Overall a good product, but I can see why some people don't like it
Written: Feb 14 '03 (Updated Jun 18 '03)
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Pros: digital in/out
low cost/mb
solid unit
fast interface
Cons: bad interface
bad documentation
tiny screen
The Bottom Line: unless you have money to blow on an ipod, buy this one.
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| dr_theopolis's Full Review: Archos Jukebox Recorder 20GB MP3 Player |
We got one of these for my dad, so he could carry around his music collection. For those who have not seen them, they are a very nice unit, and are much smaller than they seem in the photos. The device is about twice the size of my original palm pilot, but quite a bit heavier.
He managed to get the thing installed himself, but was cussing out the documentation before long. The main problem was that the unit comes with Music Match Jukebox. MMJB is a good program, but the transfer utility is very lacking. By default, it just chucks everything in the root directory, without organizing it at all. This is fine if your player only holds a few songs, but with 20GB, you cannot even put all the songs in one directory. In addition, MMJB creates filenames that are so long they do not fit on the screen, so you cannot tell what the files are after they transfer. Imagine looking at your directory of songs and seeing the same Artist name several hundred times.
A few minutes showing him that the unit just shows up under My computer and that he could just drag folders of MP3s to the device, and he was ready to rock-and-roll.
The other main interface complaint is the weird method it uses for random play. For some reason the unit can only random play within a directory, making the feature useless for anyone who is actually organized. Getting around this required some searching on the net. After looking around and many tries, we discovered that it could use playlists generated by MMJB. The end result was to copy the entire folder of songs from MMJB, and then creating a random playlist in MMJB. Just select all the songs you want in your play list, drag it to the playlist in MMJB, and select random. You can then save the playlist, and then copy it from the MMJB folder on the Archos. This is a bit of a long process, but until Archos gets their act together, I think it is the only way to go.
Having said all that, the price point is what really makes this device worthwhile. I know of no other device that matches its price/space, making it a terrific value.
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As an update, some generous programmers on the Internet have created a much improved firmware for this device. You can download it at http://rockbox.haxx.se/ . Not only are there a lot of new features, and a way to customize the currently playing display, but because they don't depend as much on the "off" button, it is a LOT easier to traverse directories. I highly recommend loading this firmware if you have one of these units.
As such, I have increased the ease-of-use rating from a 3 to a 4.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 220
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Epinions.com ID:
dr_theopolis
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Member: Michael Gile
Location: Albany, NY
Reviews written: 39
Trusted by: 2 members
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