Archos Jukebox Studio 20 GB MP3 Player/Hard Drive 500204

by Archos

Product Details

Product Manual [1.52mb PDF]

• Product Dimensions: 4.5 x 3.2 x 1.3 inches ; 12 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005NWR0
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (131 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #129,097 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

93 of 96 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great sound with heaps of storage, December 25, 2001

By 

Gadgetman (Saratoga, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Archos Jukebox Studio 20 GB MP3 Player/Hard Drive 500204 (Electronics)

This is a great buy considers the amount of storage you get as a MP3 player and as a portable hard drive. The size of this unit is compact enough to fit in a pocket for easy carrying around. It produces high quality sound provided that you use a high quality set of head phones. You can manage your of collection of songs and data easily via your PC by using the familiar windows explorer. The USB interface setup is quite straightforward and I was able to get it up and running within a few minutes. There are quite a few things which I would consider as less than perfect. First of all, the user manuel is poorly written. Many valuable information is missing (most of it can be found, however, in the Archos support FAQ site). The battery compartment door is poorly designed. If you follow the manual's instructions to pry open the cover with a screw driver, chances are that you would damage the plastic surrounding it. However, you could easily open the battey compartment door by graping the 3 notches on the side of the cover with your fingers and lift it up. The control of the features on the MP3 player is mainly done by scrolling through an on-screen menu, which would be less convenient than having a separate dial control for the volume or for searching. However, there are many great features on the menus which allow you to control the sound quality and songs play back. The unit does not allow recording even though a line-in jack is provided. If you want to delete songs on the player, you would need to do it through the windows explorer on the PC. I have also tried to backup about 1.5 Gbyte of my work data. The unit ran into a few underrun problems and that not all files were backed up. I found out later that the problem was caused by low batteries voltage. You definitely should connect the charger to the unit for data backup. When you disconnect the jukebox from the PC, I strongly recommend that you use windows to eject the hardware (for windows 98, click on My Computer; right click on the drive icon; then click Eject) rather than simply unplugging the USB cable. I suspect that many people who complained about hard disk errors did not follow this procedure. Anyway, this unit deserves a 4-star for the convenience of being able to store thousands of MP3 songs in a box and being able to use it as a portable hard drive.

26 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I loved it so much that I returned it, September 6, 2002

By 

Beeeil (Unionville, PA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Archos Jukebox Studio 20 GB MP3 Player/Hard Drive 500204 (Electronics)

The choices in MP3 players are simple: solid state, CD, or hard disk. Before I bought the Archos Jukebox, I though the CD format is best for me. However, after purchasing the Archos 20G Jukebox Player, I know that the HD is the best way to go. There just isn't any substitute for having your entire music collection with you, all the time.

Having said that, I decided to return the Jukebox Player. Why? Because I decided that I want its big brother, the Archos Jukebox *Recorder*. The Archos Jukebox *Player* was so good that it convenienced me that the HD is the format I want, and therefore I don't mind spending the extra [price] or so for the Recorder. For the extra [price], you get the following (in the order of importance to me):

1. Higher resolution display. The Player can display only one line of text (the name of the song) while you are browsing the song list and while the song is playing. This limits your capability to quickly move through the list. The Recorder's higher resolution LCD screen can display about 8 lines of text, and lots more information about the MP3 file you're playing.

2. Recording capability - you can generate MP3 files by directly hooking up an audio source to the Recorder. However, the limitation is that it only records in VBR (Variable Bit Rate) and the sound quality (if you hook up analog) just isn't going to be as good as digital copies.

3. User interface and buttons. The Recorder has 4 more buttons (10 vs. 6) which makes the user interface a lot more intuitive. Gone is the two-key combination for volume control of the player, as well as other strange key combinations.

4. USB 2.0 interface - if you have a USB 2.0 interface on one of your computers, you'll be able to access the Recorder drive (which is USB 2.0 compatible) at 480mbps, instead of 12mbps in the case of the Player (USB 1.1). The difference in speed is night-and-day.

Either way, with the Player or the Recorder, make sure you evaluate an open source firmware, "Rockbox". Believe it or not, it actually improves the sound quality over the original, Archos firmware!

The battery cover on the Archos is notorious for difficult to open. Here is a tip - use the cap of a BIC pen and insert the pointy protrusion (slanted side out) into the battery hole on either side of the LCD screen. This will slide the cover out slightly, then pull the battery cover up and out. Batteries on any electronic device should be much easier to get to, but with the BIC cap technique, you can remove the batteries in 5 seconds flat.

Note: the Player (#500204) is the play-only model, while the Recorder is the model that also records (#500277)

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic! Incredible! - A must have!, May 28, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Archos Jukebox Studio 20 GB MP3 Player/Hard Drive 500204 (Electronics)

I purchased the Jukebox 20 Player at [another location]. It exceeds my expectations.

The Archos Jukebox 20 Player with Musicmatch Jukebox Plus 7.1 (I upgraded) is the best purchase I've made in years. It is nearly perfect; almost every criticism regarding this marvel of electronic delight is due to a terrible user manual and less than intuitive controls. Once you understand how to use it you will never be without it.

I am sitting at my computer writing this with my entire CD collection (over 250 CD's) in my pocket and I still have room for at least another 100 or more. The sound is absolutely incredible and now that I have mastered the `playlist' function I have organized my pocket hard disk to play exactly the songs I want to hear in a variety of sequences that I want to hear them. The batteries last about 6 hours with continuous play. It takes about 60 seconds to swap out the 4 Ni_Mh batteries. I don't bother to use the supplied charger and use my fast Ni-Mh battery charger that I use for all my gadgets.

The manual advises: Only use the supplied ARCHOS power adapter and the supplied batteries. One of the reasons I bought the Archos was because it uses Ni-Mh batteries. I comes with 4 AA 1.2V - 1500 mAh batteries installed. I didn't want to wait to charge the unit so I ignored the warning and installed 4 1.2V - 1600 mAh rechargeable batteries. These are standard batteries that power my Olympus D-40 digital camera, Garmin GPS and sundry other electronic gizmos. ... you will find yourself using them for every thing that uses regular batteries.

The unit comes with a fairly nice headset with volume control. The headset is fairly good but if you really want to enjoy the Jukebox you need a better headset. I use an adjustable "in the ear" set made by Bang & Olfusen ... I realize that this is an expensive combination but if you have 300 CD's ... this is a small price to pay to listen to everything, anywhere, anytime. With the supplied headset I found that I needed the volume near maximum all the time. With the B&O I have it set at mid volume and the music is perfect.

The two most confusing things about using the jukebox are (1) navigating the directory structure and (2) creating playlists.

There are only three buttons on the Jukebox.
(1) On - Used only to turn the unit on.
(2) Menu - Brings up the 8 Menus: Volume, Sound, Play Mode, Playlist, Hard Disk, Diagnose, Firmware, External, and Settings.
(3) Center Control with - Play/Pause/Select, Next (+), Stop/Off/Cancel and Backwards (-)

The manual is terrible and it will take a lot of trial and error to figure this out but once you do it is so simple to use you will wonder why it took so long. I can control this beauty by feel without taking it out of my pocket. It really is quite simple once you understand the nested menu organization.

I won't try to explain what each menu does but I will tell you that the manual does a poor job of explaining the simple functions. You can enter the Menu mode at any time. By pressing the Menu button you will see an arrow to the left of Volume. If you press the Play/Pause button on the top of the center wheel you will enter the Volume Menu. If you press the + button on the right you will move down to the Sound menu etc. Minus will move back up the menu list. But if you enter a master menu you must press the Menu key to move out of the sub-menu.

The easiest way to manage MP3 files is to do all the maintenance on your computer using the Music Match Jukebox software. I recommend that you set up a directory on your computer and use the same convention on the Jukebox. For example I used a directory (folder for you kids) called MP3. I set the Jukebox settings to use that as my default directory for all files. I then loaded every CD I had into Jukebox using the CCDB database online to create the folder and song names. This is a very tedious process best done when you have something else to do near the computer. The storage directory is very important because you will have to edit every playlist file to change the location from C:\MP3\ to ..\MP3. The jukebox does not have a letter in the file location. Therefore if you use the same directories on the Jukebox that you do on your computer you can create all your playlists in jukebox using your master collection and then edit them with a text editor to search and replace all the C:\ to ..\ It is a pain but doable. The manual does not explain playlist editing. But playlists are worth the effort. I have 13 Jack Hardy CD's stored in 13 sub-directories of Jack Hardy. It was a simple task to drag all 13 CD's to the playlist on the Musicmatch Jukebox and create a playlist with 115 songs. The options with playlist are endless.

There is so much more to say but I think you get the idea that I believe this is one great product. Like all great things my wife has to have one so I just ordered the new Jukebox 20 Recorder with USB 2.0 as my next gadget. My wife will get mine with our music collection pre-loaded.

One final note. If you have a great stereo system it is a simple matter to use the Jukebox 20 as a stereo component. Just use a 'mini pin to stereo RCA' cable and hook it up to the line out of the Jukebox and the RCA in to your stereo system and voila you have all your CD's and playlists at your fingertip. You can get rid of your 300 carousel CD player.