0 which is as fast as the IE1394 on the Jukebox which is understandable as they've put their resources behind the SB1394 standard.

We transferred 200MB of MP3 songs to the Jukebox through the USB as well as the 1394 interface. The USB transfer took 4 minutes and 17 seconds and although we don't exactly remember how long the older Jukebox took to transfer the same amount of data, we have a feeling that the new version is quite a bit faster. However, the Jukebox v3.0 has a 20GB hard drive and filling it up through the USB interface will take quite a bit of time- over seven hours. Which is the reason you have the 1394 port which took 54 seconds to transfer the same amount of data. In that 54 seconds, it took about 4 seconds for the transfer to get started- after which files flew from the hard disk to the Jukebox. Based on that speed, you can fill the 20GB driver on the Jukebox through the 1394 interface in a little over two hours- VERY impressive!

The next piece of software that can be used to access the Jukebox is "Creative File Manager" which is basically an explorer-like interface to copy files to and from the Jukebox. However, files uploaded to the Jukebox using the File Manager are placed in a separate place than the one used by the audio files as you cannot see these "data" files in the Play Center and you cannot see the "audio" files in the File Manager. Using the File Manager we copied one MP3 file, one .AVI file and one .DOC file to the Jukebox and the connected the Jukebox to another PC and transferred the files back without any problems. Similarly, you can use the Play Center to upload audio files to the Jukebox and then connect the Jukebox to another PC and download these files onto the PC. While all this is good, we wish that we could have at least transferred the "data" files using the standard windows explorer instead of the proprietary one by Creative.

Besides the above two, you also get "Audio Stream Recorder" and a flash presentation that gives you a tutorial on using the Jukebox which in our opinion is quite nice.

Alternate Software
Not everybody is a fan of the Creative Play Center and thus the dedicated and enthusiastic community behind the original Jukebox came up with some alternatives. One such software is by Red Chair Software called Notmad Explorer and it is the first and only Nomad software that includes full shell integration as a Windows Namespace Extension, browser access to your Jukebox through a built-in web server, and powerful search and reporting capabilities using a built-in SQL database. If you own a Jukebox, we would highly recommend the Notmad Explorer- go ahead and download the trial version from here. Although Notmad Explorer doesn't work with Jukebox 3 currently for obvious reasons, the guys at Red Chair will be working on one when the player is officially released.