Based in France, Archos have been stirring up quite a bit of interest over here in the UK marketing a whole range of "Jukebox" products. With MP3 being almost as popular as CD's now, MP3 players are also selling quite well. So far there have been several incarnations of MP3 player:

• A small lightweight player utilizing either internal memory or external flash memory, generally between 16mb and 512mb in size.
• A CD-player capable of decoding MP3's, therefore up to 700mb in size but physically larger than a dedicated MP3 player.
• An MP3 device utilizing a 2.5" harddrive with possibility of storing 5-20gb of mp3's depending on manufacturers choice.

All of these have uses in the consumer market today, for different people with different needs.

Today, we take a look at the Archos Jukebox FM Recorder 20.

If you are familiar with the other Archos ranges, you will notice that this incarnation of the Jukebox Recorder adopts the rather more pleasant aesthetics of the Multimedia Jukebox. Measuring in at 113 x 79 x 30 mm - this is not something to be kept in your back pocket but is still a reasonably small size.

So what does this product come with? Well after emptying out the box I found the following:

• An MP3 Player (duh!)
• A wall charger
• A USB cable
• Carrying pouch
• Headphone jack to twin phono (RCA) cable.
• A set of headphones
• Manual, Driver CD
• Musicmatch Jukebox (full version)

The first thing I did was the plug the the mp3 player into the charger and charge the battery. It uses two lithum-ion batteries which are included and installed, but can be replaced quite easily with the twist of a screwdriver. These batteries must be what keeps the weight at 290g which is 60g less that the original Jukebox which used NiMh batteries. It has a playback time of 12 hours. Which is more than enough for most people.

I then plugged the device into my machine using the supplied USB cable and noted that in fact it will charge from the USB power. Windows XP picked up on the device automatically and mounted it ready for use as a normal hard drive. Within minutes I was copying my MP3 collection to the device on the superfast USB 2.0.

After I had transferred a few of the files, I safely removed the device so that no data was lost and turned on the device. It took about 8-10 seconds to boot up, which can be a little annoying. Once on, I was presented with an LCD screen (112x64 pixels) backlit with 4 green LED's. This is an ample size for doing what is necessary.

I then plugged in the earphones provided. The earphones wrap round the back of your head and over your ears and can fold up by the use of 4 hinges in the plastic. The sound quality was actually quite pleasant with a good range through all frequencies. Comfort was also taken care of as these fitted very nicely and didn't cause any discomfort even after many hours of use. I much preferred these to those in-ear solutions often bundled - they have a tendency of hurting quite quickly. A volume adjuster was included on the cable for ease of use.

There is thankfully the option to adjust bass, treble and loudness in the interface to get the perfect balance. There is even a bass boost for all you bass fans.

Playback

Finding your music is easy as long as you have structured it well. I have a folder for artists and then inside each folder for artists, a folder for an album. If you have a lot of loose files, you may find the system a little annoying as there is no quick way to find your files, i.e no search or index by letter. This is perhaps a function that Archos could include in their next firmware update?

File Structure of My MP3's from inside Windows

Once you find want you want to play, you can either just play that file - or create a play list. What I generally found myself doing was playing a whole folder (usually an album). The OS scans that folder and puts all files inside it (including files inside subfolders) into the playlist. You then have to start the play list. It would have been nice if the playlist then started automatically, but it is only a few button presses to get it going. You can of course save playlists and edit them at any point.

Playback is as good as the quality of the MP3. When plugged into my room speakers, I found it hard to tell the difference between the output from my PC and the output from this device. Most people will use the analogue output but for those with the more expensive equipment, digital I/O is also available.

One thing I found slightly annoying, was that you couldn't play from the device while also having the USB cable plugged in.

Recording

The preferred method for getting music onto your music player, is to digitally rip them straight from a CD using a PC, perhaps with the bundled Musicmatch Jukebox and then copy them straight across. Chances are, if you are reading this then you probably have a computer and this is possible - but if you haven't got a computer, you can still transfer your music across without ever touching one. Using the analogue or digital in - you can record from say your CD player straight to MP3 in realtime!

For instance, if recording from CD - one would select the source as line in and press record. When each track finishes, you would press the "next" button and it will start a new file. This is a little annoying, some sort of detection of when a song ends may have been nice (a lot of minidisc recorders do this).

There is also an inbuilt microphone which is perfect for making notes to yourself or recording meetings. There is the unfortunate annoyance of the microphone picking up the clicks and whirrs of the hard-drive every now and then. You can hear this in this clip of my friend Jon playing guitar (1.62mb).

The obvious way around this, is just to plug in an external microphone.

Radio

What makes this device unique from others, is the ability to listen to and record radio. Although it is of course quite possible to just plug in an external radio and record from that - using their system it makes capturing songs on the fly a possibility.

When listening to the radio, it is not always possible to know if you will like the song until it is say 20 or 30 seconds into it - at which point recording would be waste as you will have missed a large chunk of it. This is why Archos have introduced retro-record. This is Archos' buzz-word for a 30 second buffer. If you decide that you do in fact want to record a song up to 30 seconds into it, 30 seconds will already be buffered and ready. This means capturing that latest hit song is a walk in the park.

Storage

In the manual, they quote the following:

300 hours of MP3 music at 128 kbps
450 hours of radio recording at 96 kbps
700 hours of voice recording at 64 kbps
or 20 GB of data.

Now, personally I find that 128kbps is no-where near good enough. The quality is close to CD but not quite. I use a high rated VBR, which means you can expect less than 300 hours. At the end of the day 20gb is 20gb no matter how you look at it - whether this is file storage or MP3's of any bitrate.

For everyone?

I have taken this device everywhere with me. I took it to band practices and sat it in the room and played back the recordings at later points so we can improve. I listened to music on the bus, when walking and countless other occasions.

I personally wear combat trousers the majority of the time, with those large side pouches that make carrying things so much easier. Most things will go in there and I won't even notice it - but when walking I found the Archos Recorder would shift around quite a lot and became a little uncomfortable - it was far from transparent. At the same time it would not really fit into my jean pockets without feeling very uncomfortable. Despite it's ability to take shock quite well, it is not a very portable solution if you like to go jogging or cycle being quite cumbersome in comparison to devices such as this cheap £25 device:

This is a very light weight mp3 player, which takes 2xAAA batteries. Just plug in a compact flash card and away you go. I am mentioning this product not because it's good, as it has a lot of problems (very limited functionality, batteries often move enough to cause a reset etc.). But the concept behind the device is much better for active people as it is hardly noticeable. If this person is you, perhaps something such as the Creative Muvo is more your of tea.

When in a fixed location it was fine, I would just put it on a desk and I could listen until my heart was content.

Conclusion

In summary this device is:

• MP3 Player and Recorder
• FM Radio and Recorder (with retro-record)
• External 20gb harddrive

So all in all, this is quite a useful device to have. The only qualm I have with this device is the price. Ebuyer currently do a 20gb laptop harddrive for £90. On the Archos website, this MP3 player is £329 - I find it hard to see how they can justify the price difference. I also find it strange that on the American site, it is advertised as $299, which works out at ~£200. Why the big price difference?

I give this a Spode's Abode recommended award:

Spode