It's a ROCKbox (Archos Jukebox Studio 20 20 GB)

Member Name: KirkcaldyDad

Product:	Archos Jukebox Studio 20 20 GB
Date:	31/07/03 (1451 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Huge capacity, Customisable (if you are a software type)

Disadvantages: User interface a bit fiddly

For some months now I have been toying with the idea of getting some sort of MP3 player. Lots of options, and the more I thought about it the more things I thought I wanted from it. The main options I considered were:

1. Cheapish tiny memory based one: Maybe 64Mb memory and still fairly expensive, considering that you can get between one and two CDs worth of music on it, depending on quality. I thought I would probably get fed up having to decide in advance of a trip what I wanted, and I'd never get around to copying the files on. And considering I do two train trips a day, that would be a pain.

2. More expensive memory based one: More memory, but still only in the region of three or four albums in good quality, or more in lower quality. Would probably double up as a memory-key-fob type thing for moving files around.

3. CD player with MP3 playback: You can get them for less than £50, but after reading some reviews and talking to friends, I came to the conclusion that you seem to need to spend just short of £100 to get one that really works (reviews are VERY mixed for cheaper ones so it seems that you need some luck and experimentation with the type of blank CDs you use). One CD would hold about 10 albums worth of music. But you still have to decide which albums to put on one CD, and probably carry some CDs around as well as the player.

4. MP3 network player: There are not many of these around. Basically it is a player that connects to your hi-fi. It reads the music files from your PC through a wired or wireless network. So you keep all the files on a PC in the study and sit in the living room with a remote control to listen. Great for at home, but I actually listen to more music away from home than at home. Price is around £200 for a wired network version or a bit more for wireless.

5. Hard disk player: Still fairly expensive, but coming down in price. Starting at a little short of £200, compa
rable in price with the more expensive memory based and CD players. Portable, but not exactly tiny. However, they do have huge capacity when compared memory based players, and unlike CD players you don't have to fiddle around writing CDs and remembering to carry around the ones you will want.

So I settled on the Archos Jukebox Studio 20, which I bought direct from Archos in France, (that was the cheapest source I could find) and I've had it a few days now. So why this one?

Well, I set myself a budget of £200 for the player itself and I knew that I would want to spend a bit more on accessories to go with it. The Apple iPod was way over budget, so it was ruled out without even looking at it. Shame really - Apple have once again come up with a product which everyone seems to agree is the best, but at a price point that places it just outside the range of most of their potential customers. I suspect that once again an Apple product will go down in history as a great leader in terms of technology and ideas, which never really made it in the real world of people with limited budgets.

So I looked at some other hard disk players. Many of the newest ones seem to be trying to look like portable CD players. Why? I don't know. If anyone does, please tell me. Puting a hard disk in a non-rectangular box does two things; it makes it too wide to slip in a pocket, and makes the batteries non-standard.

So why do I care what shape the batteries are? Well at £200 I expect this thing to last a while - longer than the life of one set of rechargeable batteries. If I am charging it nearly every day those batteries will wear out in a year or two. Hands up everyone who has had to ditch an otherwise perfectly usable mobile phone simply because the batteries don't hold charge and it is either impossible or very expensive to get new batteries.

So I think Archos have got it just about right. The player has the same footp
rint as a hard disk - just about twice as thick as the disk inside it - and it takes four standard AA NiMH rechargeable batteries that I can easily replace for less than £10. It has big rubber bumpers on the corners to protect it, and to help prevent accidental button presses.

The disk itself is the type that goes in a laptop. These disks are designed for low power consumption and robustness rather than capacity and speed, which is exactly what you need for a portable music player.

I swithered between getting the Jukebox Recorder 10 and the Jukebox Studio 20. Both were bang on my budget, but in the end I decided the extra storage capacity of the Studio 20 was more important to me than the bigger display, additional buttons and recording capability of the Recorder 10. If I had had £50 more I would have gone for the Recorder 20 and got the best of both. Strangely, the Recorder does not seem to have the separate line output that the Studio has. That means that whenever you connect the Recorder up to your Hi-Fi you have to use the headphone output, and you will probably need to adjust the volume. Not a big deal, but I could see it getting annoying. In place of line out, the Recorder model has a digital in/out socket, which would be handy if you have a fancy home theatre type sound system to connect it to.

So I've got the players and here it is in front of me. It's not really an MP3 player which happens to have a hard disk inside - more like a hard disk with an MP3 player and four AA batteries strapped on top. Sounds a bit utilitarian? Well it is. But, that's actually what makes it work for me.

Like many other MP3 players you connect it up to your PC through USB, and it appears as an additional disk drive, much like a floppy drive. Depending on the version of Windows you have, you may need to install drivers (from the CD that comes in the package), and you should also be able to use the player with Mac or Linu
x if you really want to. To disconnect safely you have to tell Windows manually by clicking a little icon in your system tray. If you don't do this there is a danger that your disk will get corrupted. Windows will tell you if it's not safe to disconnect and initially I had some problems finding out exactly what was preventing it from being safe. You just have to make sure that you are not looking at it using Windows Explorer, and don't have any other programs like a command prompt or notepad looking at it. Now that I know what to look for it's not a problem and connecting and disconnecting is perfectly reliable.

You create whatever folders you like to organise your music and drag and drop files in using the normal Windows Explorer. One thing that took me a wee bit by surprise is that while it is connected to the PC as a USB drive, it cannot play music. That's a bit of an inconvenience, but you get used to it. There are pretty sound technical reasons for it - basically if would be like two computers accessing the disk at once, so your data could easily get corrupted if access from both sides were allowed. The interface is USB1.1, rather than the faster USB2, but again this is not really too much of a problem. A typical music CD converts to around 50MB of MP3 files, and takes less than 40 seconds to copy from the PC to the player. So if you already have your music collection on your PC it might take an hour or two to copy it all to the player, but you won't be doing that very often. Note that the power drain is much higher when connected to the PC, than when playing music, so you should make sure the power adaptor is attached for anything but very short USB use.

For normal use, playing music, I can run the player for at least 8 hours before the batteries give out.

MusicMatch comes on a CD with the player. MusicMatch is a software music player for the PC which you can use to make MP3 music files from your
CDs. The CD that came with my player had a slightly older-than-current version, so I already had a later version of MusicMatch available. Of course you can use any other MP3 conversion program you fancy, but Musicmatch does the job and it's free.

Note that the Archos will only play MP3 files, so if you have audio files in any other formats such as WMA, you will have to re-record them from CD, or convert them to MP3.

The user interface is very definitely written by techies for techies. Your default view is basically a simple file browser which you use to navigate through folders (directories) to find your mp3 files or playlists. When you find a file you want, you play it.

The sound is pretty good - better than the sound card on my work PC. I've got the cassette adaptor (and fag-lighter power adaptor) for playing it through my car stereo, and it sounds much better than I had expected - almost as good as a car CD player I'd say. The headphone output isn't particularly powerful, so if you have insensitive headphones or you are one of those people who likes everyone else on the train to hear your "personal" stereo, you might find that a problem.

As every other reviewer says, the supplied Archos headphones are poor. My package came with a note saying that they have been updated, so may not look like the pictures in the manual - well if these are the improved ones, the old ones must have been really bad! Even my £10 JVC earbud types sound much better, so count on getting some decent headphones if you haven't got them already. I've ended up with two pairs of the Archos headphones (another set came with car adaptor kit), so they are relegated to the car with a headphone cable splitter for the kids to use, and very handy that is too.

The software that comes with the player is simple and reputedly a bit buggy. Even before my player arrived, I got the alternative ROCKbox software from &quo
t;http://rockbox.haxx.se/". This is an alternative that has been built from scratch by a bunch of enthusiasts. It improves on the original Archos software and is said to be more reliable. I can't say whether the oiginal Archos software is unreliable, as I never used it for long enough to find out. I think the main improvement for every-day use, is that the ROCKbox software is much better at handling playlists. Upgrading the software is simple - just hook up the USB connection to your PC, and drop a file into the top level folder of the player's hard disk.

The Rockbox software is open-source, which means that, if you are that way inclined, you can get the original files from which it is built, and build your own version. You can fix bugs and add new features, and submit your changes so that other users get them. Unless you are already in the business of developing embedded software, building your own version of ROCKbox is probably not of interest to you, so most of you would just want to get the built product, upgrade your jukebox, and maybe occasionally look on the web site for any updates.

However, the open-source route does have the advantage that, even if you are not a programmer, you stand a chance of getting fixes for any problems you find, and you can even suggest improvements. With most commercial products, once you have made the purchase, there is very little chance of getting an update, unless very serious faults are found. Anyone out there got a mobile phone that works most of the time, but it locks up occasionally, or is just a pain to use for some reason? Commercial companies are just too busy designing new products and can't afford to spend time updating older products With new features. With ROCKbox, if you can think of a neat new function that it could do, you can submit a request through the web site. If it's practical and a developer somewhere also thinks it's a good idea, your suggestion may ge
t added.

So I'm pretty pleased with this player. I'm still working on getting all my CDs onto it. I've currently got about 80 albums on it, taking up 3GBytes, so I would expect to be able to get well over 400 CDs in total - if I had that many. I've tweaked the software to have one or two extra features just for me, and I've got more planned. Whether these will make it into the core build is yet to be seen.

It's also worth mentioning that, as the player connects to the PC as a normal USB disk drive, you can use it just like any other disk drive with the advantage that it is easily portable. The interface is USB1.1 so it can take a while to transfer large files. If you primarily want a portable disk, it's not really ideal - you would get a higher capacity, physically smaller disk with the faster USB2 interface cheaper than this player - but more than adequate for for things like moving files between home, work and friends PCs or backing up files.

Summary: