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.

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