Archos JBR Question

[ctoth666]

I have picked up one of these units, and there are drop out issues with uncompressed audio and it's just slow in general. Red light flashes incessantly. If I replace the 20GB with a 16GB SSD, what improvements can I expect?

[gevaerts]

I'm not sure uncompressed audio is expected to work on the old archoses. Does mp3 work well?

Things you could look at (in no particular order):
* Hardware issues, possibly with the hard drive. Does it behave strangely over USB?
* Bad settings that reduce available memory for buffering too much. Do you have the database, dircache, or voice files enabled? If so, try disabling them and see if that improves things.
* A bug in recent versions. The JBR isn't used by many people these days, so it's probably not impossible that there are some undetected issues in recent builds. Which version have you tried? It might be useful to test with older versions (you can find those at http://download.rockbox.org/release/). Note that recent versions definitely use more memory (the cost of more features...), so differences here might be due to that and not to a "real" bug.

Switching to an SSD should definitely make the entire system more responsive, and possibly also improve battery life.

[werich]

gevaerts is right. I used the JBR for years and back then there was no WAV support at all, due to its lacking CPU. It is operated by a programmable DSP which can only handle MP3 in- and output and some simple code.

Later the genius Rockbox team managed somehow to do the impossible (again) and implemented a sort of WAV support, but obviously the hardware is still too weak to run it reliable.