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I really like my Archos Jukebox 6000. Except for the bugs...and with each new version of the firmware (see below), the bugs seem to be fewer and fewer. I liked it so much that instead of returning it 'cause It wouldn't do what I wanted out of the box, I wrote a small utility that fixes a couple of the problems I had with it. The utility (of course) only works on the Mac. It is called MacEmThreeYou. It is free and can be downloaded here. Please read the rest of this page before using MacEmThreeYou. Version 1.0.4 ignores any file which it doesn't think is an MP3 file. This means it won't add icon files or other kinds of files which are stored along with the MP3 files on the Jukebox (including the archos.mod file). Version 1.0.3 limits the size of the playlist file so that it doesn't exceed the limits of the current firmware. If there are more than 250 songs, MacEmThreeYou will create multiple playlist files. The song count is not checked until the end of a folder so if you have all the songs for one album in each folder, the whole album will be in the same playlist. Version 1.0.2 fixes a bug which caused only one folder within each folder to be processed. MacEmThreeYou now correctly processes all folders and all sub-folders within them. Version 1.0.1 is now available and no longer renames the MP3 files as it builds the playlist because the 4.13e version of the firmware no longer has the file name comparison bug in it so all songs in a directory can be found by using their real names. The Archos Jukebox 6000 is a 6GB USB Hard Drive which is also an MP3 player. Very cool stuff and the price is right. The first problem I read about I will warn you about here. The manual says that the device can be reformatted on a Mac as a Macintosh HFS volume. Don't do it. It can be done, but then the MP3 player hardware cannot read the hard drive. This turns the device into just an external USB hard drive. The next problem I ran into was that there is no built in way to play all the music on the device (unless all the MP3s are in one directory - something I didn't really want to do. This can be solved with a playlist, so I tried to create a playlist. Well, apparently the software that ships with the device for the Mac doesn't create a playlist file that the device can read. Archos claims they are working on this, but I am impatient so I wrote a little program called MacEmThreeYou for the Mac. MacEmThreeYou will make a DOS style M3U playlist which will work with the Archos Jukebox 6000. Select all the folders at the root of the Jukebox hard drive: |
At this moment, the latest version of firmware on the archos website is 4.53g. There is a new discussion list for owners of the Archos Jukebox located here. |
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and drop them on MacEmThreeYou. It will create a file called " Playlist.m3u" at the root of the Jukebox hard drive. I put a space in the name so that it sorts to the top of the list of folders. With versions of the archos firmware before 4.53d there are numerous problems loading long playlists. With version 4.53d I have been able to load playlists as long as 265 songs. The current limits of the archos firmware are supposed to be: • up to 299 songs in a playlist • up to 999 songs in a folder • folders can be nested up to 20 levels deep I have exchanged a number of e-mails with archos and they have been very responsive to my comments, bug reports and suggestions. |
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