8. Interview With Neal Leggett, European Brand Manager, Continued

THG : Will the Jukebox 1 still be available?

N.L : We will continue to ship the Creative D.A.P Jukebox in a 10/20 GB format across Europe and we have no plans at this time to discontinue these.

THG : How did you manage to improve so much the battery life compared to the JB1?

N.L : We are using LiON batteries for the Creative Jukebox 3. The unit will ship with one as standard, giving you up to 11 hours of playback, and you will be able to add an additional one when they become available, which will give you a massive 22 hour playback time.

THG : What about an USB 2.0 port instead of the USB 1.1?

N.L : We decided to add 1394 and USB 1.1 because they are the most popular interfaces today, meaning we have a product which can address almost 99% of the PC market. For those that want to take advantage of the very fast data rate that 1394 gives you, you can upgrade your PC with an inexpensive 1394 card or Audigy Player Sound Card, which has 1394 as standard. For those using a laptop, you can buy a very inexpensive PCMCIA adapter for around $43.00. A major feature of 1394 is the fact it does not require a host, which in theory means two 1394 devices can connect and communicate. Having 1394 on our devices gives us some cool advantages for future development and as our devices can be upgraded via the firmware, who knows what we may have in the pipeline :-)

THG : Is there any possibility to see Notmad Explorer integrated in the JB3 drivers to be able to use it from Windows Explorer for any kind of files?

N.L : At present, there are no plans to integrate this application. As mentioned previously the main purpose is music playback and secondary data storage. We believe we cater for both. As to whether this will work with the Creative Jukebox 3, I am sure the guys at Nomad will get their hands on an SDK at some point, which will enable this to work with the Creative Jukebox 3.

THG : Why can we not see the Creative Jukebox 3 in Windows Explorer?

N.L : We use a proprietary Disk Operating System designed specifically for the Jukebox. This was done at a strategic level to give us some advantages over the FAT Disk Operating System, for example: FAT cannot support file sizes over 2 GB, the Creative file system can support a single file size as big as the disk. For file sizes 5-10 MB, it reduces the amount of disk movement to access the file. This results in a lower power consumption while playing the files. Therefore, extended battery life. The Creative file system understands metadata. This allows our UI to access a file's metadata without scanning the whole file looking for ID3 tags. Again, this improves our overall performance and reduces the power consumption. By using a proprietary HD operating system we have created a major barrier to hacking. FAT is difficult to manage via firmware. Obviously, on the down side, the Creative Jukebox is not seen in Windows when connected, but with the primary reason being music playback, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. We believe we have produced an application which can now handle users' requirements for data storage management in the form of Creative File Manager. It is only one double-click away if it's on your desktop - the same as Windows Explorer, if that's on your desktop. We have also addressed the issue with using the Creative Jukebox 3 on other machines that do not have the drivers. There is an application which creates a single driver/application which enables you to connect to any PC with a single floppy.

THG : Did you use specific chips/components to reach the 93dB SNR on the outputs?

N.L : All I can say here is that we are a very experienced Audio company, we have very experienced and knowledgeable engineers and we use high quality components. And with these ingredients, to my knowledge, we have produced the highest quality HD based music playback device in the market today.