Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
94 of 97 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great sound with heaps of storage, December 25, 2001
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.
|
|
|
32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Once you discover the tricks, a best buy!, January 12, 2003
Firstly, to look at the many negative comments would scare most people out of ever buying any H/D MP3 player. To be fair, I have fully read everything there is to read about this product, as well as competitors. Grass is always greener, and it is true here as well. Bottom line, all have both great and horrible reviews. What they have in common is that newer manufactured units have appeared to resolve many of the issues.Now to specifics. I purchased my Studio 20 two months ago. I have had absolutely no hardware issues whats so ever. I do agree that the documentation is the worse I have seen, and the onboard firmware programming leaves much to be desired. I have suffered many software lock-ups, poor sound, bad navigation, and everything else others have spoken about. However, I found a fix that changed all of that...... I located a Archos users group for both the recorders and players. This group of programmers numbering hundreds have rewritten the firmware code, and the result is the difference between night and day. No more lock-ups, sound issues fixed, navigation is awesome, and about 80 percent of everything people found so hateful about this unit is gone. The best part, is they have full and complete information concerning their firmware from a software point of view. Immagine, an owners manual of 30 pages (Yes, all in english) listing everything to the smallest detail. This includes hundreds of experts you can IRC at anytime for questions. Best of all, this modification is free, easy to install, and doesn't violate the units warranty. To locate the web-site, go here: http://rockbox.haxx.se/ I also recommend that you look at their daily builds. You see, each day, their programmers are developing new changes in the firmware which make it more powerful, capable, and user friendly. This is as much fun to see the changes as it is to use the unit. At any rate, I fully understand the anger of those who have suffered hardware failures. This seems to concern those units built from post time to the mid 2002's. I also know the Archos people are about as easy to find as tax break. If you are willing to get past that, then the firmware change will make a believer out of you as it has me, and litterally the thousands of people like me who log onto their web-site daily! Enjoy!
|
|
|
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
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)
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
