Last year, I got my baby, a Creative Nomad Jukebox 3. I loved this thing. It held 20GB of mp3s, pumped out near-reference quality sound, and had a great suite of recording features to boot. I could live with the fact that I had to use a workaround to access the proprietary interface in Linux. I could overlook the fact that it sometimes froze up, requiring a hard reset, and the fact that it didn't support Ogg. What finally broke me was the dreaded EAX freeze.

Lots of folks reported that their units had frozen at the intro (EAX) screen and could not be reset. These unfortunates had to send the units back to Creative for replacement or repair, which gets woefully expensive after the three-month (yes…) warranty expires. However, as most of these problems cropped up in the first couple of months of use, I figured I had dodged the bullet after 11 months.

Wrong.

Now I have this problem. I reported it here, and as you can see, the outlook is less than encouraging. Nobody knows what causes it, nobody knows how to prevent it, and nobody knows a way to fix it beyond ripping out and replacing all the internals, a process that costs anywhere up to $200US. The player only cost $299. On top of that, I've got no guarantee that it won't happen again. No thanks.

I'm not bashing Creative here, but I certainly need to think twice before investing in a product with only a 90-day warranty. The product is spectacular, but the support is non-existent. And yes, this (and similar) catastrophic problems have been reported frequently on their whole hard-drive based line.

So I'm down to shopping the after-Christmas sales for a new option. So far I'm narrowed down to the iRiver or the Rio Karma, both of which support Ogg and work in Linux.

…and yes, I will be getting the silly extended warranty this time 8-)