|Forum|Articles|Archos Review. By Anubis     Several months ago I finally decided to get an MP3 player. Because I intended to only use it at home, and not take it with me jogging or in the car, a hard disk based MP3 player seemed to be the logical choice. My only requirement was that the MP3 player be Mac compatible. Unfortunately at the time this narrowed my options to the Ipod, the Nomad Jukebox and the Archos Jukebox. The Ipod was not an appealing choice because of its high price, its requirement of firewire, its lack of PC compatibility, and the fact that it was SDMI* compliant. The Nomad was relatively solid, but it was also SDMI compliant, plus it was bulky and ugly. The Archos seemed to be the best choice of the three, it was made in France and therefore was not SDMI compliant, but there were numerous reports from the field that it was highly prone to hard drive corruption. In the end I got the Archos, and here are my findings. Hardware The Archos Jukebox Recorder is built around a six gigabyte IDE laptop hard drive, and has two megabytes of ram. The display is a 1 X 1.5 inch backlit dot matrix LCD, though small, the characters are easy to read. Controls consist of the standard joypad for playback control, two action buttons, and three soft buttons that correspond to menus that appear onscreen. The units ports consist of the standard headphone jack, a type A usb connector, a digital signal out connector for high end stereos, a line in connector for recording off of other media, and a nine volt DC in jack. The unit uses four AA sized NI-MH rechargeable batteries for power. Fournately the batteries can be recharged within the unit, as removing them requires a screwdriver and divine intervention from the Qizzath Saddarth. In addition to the MP3 player, the box contained an instruction manual (that was pretty poor), a set of headphones, a minijack to RCA adapter, a software installation disk, two sets of batteries (nice), an A-A usb cable, and a blue neoprene carrying case that I have never used Installation Installation was easy on both the Mac and the PC. On the Mac running OS 9.04 all I had to do was run the driver install program on the included CD and restart the machine, the Archos then showed up on the desktop as another hard drive. Windows ME installation went smoothly as well, the add hardware wizard found the drive on startup and installed the new drivers without me even having to direct it to a file on the CD. The unit then showed up as a hard drive in Windows Explorer. Since the unit acts as a normal hard drive to the computer, you can make directories and copy any files you want to it, not just MP3s. This was extremely useful to me, as it allowed me to copy files from the PC to the Mac that were too large to fit on a floppy. An added nerdy feature of the OS on the Archos is its ability to read and display text files, so you could, for example, be able to copy a list of contacts over to the Archos and use it as a pseudo PDA. I suppose this is as good a time as any to say that the included MP3 player software, MusicMatch, sucks harder than Cleopatra 2525. It requires an active internet connection to listen to music on your local hard drive, so it will attempt to dial out, over and over again, whenever it is active. It has spam banners, a take over interface, and it will not let you encode MP3s at 192k unless you pay MusicMatch more money. Even taking all of that away, it is hard to use, all the real MP3 player software like Soundjam and iTunes are light years ahead of it in the category of not sucking. PLAYBACK The interface on the Archos mimics a List View / Windows Explorer directory list based on the files and folders stored on the unit, this means that if you already had a file/folder system on your hard drive for organizing MP3s, you can copy it to the Archos unit and use the same system on the internal OS. There are several different play modes available, by far the most useful is the "Shuffle" mode, which plays the contents of the selected folder in a random order. Sadly it is not a true random play, songs that have already been played are not removed from the playlist. There is also a "Scan" mode that will play the first 30 seconds of every song in a folder. I suppose this might be useful if you had been given a folder of MP3s by someone and you wanted to quickly determine which ones were worth keeping, but I have never used it. The Archos also supports playlists, you can make playlists with the corpulent suckware that comes with the player, but they are just text files so once you have made one playlist to reverse engineer, you can throw the crippleware away and write the rest of them in a text editor. You can also make playlists with the units built in OS, however it will require lots of time consuming button pushing. Playback quality was generally good, there was a barely perceptible hum during silences, but it was hardly noticeable when music was playing. The included headphones may be cool looking, but they lack depth, and do not sound that good as the 2 dollar headphones that came with my Sony walkman. When plugged into an amp and a set of fairly high end magnetic planar speakers, sound quality was indistinguishable from that played from the computer. Assuming the hard drive does not fail anytime soon, it would appear I made the right choice. *Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) compliant MP3 players only allow one way copying of MP3s, they can be copied onto the player, but not back off again.   Syntax Error/:|Forum|Articles|