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10/29/2002 Archived Entry: "RockBox"

I have an Archos Jukebox Studio 20 MP3 player. I'm now very happy with it, but at first I was dissapointed.

I bought it back in February from Amazon. I wanted to use it on a vacation. It arrived 2 days before I left and was defective. I didn't send it back immediately, waiting until after my vacation. What I didn't know at the time was Amazon's 15 day return policy. Anyway, I called Archos tech support and had to ship the device for repairs. It turned out that the built in battery charger did not work. The new one arrived several weeks later and its been working great since.

The player runs for 6 or more hours on a full charge. I can usually get a full day's work in on a single charge. I recomend buying some better headphones though. The pair that it comes with were uncomfortable and didn't sound very good. Copying songs onto the player could not be easier. Just plug it in. I use Windows 2000 and it detected and installed automatically. Over the last couple of months I have filled the player with almost 20G of music. Nice!

Later, I saw an article on slashdot about an opensource replacement firmware for the player. The project is RockBox. I downloaded and installed the program. I was impressed with the features. With the standard firmware I had problems with the music skipping. After upgrading I haven't noticed any playback issues at all.

I just upgraded to the latest release, version 1.4. Wow! If I were archos, I would replace my firmware with RockBox. If you have an Archos, you should use RockBox.