Perfect in theory
Written: Jun 10 '02
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Sound: |
 |
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
| Durability: |
|
|
| Portability: |
|
|
| Battery Life: |
 |
|
|
Pros: Encodes MP3 from microphone or cd-player, hundreds of hours
Cons: Difficult to operate, heavy, buggy, noisy recording
The Bottom Line: Really need a recorder, and not just a player? DAT, minidisk or taperecorder doesn't do it for you? Wait for better MP3 recorder than this.
|
|
|
| ctoffer's Full Review: Archos Jukebox Studio (20 GB) MP3 Player |
This is it, I thought the first time I saw the Archos Jukebox Recorder (ARJ), finally an MP3 player that can record directly from CD-players and microphones. These features were the only reason I had bought a minidisk recorder one year ago. Now I had to have this new wonder.
But was it? MP3 is much better than MD if you only want to transfer sound from a computer to the player. The AJR i bought had a 6 GB disk, the later version has an unbeatable 20 GB and is USB2 compatible. (Great for us who think the that 1M per second is too slow)
The AJR work as an external hard drive, you can transfer all sorts of files but only play mp3 (and movies on the multimedia version). You copy and paste as between to regular hard drives.
but if that is all you want, you do not need the recorder. You can go with a regular MP3-player.
Recording
What is unique about the AJR is that it can record from any audio device. I wanted to use the mp3-recorder as I use my minidisk, to record from a mike or line-in for (semi) professional use. (Record interviews in near broadcast quality or to sample sounds for composing).
The built in mike is great if you want to record hard drive noises, but sucks for anything other use. As the unit comes without a mike input I plugged my battery driven Sony ECM-MS907 (which works well with my MD) in the line-in. Turning up the record level made the level ok, but the sound was kind of crappy with lots of noise (but far better than the built-in mike).
If you want to record anything more than personal memos go for something else.
The quality when recording from a cd player is acceptable, though. With this function you do not have to have a Internet connection to enjoy the advantage of mp3 (the size). The encoding in real-time works well and you can choose from seven different qualities (with 160 kbps at best which is enough to satisfy the fineschmeckers of mp3). You can even choose sampling rates from 48 kMHz and down. As a music-encoder the Archos Jukebox Recorder works well. The only downside is that you have to write artist, album and song title with the navigation buttons, (very time consuming).
There is also a digital input which should give you perfect recording if you have a cd player with digital output. I have not tried it out yet.
There is no way to cut the ending of a song in the recorder itself. If you want to cut away silence, you need at software on your PC. Hopefully Archos will include features like that in future updates.
Design.
The design of the jukebox is at best ‘different’. The recorder is as small at it can get. The four AA batteries goes on each side of the hard drive. Poor industrial design make me anxious every time I change batteries, it feels like I’m braking something.
The buttons are somewhat loose and made of plastic which gives the AJR a cheap look. The designer have even included an on button AND and off button. I wonder why.
The display is not that big and it is monochrome, but at least it is backlit.
The whole thing is quite heavy. 350 g (12,3 oz) is the official weight, but it is a hard drive.
The interface.
The menu is unnecessary difficult. It takes time to understand how to navigate through the different elements. The original software that came with the AJR had al lot of bugs, but upgrades are available on the net. (Not much help if you bought the thing because you don’t have an internet connection).
You have to organize the music in folders if you want to use the player. The small display only shows 6 song, and navigating through hundreds of songs will take time if you don’t have them organized.
Only recently they added a functional play list and queuing so you do not have choose one and one song. Playing was hell before but seems to work well now.
Bugs
There has been a lot of bugs with the AJR. With the original software there was a problem to find the files you had transferred from the pc in the player. This seems to be fixed. Recently I have had problems with the batteries. The standard AA size rechargeable batteries are probably not the best quality because they have included an extra pack of them. They have probably been charged 8 – 10 times and is now no good anymore.
And another thing: When you insert the battery eliminator, it starts to charge the batteries even though they are not rechargeable or if there are no batteries at all. This can only be stopped when you pull the plug. Doing this one time resulted in an error when I started the AJR, it refused to open. I ended up formatting the drive. It hung in the formatting process and the machine suddenly would not recognize the drive. Installing upgraded software (WinXP was not supported until recently) seems to have solved the problem for now.
But bugs have followed Recorder since I got it 5 moth ago. It seems that the folks at Archos have not had enough time testing their products before releasing them.
Other things
I tried jogging for a while and it works well (it has a 2 MB buffer) The AJR are just a bit too large to put in your pocket but it fits well on the belt with carrying pouch that comes with it. Archos claims the batteries last up till 10 hours. I think they are right the first time you use it but the batteries deteriorate rapidly. The charging time is unknown because the machine just keeps on charging even when the batteries are full.
I bought it directly from the Archos homepage. It all went smooth. The site includes upgrade drivers to both the Jukebox software and USB. The support pages are otherwise not very much of help when things go wrong (and believe me, they do)
(I bought the European version just in case there are differences.)
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 400 (20 MB)
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
ctoffer
|
|
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.