The NOMAD was a range of digital audio players designed and sold by Creative Technology Limited, and later discontinued in 2004. Subsequent players now fall exclusively under the MuVo and ZEN brands. The NOMAD series consisted of two distinct brands:
NOMAD - Players that use flash memory. This brand eventually became the MuVo line.
NOMAD Jukebox - Players that use microdrives. The brand evolved into the ZEN line.
NOMAD and NOMAD MuVo
These 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 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 ElectronicsYepp YP-D40 player with 64 megabytes of solid-state memory. IEEE 1284Parallel port connection
The first NOMAD Jukebox used the OASiS operating system, which was developed in India. Later NOMAD Jukeboxes used Creative's own firmware. Most players use Texas InstrumentsTMS320DA25xARM plus digital signal processor as their CPU and support some version of Creative's environmental audio extensions. It beat Apple Computer's hard drive music player "iPod" to market by about a year. The NOMAD Jukeboxes have varied in their use of connections. The 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. USB 1.1 connection
A variant of the NOMAD Jukebox was also sold as an OEM product by Dell under the name Dell Digital Jukebox, 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, 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.
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
- 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 For NOMAD Jukeboxes Proprietary software
