I have an Archos Jukebox Recorder. Piece of crap. Sure, I guess it all looks good, but in use it's just plain crap. I don't know how the people here who have it are having different experiences.

I got mine last Christmas, and defended its features over the iPod. Admittedly, I wanted a portable MP3 player that could record, so the ipod was out of the question.

After using the thing, The software is buggy as hell, the display is crap even with the light on, the form factor simply feels cheap, and many of the things the company says you can do on the player is either not actually possible, or it's incredibly hard to do. They say that you can make a playlist without computer access. Well, following the only instructions I could find - an online message board FAQ, I could not get it to work.

The player has inconsistent behavior, such as wierd display errors where the entire display will be shifted down about 3 lines.

Pros- I guess the sound was pretty good, the songs played normally, and the recording quality was pretty good, considering, but that's only if you had a loud enough input. if you had an unamplified input, you'd get about as much hard drive noise as you do source.

My dad recently asked me for ideas on what portable player he should buy. His iPod ships tomorrow.