Archos Jukebox: 21st Century Life-Support
A week last Sunday I turned 29 (less than a year to go ‘til the Big Three-Oh! Poop!). My present from my brother, sister-in-law and nephew was an Archos Jukebox Recorder 20, an MP3 player with, in reality, 18.6 GB of hard disk space. Mind you, this is still larger than the hard disks of our two current computers combined, going to prove that the rise of home computers with disk capacities approaching a quarter of a Terabyte has nothing to do with people writing longer Word documents ;) As an aside — has the RIAA(Recording Industry Ass. of America) considered the positive impact of P2P on the hard disk and computer industry? I thought not!
When I was in the sixth-form at school, I bought the early-nineties equivalent of the iPod: a slimline, powder-blue Aiwa personal stereo. Yes, I know it sounds a bit QEFTSG(Queer Eye for the Straight Guy), but they were cooler than Sony (at the time) and had better build quality. Oh, and they were barely bigger than a cassette case. And they cost "only" £60: a lot of money for a 16-year-old, but still cheaper than an iPod.
I would wear my Aiwa on the school bus, and still be listening as I walked into the form room at the start of the school day. I would be greeted with comments like "Tim’s got his life-support on again, then!" I would guess that I was being talked about, and remove my headphones just in time to catch the comments.
I sold the Aiwa less than a year later for £50 — not a bad residual, really, making it even more iPod-like.
Anyway — I digress. I’ve ripped several CDs (albeit only the tip of the music collection’s iceberg) to 160Kbps MP3, and transferred over some other MP3s and OGGs from my work machine — and I’ve still only used 2.3GB.
Being a Mac user, I’m finding the Archos to be a little limiting in terms of synchronising with iTunes, which only supports the iPod. The Jukebox mounts just fine as an external hard disk, though, and it’s not as if I have the room to store 20GB 18.6GB of music on either of the main computers; if I did, then synchronising would be a better option. I will one day buy that 120GB hard disk and put it in my 4-year-old Mac. (PC users: Hah! Try doing that in an old x86 box. I know, you probably will be able to, but my own experience of upgrading outdated PC hardware is frustrating, to say the least. Say ‘Hello’ to BIOS incompatibilities!)
Sound quality is good, but is obviously dependant on the bitrate with which you encode your music. As I said, I’m doing all new stuff at 160 Kbps, which for me is a good compromise between file size and quality. I have some older 192 Kbps files, as well as 128s downloaded off the web (Mostly Epitonic.com — ‘tis trés legal). The fact that Nick supplied a pair of Sennheiser in-ear headphones helps, as they are some of the best earbuds available, and they’re reasonably priced, too.
The Epitonic+Not-An-iPod issue brings me to my final point: I don’t doubt that I could fill the Jukebox many times over, even by just ripping our CD collection and not going anywhere near my vinyl and old tapes. So far, though, I have (with one exception — my Coldcut tunes) just transferred entire albums onto the AJBR(Archos Jukebox Recorder), because playlist managment is (I’ve found so far) not as good as iTunes and (apparently) the iPod. Thus a folder structure of artist/album works best for me (until I get to grips with the AJBR’s m3u-creation functionality) and artists which only have a single track, many of which I have downloaded from Epitonic, will become frustrating to listen to.