Product Reviews

When Apple announced its iPod last autumn, it was received with the habitual whoops of delight by the Mac faithful. However, by that time the idea of a hard disk-based MP3 player was already old hat. Both Creative Labs and Archos had released their own versions a year earlier. Now, just as Apple gives birth to the second-generation iPod, Archos is already one step ahead.

Don't stop the music

The Jukebox Recorder 20 is a 20Gb version of the Jukebox Recorder 6000 we reviewed in August (see Reviews, 24 August 2001, p29). More than trebling the capacity means that, at a sampling rate of 128Kbits/sec - perfectly good for all but the most fussy audiophiles - the Jukebox can now hold up to 20,000 minutes of MP3s. To put this in context, if you could listen to the Jukebox non-stop, day and night, you wouldn't hear the same song twice for nearly two weeks.

The Jukebox Recorder 20 isn't just an MP3 player, though. Plug in a USB cable and it mounts on the Desktop as a hard disk. From here you can drag and drop any file or folder from your Mac to the Jukebox turning it into an effective portable hard disk or a handy backup device. In order to keep the menus clear of other file formats, only MP3 files and folders appear on the Jukebox's LCD screen.

The Jukebox Recorder is also the best way we've found to convert old vinyl records and cassette tapes to MP3 format. Simply plug the supplied audio cable into the back of your record player, enter in the track details and hit start. Our only grumble was the need to manually start and stop recording with each track. As well as recording from analogue sources, the Jukebox Recorder 20 features a digital in/out socket and a built-in microphone for recording speech.

In use, the Jukebox certainly sounds good. The headphones fit behind the neck and over the ear, and, despite being collapsible,

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are surprisingly comfortable and offer an impressive bass response.

Unfortunately, we were not so impressed with the Jukebox's usability. And the manual was inadequate in many instances, particularly when explaining how to create a playlist. It took several hours of trial and error to discover we had to hold the play button down over a track to select it for a playlist. Quite by accident, we also stumbled across the key-hold function - a feature the manual had failed to tell us even existed.

Navigate through the Jukebox's directory structure and further problems arise. MP3 files are listed by file name only and can't be searched for by artist or album name. In fact, the ID3 tags (the labels that contain artist, album and track details) created by some encoders, such as iTunes, aren't recognised.

As such, creating playlists on the Jukebox is fiddly and time consuming. To solve this, Archos supplies a copy of MusicMatch Jukebox to help manage MP3 files on a Mac. Unfortunately, playlists created with MusicMatch couldn't be exported to the Jukebox, and even copying individual MP3 tracks was easier to do directly from the finder.

Using iTunes made it easier to drag and drop MP3s straight from the iTunes window, which allowed them to be sorted before exporting. However, the same problems occurred as with MusicMatch when trying to export the playlists. To solve this problem, a member of the MacUser team has developed a piece of software called Jukester (www.vortex.co.uk/jukester), which makes creating and exporting playlists to the Archos Jukebox a great deal easier.

Power struggle

The Jukebox is capable of up to 10 hours playback between charges, and draws its power from four rechargeable AA batteries, which explains its brick-like size and weight. Unlike the iPod, which charges automatically when connected to a Mac, the Jukebox requires a separate power adaptor and can't be used while charging.

What's more, most Mac users will prefer the high-speed FireWire interface adopted by the iPod rather than the slow USB interface used by the Jukebox. However, the Jukebox is already USB 2.0 compliant so it will be just as fast in the long term.

Compared with Apple's new 10Gb iPod, the Jukebox Recorder 20 is certainly not as pretty, as portable or as usable. However, it has twice the capacity, can encode MP3s from virtually any audio source, costs £130 less and still manages to sound great.