david taus

Nomads are a Fading Kind

music: Spaghetti Western- Do Right By People

The advent of the digital music player is without question changing the way people listen and even the way artists create music. We are quickly becoming an iPod nation; the number of white earphones I see in my classes increases every week. I haven’t jumped on the iPod bandwagon (and Nick’s roundabout link to iPod’s Dirty Secret hasn’t further encouraged me). iPods are great for what they do, but they are a consumer-level device that does not allow for much more than listening to music. Great for most people, yes, but I need a little more.

I’m a nomad guy. Solo trip to the Outback aside, I’ve actually been using a Nomad Jukebox 3, for the better part of three years. It is a bulky beast by industry standards, but the extra features more than make up for it: .wav playback in addition to .mp3, two line level outs, and best of all, lossless analog and optical recording at line and mic levels. The last feature was the real selling point. I could take the thing to a show, plug into a taper or the soundboard, and come away with a cd-quality recording. Now that I’m making music myself that is (sometimes) worthy of recording, the thing has become indespensible. I’ve recored all of our biosphere sessions as well as the acoustic side-project stuff on my Nomad JB3 and it’s come out perfectly. (The recordings, not the playing.) Now that I think about it, I interact with that little piece of electronics on almost a daily basis.

Yesterday I turned on the Nomad to find the LCD screen half blank. There’s now a big horizontal strip running across the top third of the screen that is completely blank. None of the music is lost on it, and I’m pretty sure everything else works perfectly, but now it’s really hard to navigate the menus and playlists. It’s almost like that old Twilight Zone episode where the man is transported to a world with an infinite number of books and all the time he wants to read them and then breaks his reading glasses. The music is still there and I can still record (I think), it’s just going to be a problem getting to it.

This isn’t the first mishap with said Nomad. The line-in jack popped loose about two months ago so I opened the thing up to investigate and tmo did a handy job of soldering that seemed to fix everything. After this last mishap, I think it’s time to start thinking about a replacement Nomad. The thing is pushing three years, which isn’t too bad for technology these days.

I would get another Jukebox 3 in a heartbeat, except I hear that Nomad has discontinued making them. I’m not sure why, as the recording features are really unique. I guess nobody cares about that and everyone is just interested in listening to their dumpy quality mp3’s. But I think it’s worth shopping around a little. If there is another digital music player out there that can record into .wav (and record optical!), can play .ogg, and isn’t limited to proprietary software for transferring between computer and device, I’m all over it. Possibly the iRiver H140? Meanwhile, I’ll blindly stumble through my music collection and hope I hit the right buttons.