Please Help with Jukebox recorder 20

[cheapkelly]

I bought this used from my son when he wanted an MP3 player. The person put alot of rock n roll songs on it for him. Anyhow, he now has a sandisk  and my daughter has a Zune, which is a cinch to work and set up. We never put anymore songs on this after we got it. The cd was a bit scratched, but was jukebox. I went to ebay and seen my player on sale. I read the info and he said "upgraded to rockbox", etc. So... I figured that was the problem. I take it that I did it right, as when I first turn it on it says archos recorder os 1.28, but when I press the middle "play" button it says Rockbox 2.50. The different options are all different too, which are yours. Anyhow, all my music is in media player 10 (i think, it could be 11). It said with xp that it is "drag and drop". When I plug in my player, the player shows the usb is plugged in, but on  media player it says no device found. I am a TOTAL beginner with this stuff, so please be patient with me and use "every day" words. I don't know all the computer mumble jumbo yet. Is my recorder compatible with windows media player? If not, what can I download for free and how do I tranfer the songs?? Thanks in advance for your help. I can just go out and get a newer one pretty cheap, but I only want a player and this is 20 gb. I don't need all the bells and whistles of the new ones (pics, videos, etc), so I would like to get this working since it holds tons of songs. Thanks again!!

[scoz]

The beauty of Archos products, or at least these ones, is they don't require any additional software to copy tracks to them.  When you plug it into your computer is is exactly the same as pluging in any other external hard drive.  It will appear as another drive on your computer  When it says "drag and drop" it means exactly that.  Open up "windows explorer" or use "my computer" and just "drag and drop" the files from your computer to it.  

The cd that comes with them did include "Music match"  which was an MP3 player thing like WMP but is not needed at all.  In fact I'd say avoid at all costs.

[AlexP]

The beauty of Archos products, or at least these ones, is they don't require any additional software to copy tracks to them.  When you plug it into your computer is is exactly the same as pluging in any other external hard drive.  It will appear as another drive on your computer  When it says "drag and drop" it means exactly that.  Open up "windows explorer" or use "my computer" and just "drag and drop" the files from your computer to it.

Which is of course true of any DAP with rockbox installed.  That's (part of) the beauty of rockbox!

[cheapkelly]

OK, please be patient as I'm computer illiterate, well, maybe ONE step above that. LOL Can I use windows media player ? Is it compatible for that, or do I just drag the actual "folders" for each cd I have? Thanks for the help so far. I'm sure I"m making this harder than what it really is.

[scoz]

I've no idea if it works with WMP or not, and mine's currently not working at all so I can't find out.  

Just use explorer to drag and drop what you want to put on to your player.  MP3 only with rockbox 2.5 mind you.  If you get a more recent version WAV files'll work too.

[cheapkelly]

OK, I understand that so far. I believe that the songs are in wav file (the one that gets you more songs on a player). What can I use to change them over to mp3, or will I have to redo all my songs?

[scoz]

it sounds like they are probably WMA (windows media audio) rather than WAV.  I guess it's possible to convert from WMA to MP3, though I've never done it and in general I'd say not to do it as the sound quality will be bad.  

To be honest I'd just re-rip the ones that I really want on my player as MP3s from the CDs.

[AlexP]

It is possible to transcode from anything to anything, but it is a bad idea to go from one lossy format to another, as each encoder will throw away different parts of the track, and the result will sound much worse.  I know it is a pain, but you are much better off ripping again to the format you want (such as mp3).

[cheapkelly]

ARGGGHHH!!!! Is there NO other way? My daughter has a zune. Can she download all her songs off that and put that in a media player? ALthough I "think" her songs are also not in MP3. She has them all from media player. I have over 1000 songs, with many cd's borrowed from friends and such. It'll take forever. I suppose I can just try one song or one album just to see if it sounds good. I'm not super, super, super into music to have the very, very best quality. After all, the wav or the wma is supposed to have poor quality, and those are fine with me. Any other suggestions?

[AlexP]

wav is perfect quality, it is the uncompressed data.  It sounds perfect.  That is why a track is about 10 mb per minute in wav.

wma will sound fine at the correct bitrates, but transcoding from one lossy format to another WILL lose quality.  If you don't mind that, then by all means transcode.  Why not try it and see if you can live with it?

The archos has a dedicated chip to decode mp3 and a very slow main CPU that is not fast enough to decode on its own.  We cannot make it decode any other formats (well, technically it is possible to reprogram the chip that decodes the MP3s, but the sake of this argument we cannot).  With the archos you are stuck with mp3 or wav.  You could go quite happily from wma to wav with no loss of quality as wav is lossless, but it will never be better than the input quality.

[pixelma]

I'm a bit confused whether we are talking about wav files (uncompressed, "what CDs use") or wma files (compressed music files, usually prepared with windows media player). The differences and the question which format would work with Rockbox on a Jukebox Recorder is already covered but there is one thing I'd like to mention about the wav files in case you have some of those.

While you can listen to uncompressed wav files on this player with Rockbox it is currently not very convenient unless you have only very big files, e.g. one album in one file, because wav playback is only a plugin on these Archos players - more a demo of the possibilities. This means you can only chose one file to play, you don't get your while playing screen, don't have live sound controls (it just uses what you had set before), you can not seek or skip and after playback is finished you'll get back to the file browser and would have to chose the next file to play.

[cheapkelly]

Help. I checked in windows media player under type file, and many are checked, but unfortanately wav or mp3 are now. It's wma that was checked, along with others. Is there a free program that can convert them all to mp3, or if I make my "playlist" can it be done that way? I supposed if I would have checked them all to begin with, i would have been OK? HELP!!!

[AlexP]

There are many many programs that can transcode, check google.  For what it is worth, I like foobar2000.

[cheapkelly]

OK, here is the thing. I did manage to download one transcoder. What I did just to try it was to drag and drop what I wanted done. Then it said what it was , which I clicked wma, then what you want it to be, which I clicked mp3. I did about 3 or 4 albums just to see how it worked. For some reason, I couldn't just find a folder for the whole library, or will I have to do each one? I even managed to get iton my player after almost a year playing with it. YAH MEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Anyhow, how I did it was right clicked on each album folder and "sent" it to the E file. The only problem I had is now the player has 2 songs , one the mp3 which plays and the  other that doesn't. Is there an easier way to do this, or do I have to go file by file, then just delete all the wma files? It's not hard, just time consuming. Please let me know.  I couldn't find the one that bambi recommended, unless I typed it in wrong. Any other program that you guys like that is EASY!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks to all for the help so far!  IF i do google it, what exactly do I put in? Transcoder, coder, codecs, what?? HELP!

[AlexP]

http://www.foobar2000.org/

This is getting off topic for rockbox now.