Sorry, been mostly offline for the better part of the last week. Lots of stuff going on — home, work and play — and just not enough time to do it all.
My Archos Jukebox Studio 10 arrived on Friday (pretty good as I took the free shipping and Amazon estimated it would arrive anywhere from the 19th to the 21st). Charged it overnight and loaded it up with about 50 of my CDs on Saturday. I back up my CDs to MP3 at a fairly high bit rate — generally VBR with a min of 160 — but they only took up about half of the 10G I have available.
Just about the best part, though, is Rockbox — an Open Source replacement for the firmware for most of the Archos line. I didn’t know about Rockbox when I bought the thing so that wasn’t a part of the reason I bought it, but the firmware adds a lot of function and the support from that group of people is just phenomenal. If you’re thinking about buying a portable MP3 player/recorder, I’d suggest you seriously consider Archos! It’s not the best or sexiest or coolest hardware around but you can’t beat the support. Maybe there are similar things around for some of the other hardware like Creative, I dunno, but Rockbox is aces in my opinion.
And to think, I just kind of happened across it while looking for information about the jukebox online. Sometimes the Internet is a wunnerful thaing!