Rating: Summary: Pretty good low budget Jukebox Review: I just got this item and for the price it is hard to beat. I also downloaded the rockbox firmware, which so far is pretty cool. I would say that this device lacks a huge feature in that it can not search nor delete. I found this a little annoying but for $150 I can't complain too much. You also can't play all the jazz songs for instance. You will need to create a playlist to do this. Rockbox does make it easy to create playlist, but this is still not as easy to use as if you could do this directly on the device. FYI, it looks like the new version does have searching and deleting functionality, but lists for $350.
Rating: Summary: Great Review: I think this is great because it is great.
Rating: Summary: Form should always follow function. Review: Sure, it may not be the best looking option out there, but it works, and it works well. Plus it's cheap. Note: The first thing you should do after putting a FULL CHARGE into the battery is install the Rockbox firmware! This solves a lot of software problems, and Rockbox is just awesome. Google it. I have had absolutely no problems with mine in the year+ that I've had it. It sounds great (especially with some nice Sennheiser earphones), is easy to navigate, and has a great battery life. It can also be used as a USB hard drive and digital recorder. Sure, it may not be the most attractive looking player, but it's half the price of an iPod, and does more. Form should always follow function.
Rating: Summary: The quality of this product differs greatly!!!!! Review: My jukebox studio works fine and has great sound and battery life. but ive done a massive amount of research on this product and found that it got many bad reviews as well as a few good ones.i realized that each individual archos unit comes with different quality, i find that very strange. So if ur lucky the archos jukebox u get will be very good. But if dont want to take a risk u can always buy a ipod or dell mp3 player for double the price.
Rating: Summary: good but not good enoughf Review: I bought my Archos 20 GB jukebox recorder about 7 months ago. At first I loved it but I noticed right off that the headphone jack was not of top quality. Any time the headphone plug was wiggled even the slightest bit it creates a horible static and now you can only hear sound coming out of one terminal(left speaker). This is a great divise to use as an external hard drive but it lacks greatly in the playback area. Recording is great it can pick up just about anything in a roon and for as long as you want, very clear. It starts up much quicker that previous Archos JB's. some people have the problem with portability and battery life. I solved that problem by buying a alternate power source that i could use with 4 AA batterys. I took mine and traveled all over asia with it and over all it heald up prity will. I am giving it two stars because at this point the audio jack is failing and only after 7 months. Bummer, but now usless for audio.
Rating: Summary: Stay Away Review: I really did not want to believe all the negative things about the Archos jukebox, and now I'm paying the price. Do not make the same mistake! The product is good but with one major flaw, durability. You might end up getting a good unit and praising it but that is the less likely scenario. Mine went bad in a week and Archos technical support is hands down the rudest, least qualified and least helpful technical department I have ever had the misfortune of calling. Consider yourself lucky if you end up with a good unit and if not return to Amazon within the 30 days period, do not even bother with Archos for repairs. Two stars since there is some chance you will get a good unit, just don't count on it.
Rating: Summary: Buyer Beware 0f poor quality control Review: The first one I ordered charged up for about ten minutes then died. The second one arrived dead and would not charge or respond at all. So both are back to Amazon and I'm now looking for a different vendor's product to order.
Rating: Summary: Think hard about anything Archos makes over others... Review: I can only give this device (and all the others by Archos around the same price) two stars, because there are some nagging items which make me wish I would not have went the route I did buying an Archos product with the camera kit and card readers. First, the tech support is the worst I have ever seen in my entire life, include 12+ years in the IT industry. Not once, in the six months that I have tried to contact Archos have they ever responded back. I had issues with version 1.3.x of the firmware not randomizing correctly and/or allowing randomization across all tracks ... never heard anything. I even asked for the 1.2.2 firmware, so I could downgrade. I heard nothing and finally found it using a Google search. The unit will simply not give you the projected battery life numbers. Since I've had laptop computers for the last seven years, I am pretty good at conditioning my batteries. I am even better with my MP3 player, yet I can only get about 4+ hours out of my batteries, I have had this problem after the first full charge. Another item is that the unit will sometimes just turn off or fail to play some MP3 files, if I manually select them. However, if they come up in random mode, they will play. The camera's resolution is really not good and taking movies with the camera appear to resemble 8mm home movies from the 60s. It would be classic if automatically added that film projector sound to all the movies! (grin) Also, it's a pain to have to download Divx in order to play the movies on your home PC. The plug-in to MusicMatch hasn't been updated since the last version of the 10-20 GB players. So some of the new features can not be used. The buttons often do not function, forcing me to power down the device and try again. Finally, on the good side is that the drive is a USB 2.0 drive and I can move my MP3 songs from my home machine (where I keep my library) to the player without having to use Music Match. The sound is good, so that's another good thing and I do use the device just about every day at work. I also use the device to backup my laptop and key files on my home PC, since I don't have that large of an MP3 library. However, I would consider looking at the Dell device (although I am not a fan of not being able to transfer music files via USB with the device) and the other 20+ GB players before going with anything Archos makes. Had they responded via my e-mails at least one time, I would have maybe rated this product with a 3 or 4 stars, because to me product support is a very important factor.
Rating: Summary: It's a good unit, but... Review: I've had my JB Recorder20 for almost 2 years now. I gave my gf one for christmas last year. I liked it very much at first. I used it mostly during long-distance drives (400 - 1000 mile stints); having several hours of playback capability is essential. With the original *lame* NiMH, it would go 8 to 10 hours on a full charge, not bad, but then required an overnight recharge. Big plusses: USB2, replaceable rechargable NiMH AA batteries (so you can upgrade the play time by putting better NiMH replacements in; I got up to 20hrs on 2000mah!), looks like a hard-drive to windows, and it can record from mic or line-in. It's very intuitive to use, not too large, and MOSTLY reliable in playback. The player will play standard M3U play lists, randomizes nicely, has decent sound, and a lot of adjustable parameters (including backlight time, bass-boost, etc.) It handles playlists with over 1000 tracks w/o problems, mostly. It's firmware is easily upgraded - you drop the firmware file into the top-level directory, it finds and reads it while it's booting (so it does require a file and is not a true "firmware" upgrade as it does not burn a rom, etc.) Since it handles M3U lists, you can create lists with just about any kind of software; I use Cygwin bash scripts with find/sed/awk to build mine, and a freeware disk sync tool to sync to/from the player; I do use it for non-audio as well as audio file transport. Or I did. BIG CONS: Both players' charging circuits have burned out using the adaptors supplied by archos. It's $85 per to get them fixed. From the warnings ("will lose data") I am going to have to extract the now dead-as-doornail batteries, put in charged ones, and remove/back-up all my sensitive data from the device myself. In other words, it's an exchange program, so if you have nice NiMH bats in, or don't have your music backed-up on your machine, you'll need to manually deal with these situations before the exchange. Support: Their tech support never figgured out a playlist problem I had. The player was unable to parse a directory with a 3-letter name (it could not read from directory "Music/Fun"; when I changed the name to "Funny" it started working - ARCHOS did not help, nor did they reply after I sent them the solution.) The drive did not issue any diagnostic, it just never found any of the mp3 files until after the rename and playlist rebuild. My gf had to contact Archos several times attempting to get warrenty service for the recharge problem; we're each debating if it's even worth it. $300.00 for purchase then $85 per year for charging circuits? Rediculous. Nearly every problem I've contacted support about seems to have a canned response: "the firmware file may be corupted, please re-install the firmware upgrade." It has never helped. Robustness of use: It does not seem to handle VBR files well, occasionally locks-up at random, and when this happens it requires a power cycle. User Interface: The screen is tiny and hard to read. The "diagnose" command is useless. There is no "resume" feature to pick up at the last song played (or audio book track). Instructions come in multiple languages, but leave a lot to be desired; for instance it does not explain that standard M3U play lists are supported, when stopping a play-list you end up in the folder where the song that was playing is in (not the top-level folder any more), and other little surprises. It does not mention anywhere in the docs anything about input voltage acceptable for the recharging circuit; one can only get this information from the AC adaptor supplied with the unit. Support never answered this question, only suggested buying another adaptor from them. (i wanted an adaptor at home, and one at work.) These devices are not cheap. That both have blown the charging circuits after 1 year, and 1.5 years use, is inexcusable. I'm a pedant where it comes to computer devices and the units were not subjected to spikes or noise, this seems to be the result of a design limitation. So.. there you have it - the OS has weaknesses, as does the hardware, the support is poor, and the UI not well documented. Otherwise it's a great player if you're a DIY type and don't mind it blowing up after a year.
Rating: Summary: You get exactly what you paid for Review: I recently purchased this peculiar looking device, hoping this was a great deal and that an external hard-drive with the same capacity costs 100$ more. Well, all is still going well with this thing, but you have to remember: it is a HARD-DRIVE! There are no shock absorbers in this little box and not a lot of protection around it in-case it drops. Just a little scratch on the HD surface could cause the entire device to malfunction. If you are known for you buttered hands, get the I-Pod (lighter weight and comes with a neat new belt buckle) or a Flash Memory Stick that also plays MP3s. To add to the review, former e-mails from the Archos company promised a device with a remote. That was 3 years ago. Think about it...
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