Love it or hate it? Nah, it's just "ok"
Written: Mar 16 '02
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Pros: High Capacity at a reasonable price
Cons: User Interface is abysmal, weird lacking in many features
The Bottom Line: If you really want 20gb of space your options are slim. The Archos is as good as it needs to be, but not much more.
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| slackerdotcom's Full Review: Archos Jukebox Studio 20 MP3 Player |
It seems most of the other reviews for the Archos Jukebox Studio 20 are either gushing 5-star gloss fests or 1-star diatribes on all that is wrong with the mp3 format and this player in particular. I'm afraid that my sentiments don't run too strongly in either direction. Call me the middle ground.
I bought the player in a rush, with little time to research the options available. I found out at the last minute that an upcoming flight to Tokyo would place me in a rear row of the plane where EmPower ports are not available. This made my 3-hour battery capacity in my laptop insufficient to provide the 14 hours of mp3 playing I'd need for the flight.
Since capacity was my primary goal there weren't too many options available. There's still not much to choose from in the 20Gb size of the marketplace. The Archos unit seemed like a decent enough solution and the price was comfortably in "just buy it and see how it works out" territory.
Now that I've had a chance to get a feel for the unit, I can't really complain all that much. It does all the things I'd expect from a portable mp3 player and it indeed holds 20Gb of music. I was able to dump my entire CD collection onto the thing without having to be concerned about the space. In this it's quite satisfying. I'll never again sit on the plane and wish for a song which I hadn't thought to load up on my laptop before the trip.
The unit is not without its frustrations, though. For instance, the only way to shuffle tracks in different directories is to create a playlist using the supplied Windows software. However, a playlist is limited to just 999 tracks. With 20Gb of space, 999 seems like a very short-sighted limit for playlisting. The first thing I wanted to do with the unit was to create an "all tracks" playlist in order to shuffle all the tracks. Can't be done. One positive note: The playlists are simply text files, one filename per line with relative pathing. A soon as I figured that out, I ditched the visually-appealing but typically unstable windows MusicMatch software supplied with the unit.
The front-panel user interface is even worse. You can tell this thing was designed by the programmers. Even though it does what it needs, the designers seemed to choose the least obvious, most cumbersome route to each feature. The insanity of having to press right and left on the navigation disk to scroll up and down through the setup menus is just the beginning.
Am I happy? Sure, I guess. I've got every CD I've ever owned in a form-factor that fits in my pocket and runs for 10 hours on off-the-shelf rechargable batteries. That's a pretty nice place to be despite the interface and feature issues. That said, though, I'm ditching it as soon as there's a better alternative on the market. And a the Archos sets the bar pretty low for a competitor to surpass them.
There are firmware updates for free download from the Archos website, so it's not impossible (but probably optimistic) to hope that these issues will be addressed by the manufacturer.
I found the sound quality to be as expected. Not sure what the problem might be with the other reviewers who report terrible sound quality. Perhaps indicative of manufacturing quality control issues, but my sample of one is hardly sufficient to conclude anything.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 299
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Epinions.com ID:
slackerdotcom
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Member: David McNett
Location: Austin, TX, USA
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 5 members
About Me:
I use epinions account "nugget" now, not this one.
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