Practice makes perfect - Jukebox 20 Recorder (Archos Jukebox HD-MP3 6 GB)

Member Name: banshee

Product:	Archos Jukebox HD-MP3 6 GB
Date:	16/01/03 (821 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Capacity, Portability, Sound Quality

Disadvantages: Occasionally hangs, Infrequently skips, A liitle chunky

OK, I've had the Archos jukebox Recorder 20 for about 6 months so I think I'm fairly well positioned to give a review. Where possible I'll put emphasis on the practicalities

Right, I was getting bored lugging 4 and 5 CDs at a time into to work so I could listen to 'em at my desktop so an alternative was needed. Listening to a friends Samsung 128 Mb player one day I was pleasantly surprised at the sound quality. MP3 - OK that's the way to go - what's out there? After reding various reviews (including some on dooyoo) I whittled it down to an Archos or a 'similar' offering from Creative. Went with the Archos 'cause I didn't like the size of the Creative. Could've gone for the 6Gb vesion but for the money I went for the Recorder 20 (20 Gb) one. (Here's, more info on the Archos website - http://www.archos.com/lang=en//products/prw_500279 .html ). I bought it from DABS (www.dabs.com) - came to around £260 - I can't remember what the exact figure was.

So what do you get? Manual, V6 of Musicmatch software (pay attention to version), headphones, a garish blue neoprene belt pouch, collapsable headphones, Windows drivers, a line-out cable (for connecting to an external HiFi) and a USB cable. The machine is USB 2 compatible (more info further down)
NOTE, you have to charge the jukebox for a minimum of 6 hours in the first instance. It run's hot when you do this but nothing too major. I've even read the manual but I can't say it's up t much.

PC Installation was easy - however the drivers I got aren't XP certified so you get the usual error message upon installation. BTW there are XP-compatible drivers available on the web-site. Didn't have to install the Music-match software as I've elready got it. I'm currently (16/1/03) using Musicmatch 7.5 - I believe it's free from their web site. (I'm running the Plus version - long story, maybe another time).
r>Connected it up to my PC and it recognised it (Note run the jukebox off the mains whilst you're transferring music to conserve battery life).

Transfer of music is easy (I'm doing all the MPC @ 128kbps) - have yourself connected to the internet; load the CD. Musicmatch downloads the track info and does the transfer (Very important - in one of the advanced settings there's an option as to how you want the naming done. I got this wrong in the first instance and couldn't understand why it was (transferring thus)playing the album tracks in alphabetical order. Doh! Finally worked it out. Set it to transfer as Artist/Album Name/Track # / Song Title / Artist). Transfer is fast especially if you have USB 2 ports on your PC (I've transferred CDs (approximately 45 minutes of music) using USB 1 under Windows 98SE - the difference is about 7-8 minutes using USB 1 versus 1-2 (Max.) minutes under USB 2).

I've now got 50-70 albums on it and it hasn't really made a dent on the storage.

Now you can shake it about and I've been, as yet, unable to make it skip. But there are downsides - there are very occasional 'jumps' whilst listening but they are few. I've also had 2 occurrences where the system just hung. Powered off/on and all was fine. This may be firmware related so I'll have to check the Archos website. It's kinda chunky so you'll need biggish pockets to cart it about. The headphones are a bit manky - so I'll have to splash out on some new ones but the Archos ones are adequate for now.
I've also run it through my Hi-Fi at home with the supplied cable - looking forward to taking it on holiday. The buttons on the front panel for scrolling through can be sluggish in their response but it's no big thing.

Overall I'm very pleased with it and I heartily recommend it