Rating: 
Summary: Works well until it erases itself
Review: I recently bought the Archos 6GB Jukebox 6000 for a trip that I was taking for a month I was going to be spending a lot of time on the plane and I figured that with 6GB of music I could pass the time easier. After the first two hour leg of my trip the plus button (+) on the unit stopped working which made navigating through the songs annoying because if I missed the song that I wanted I had to go all the way around the list to get it again. I was also unable to turn the volume up when I wanted to. I emailed Archos's tech support about the problem but have not hear back from them yet, about a months time has passed. I managed to listen to my songs for most of my trip. The sound quality was good and the playback was smooth. However, the night before I was to get on the plane to return home I was listening to the player and it froze up. I turned it off and then on again and the menu showed that the disc was empty. I was left with no music for my flight home, which was approximately 30 hours of total flight time. Needless to say I was not very happy. When I went to return the player, the place I bought it from told me that 12 out of 16 Jukebox 6000's had been returned for the very same reason. Since returning my Jukebox 6000 I have looked into getting a Creative Nomad Jukebox and I am strongly considering the change. The Nomad has a much better graphic interface and I have not heard of it having any stability problems. If you can deal with the Nomad's bigger size I recommend choosing it over the Archos simply because you will not loose your music at the worst possible time like I did.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Product But the worst Tech Support in the industry
Review: I have the player/recorder and love it when it works. I has some bugs but since I bought it the first day of availability I expect some bugs. What I did not expect is non-existant tech support. Their product support page is blank, they do not respond to emails ,PERIOD, sent to the tech support address. Right now the product is worthless as it will not go back in the directory tree structure...it's stuck in a subdirectory.
Rating: 
Summary: Gadget heaven!
Review: My whole music library (900+ songs) is now in the palm of my hand. I play tunes through my car stereo, home stereo, pipe it into my VCR for home video overlay etc etc. And I still have half the storage capacity available for carrying my other cool files between my work PC to my home PC. The USB link is fast (cable included), the firmware upgrades are easy to install, and if you take the time to read the manual you will have NO trouble operating the controls. Battery life has been excellent and the unit comse with a GREAT carrying puch. My only gripe is that I can not skip to the end/beginning of a song (the >| and |< features do not exist as near as I can tell). Otherwise I am in nothing short of GADGET HEAVEN!!
Rating:
Summary: Great Unit
Review: I recently purchased the JB6000 and here is my two cents worth. First, I was looking for a portable mp3 player that would store a large number of CD's (I was taking it on a trip to Alaska). There are not many choices out there, but the JB6000 is a great choice for the following reasons. Huge storage capacity - 6GB or 150 CD's! More than I was able to listen to on my trip to Alaska. Very good battery life - I was able to get about 6-7 hrs. out of the unit before re-charging. Very good sound quality - yes there are better head phones out there, but the ones included performed very well and were comfortable. Beware, if you use larger, better quality headphones, you may find the unit's amp is not strong enough to drive the headphones at adequate levels. Very logical storage format - if you are used to windows explorer, you will find the JB6000 very easy to navigate through as it uses the same file tree format as windows. Very easy drag and drop file transfer. BTW, the unit also doubles as an external USB hard drive. Great web site support for firmware updates - before I left on my trip, I went to the website and downloaded the most current firmware that has corrected most of the issues you will read about in other reviews. Very sturdy construction - the unit is a bit heavy, but I view this as a plus. You can feel the quality in the construction - it feels substantial, not plastic. So why a rating of 4 and not 5? Well, there are a few things I would like to see to rate this juke box a 5. First, a control for volume that is independent from the other control functions. Second, a more powerful amp. While volume was not a problem most of the time, there were times when a little more volume would have been helpful. Overall, the unit performed flawlessly. I had more selections of music with me than I was able to listen to, the battery life was more than sufficient and sound quality was good. Purchase this unit with confidence.
Rating:
Summary: Could be great.... but not yet
Review: I'm writing this review after returning this product (the second unit that I purchased) almost 3 weeks ago. I've since moved on to other things. Basically, everything worked great for me, up until a certain point. No USB problems, sound quality was great (when using different head phones.) My problem - PLAYLISTS! I would create a playlist and put it on the player, and during the initial hard drive scan (to find all of the playlist entries) it would just shut off! Every time, and on a different song! The only playlist that I got to work had 13 songs on it. I called Archos, and they told me to format the hard drive, run scan disk and defrag on it. Reading other reviews, it seems that this is their common response to just about every problem. Format, scan. Something tells me that this is just a bit TOO easy. I think I'm going to wait a while to get a large capacity MP3 player. This stuff is all just too new, and as a result, still too bugy. I had high hopes that Archos would come through, but unfortunately, not. The problem listed above happened on two separate machines. Oh well. Buyers beware.
Rating:
Summary: One that works is a great advancement of civilization
Review: This is a great machine! Finally, no need to carry a CD player, and a handful of discs. For travel, on vacation or work, this is an essential companion for anyone who loves music, and customized his/her own. It is no bigger than the transistor radios those of us in the mid forties can recall. It holds an incredible 100 hours of music, which works out to about eighty discs. They get there easily, after loading a Cd into any computer which then installs the MP-3 enabling program. Then, it is as simple as loading an audio disc, clicking onto the selections to be reproduced. Click and drag then transfers the selections onto the MP-3 unit itself. The neat thing about it is that then the music is in two places: On the computer and the player. The controls, while small, are easy to use. With a good pair of headphones (I use Sony Professionals) the sound is fine. Interestingly, like the experience of "an electronics fan" and some others, my first unit died after about a month. I returned it, and acquired another. No problemo. The greatest toy smaller than an Aston-Martin.
Rating:
Summary: Back to the drawing board Archos, you're batting ZERO
Review: After studying up on all the various mp3 players on the market, I decided on this one. I read through all of the reviews on Amazon.com, nearly all of which were favorable, but now I am wondering how many of those were written by people who had only had their Jukeboxes for one or two days. My Archos Jukebox quit working after only seven days. At first, it would do bizarre things like shut itself off if slight pressure was applied to one corner; then the problems worsened. About 75% of the files I'd saved on it just vanished, and the rest were replaced by "gibberish" file names which gave error messages any time I tried to play one. There was no way to run scandisk on it, because when I connected it to my computer, I got an error message which read "device attached is not functioning." I returned the defective unit, and promptly received a replacement (thanks Amazon - your efficient shipping department is right on the ball). Unfortunately, the new one lasted only FOUR days. Today while I was listening to a song, I suddenly got the message "HARD DISK ERROR," and now the unit won't function at all. It locks up at the start-up screen. The Archos Jukebox 6000 has some nice features, but all the features in the world are useless if it DOESN'T WORK!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent product if you put in a little work...
Review: I bought this mp3 player this week and was very impressed with the idea of having a 6 GB hard drive to store my mp3's on. Overall the build quality is very good. The Archos jukebox basically acts like any other hard drive when I plugged it into by USB port (I'm using Win 2000). So all you have to do is drag and drop files onto the jukebox, making directories along the way. Unplug the jukebox and you're set to go. The only two weaknesses in the jukebox I could find are easily remedied with a minimum of effort. The headphones that come with the player are absolutely useless, so have some better quality ones ready. Another issue I was a bit worried about was the very muddy bass quality even with high quality recordings and very nice headphones, luckily when I upgraded the bios to ver 5.01 the sound quality improved dramatically. Upgrading the bios took all of 5 minutes. For a small investment in time you get a very nice player that performs admirably.
Rating:
Summary: Major Problems
Review: The jukebox worked as advertised for about two weeks and I was enjoying it very much (except for the minor items that have been well documented here). I had filled the 6 gigabytes up with mp3s and was using it for my daily commute and in the office. Then, for no apparent reason, it just stopped working. When I turned it on it would start the boot process and then just shut itself down. I thought that maybe it was a just a power/battery problem, but the unit continued to malfunction even with the AC adapter plugged in. I then thought maybe it was a hard drive issue and tried to hook it back up to the computer. No luck--the computer wouldnt even recognize the jukebox anymore (it had no problem doing so earlier) and trying to get it to work would cause Windows 2000 to crash (no mean feat in and of itself). Repeated emails to Archos' tech support to try and resolve the issue went unreturned by them. Needless to say this thing is getting returned to Amazon. I was tempted to try another one in hopes the one I had was a lemon, but reading the reviews here leads me to believe that my experience was not unique and that I'm likely to experience these problems again. It is a great idea for a product, I hope some company gets its execution right soon. Yes--I know about the creative labs product--and just might try it. Lest you think that my problems were caused by a tech-newbie or an old computer system, they were not. I have worked with computers (building them, etc) for 10 years and was running the Jukebox off of a mainstream computer (an Pentium III HP) that is only about a year old).
Rating: 
Summary: Errors, Errors, Errors
Review: Sounded good, if you buy better headphones. Separate volume button would have been great. Nice size. Sparse documentation. Too bad it didn't work. It would copy a few files, then the blue screen message, "Unable to write to drive F:". It would copy a another file, then the same error. Tried a different computer, and website recommended procedures to fix the problem... same results. It goes back to the store tomorrow.
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