Fresh-Out-the-Box!

My MP3 player November 24, 2003

I’ve had my Archos Jukebox Recorder 20 since January 2002. I did a fair amount of research before my purchase, and am still confident that I have the best portable MP3 player available for my requirements.

The first 6 months of ownership were OK- there were some annoying traits, such as the audible background noise when the volume was low, the terrible quality when recording through the onboard microphone. The main peeves were the fact that if you turned off in the middle of a 80 minute seamless mix MP3, it would restart at the start of the track- there was no way to resume, and the inability to random play whole directory trees as you can in Winamp. But nothing was too bad, it was certainly a lot better than the Sony MiniDisc that had made it round Thailand with me for 2 and a half months; a little bigger, but the fact that it held 20 Gigabytes of music (or any other computer file I cared to store on there) was the real winner. That’s equivalent to 300 or more MiniDiscs- that’s a lot of money to buy, and a lot of weight and extra stuff to be carrying around.

Things start to get better

So I carried on with the standard set up for a while. Then, after some searching on Google I discovered the Fun MP3 players website, and in particular the forum on there. What I discovered on there, was the beginning of the RockBox project.

Using RockBox took things to a new level. It’s on open source project written by a bunch of enthusiasts worldwide. They were fed up with Archos having an under spec interface and generally having software that didn’t live up to the potential of the harware. So people hassled Archos in France, to make the source code of the operating system available so that others could improve the general operation, inturn making their harware more usable and sought after. They took the usual corporate head in the sand approach and refused.

Not to be discouraged, these enthusiasts started figuring out how the thing worked for themselves. The great thing about the Archos is that when new firmware (the software that tells the player how to work) was released, al lthe owner need do is download it from the Archos website, plug the Archos into their PC or Mac and drop the downloaded file straight onto the Archos. Next time the Archos is restarted it checks to see if a firware file is available. If so it loads that instead of the base operating system that’s embedded into the device at the factory. So this firmware file was easily available, allowing the enthusiats to figure out how what it did and how it did it. Collaborating over the internet and using the invaluable Sourceforge as the workbench

Upgradeable
It’s possible to upgrade the Archos- to put a larger capacity hard drive in there. The instructions are all here.

The future

When I get some spare $$$ I plan to stick a larger hard drive in there. This is pretty easy when you follow the instructions

TBC