Customer Reviews

Archos Jukebox Studio 20 GB MP3 Player/Hard Drive 500204

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(41)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(38)

 

 

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.

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)

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.

I have been waiting quite a while for mp3 players to reach a point where they could do what i wanted. They finally can. This product blew me away. A few plesant suprises, like it's built in batery charger, was unexpected. I have been looking for an MP3 player, a second hard drive for my pc, a way of quickly transfering data from my home to my work without waiting for cd's to burn. Done, it does it all. Every album i own was on my pc, not their all in my hand, and i have room left for twice as many! another unexpected suprise was it's size, the picture is misleading i thought it would be large, it's smaller than a tape player walkman.

~ Some specs about the computer I'm using with the player ~

Dell Latitude CPx (laptop), 500MHz processor, 12GB HD, 128MB RAM, USB 1.1, Windows XP Professional OS.

~ My Archos Jukebox Studio 20 GB MP3 Player/Hard Drive 500204 Critique ~

(Positive)
1. The sound output is amazing! I'm a die-hard metal-head and when I'm playing tracks from bands like Machine Head or Mudvayne, the bass and treble feature of this player really crank out the power in the music!

2. Installing the driver(s) for this player was a breeze! I was downloading mp3's within 20 minutes after I opened the box!

3. Transferring mp3 files from my laptop to the player did not produce any "artifacts" in the mp3 files...such as pops, crackles, or scratches. Then again, I only transferred 20-30 mp3 files at a time...and waited a few seconds in between transfers. A friend told me that this is the way to go when you are using USB 1.1.

4. Very intuitive to operate the mode functions. You can learn w/o reading the manual.

5. The blue bumper-edges of the player protect the sensitive corners from damage. This also allows the player to not slide around on a smooth surface. You can also place the player on its back or face and not worry about buttons being accidentally pressed.

6. Despite what the other reviews here say about the charge life of the 4 NiMH batteries, they are great! They last 8-10 hours easy! But, let's see how long that lasts.

7. The player will automatically shut off when not in use. Always a great feature which saves power.

8. Fast-forward and rewind work great! No complaints.

9. I travel with my player a lot...and it never skips or shuts off! Very travel friendly!

(Neutral)
1. Housing for the batteries is very small and the batteries are tightly encased. In case you don't know...those two silver vertical "tubes" in between the blue-bumpers is where the batteries are housed (2 for each side). To remove the batteries requires a delicate hand, or you may crack the housing. But it's almost unavoidable with such a small player design.

2. Despite what was written in the product description here on Amazon about the pause feature, there is a pause button; you can even see it in the expanded picture. And yes, the pause button works fine.

3. The so called "grinding" sound the HD makes is not very loud. It's more like a "clicking" sound.

4. The LCD display is fine; no complaints.

5. The carrying case and head-phones are a nice addition.

6. The 9V AC adapter is small...and boy, can it get hot when plugged in!

7. Something odd...when I opened the box, the carrying case and bumper-edges reeked like benzene, or some fuel like that. Weird...

(Negative)
1. I don't like the fact that Archos solely recommends the use of the NiMH batteries. By the way, these NiMH batteries are rechargeable and output 1.2V. I'd much rather prefer that the unit was compliant with 1.5V batteries...which are much more affordable and available.

2. The owner's manual (English version) has many grammatical errors and a few inconsistencies. It is poorly laid out, and takes a few readings to fully grasp what they are trying to say. It makes me think that it was written by someone whose native language is not English.

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I recently purchased an Archos Jukebox STUDIO 20 and am very pleased with it. I get at least six hours per battery charge, have loaded over 15,000 minutes of music, and carry it with me everywhere. But there are a few things I was not aware of, or was mislead, before purchasing it. Here they are:
1) This unit DOES NOT record from any source. The only way to load music is plug it in (USB) to a computer and drag-drop your MP3s. The Archos Jukebox RECORDER 20 will record from any line source but the STUDIO 20 does not have onboard encoding. If you want the Recorder you have to pay extra.
2) The manual is the worst I've ever seen. Extra help has to be found on-line, but most of the controls seem very intuitive to me, so I've not read too much yet.
3) It doesn't do well in heat (direct sun for long periods) and it heats up _a lot_ when charging. I'd suggest you unplug it after about 4 hours.
4) You can't create playlists on the unit. The accompanying MusicMatch software allows you to create and transfer playlists... but it's not the easiest to use.

And last - the screen (11 or 12 characters wide) makes reading filenames kinda hard. Keep your track names short or else you will have a heck of a time browsing your library!
All in all I'm in love with it and, as I said, it comes with me everywhere!

20GBs worth of data in this little hard drive huh? Sadly enough, that's bigger than my hard drive on my computer. What am I to do with all this space you ask? Well, instead of 128kbs mp3 files, why not 192kbs instead? The quality of the music will be THAT much better! :-)

I was looking at the iPod of course but it's twice the cost of the archos. It's slimmer, but you'd have to get a firewire card, something I don't have on my ancient PC and I'm not about to shell out any extra moolah to get one. USB is perfectly fine for me. I was able to transfer 1 GB worth of mp3s in about 15 mins. I can't even imagine how much faster a firewire transfer would be, but for the price of the archos, 15 mins is perfectly acceptable.

So down to the nitty gritty. The headphones, like many others have attested to, are complete garbage, totally incapable of withstanding any bass whatsoever. So please do yourself a favor and just toss them to the wayside and get a decent pair of earbuds, head phones, anything. The clarity and crispness the sound is absolutely brilliant with the proper headphones. I have hooked it up to the speakers in my car using the line out. Sound quality is that of the original CD. Just keep in mind to disregard the recommendation that the instruction booklet tells you about encoding it at a bitrate of 128kbs. That's not good enough. Go for at least 192kbs. With this much disk space, just do it. Don't ask questions. :-)

The instructions say to charge up the unit for 8-10 hours before the first use and that's something you should really follow. It took me a good 11 hours to fully charge that thing up. I couldn't wait so I played with it at 8 hours charge and while transferring files, it looked as though everything worked fine, but when I played them back, the player froze. This is also another reason why you should plug in the AC adaptor while transferring files. After that I was ready to go. Again, make sure you plug in the AC adaptor while you're transferring files just to make sure you don't get any errors. Better safe than sorry. When you're done, don't just unplug it. Instead, make sure you eject the jukebox properly. In my case, I'm using XP, so I just right click on the icon and stop it.

Navigation: pretty intuitive. Depending on how you set up your directories, you should be able to find your files very easily. The only reason why I didn't give it a full 5 is because you don't have a separate volume button. The only way to change the volume is to go through the menu, but it's not that big a deal, two clicks and you're there. It would still be nice to have a separate button for the volume, but for this price, I can live with it.

What more can I say? I love my Jukebox and think I've made a great choice in buying this unit. Best bang for your buck!

The Archos Jukebox 20, thats 20 Gigabytes, is simply the ultimate mp3-player. But since you can store not just audio, but video, photos and files, it's also the ultimate portable storage device.

As a satisfied owner of the Archos 6GB jukebox, I knew I could have upgraded it, customized it via third party, but that didn't seem like the best idea. As soon as I saw this 20GB factory built Jukebox, I knew I made the right decision, and put the 6GB on auction along with some other portable storage devices.

Why? The Jukebox 20 does it all, with quality and with an unbeatable price.

I bought this player 2.5 years ago. I've used it hard, both as an external hard drive, and as an MP3 player. I'm a soldier, took it to Iraq with me last year. It easily survived the cold of winter and the >120degree summer heat. I ran outdoors with it at least 5 days per week, as well as running it through powered speakers. Took it with me to the field. It's been dropped, used on multiple computers without installing the Archos drivers (Windows XP seems to handle it fine), run the batteries to not holding a charge and replacing them, shipped in military hold baggage back and forth internationally. I can't praise this unit enough. I'll use it until it dies, then buy whatever Archos is producing at the time.

BTW, the 2 people who had iPods in my unit had them cease to function while they were over there. Just not as durable, I guess.

...

Now that thats out of the way..The Archos 20 player has many pros, and a few cons. Among all, is the ease of transfering your cd collection to the machine. Just load up the software provided, direct it do the new player (which will show up as a new harddrive on your pc) and press the record button. Within 4-5 minutes you have your cd already placed in its own folder ready for playing. Play-lists are easy, just use the software, its pretty simple. The sound is great, dont listen to people that say its bad, all you gotta do is play with the bass and treble. The controlls on the machine are a bit wierd, but within 5 min. I was flying around, navigating all my cds and the tracks within. I organize it by band name/cd/track/title. Lastly, dont mix and match and move things around alot, because just like a normal harddrive, it will get cluttered and errors will start to occur. And if you have a problem, also like a HD, just run scan disc and fix the errors. Thats all, e-mail at coolsk8two@aol.com for questions.

The only reason it does not get 5 stars, is i feel that unless you know alot about computers, how they work, and can figure gizmos out for your self (the instructions are worthless) than this might not be the player for you. But if you are all of the above, than I highly recomend the Archos JukeBox 20.