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Hard Drive Hack On Archos 6000 MP3 Player
Richard Holdman writes: "A few weeks ago the Archos Jukebox 6000 was realeased and only comes in a 6GB version. For those wanting to upgrade to a larger drive you might want to check out this page. It explains how to take your Archos Jukebox 6000 apart and install a 20GB hard drive. Be warned though, it will void your warranty." Or, you could pick up a Toshiba Libretto on eBay and pop in a 20GB drive for an MP3 jukebox you can telnet from.
Juan Epstein sucks my many penises!
That archos is only 4.5x3x1 inches big. You have to use a lap top hard drive. 20gig is the biggest 9.5mm drive they make at this time.
I have a toshiba libretto 70ct, i bought it about two years ago and about all it's good for is a portable mp3 player, especially for a car.
Yep, mine gets attention from women and technophiles (both sexes). The only problem I have is that it's getting too slow. I could *really* do with one of the newer ff1100V models to replace my aging 50CT, but I haven't been able to find one in the UK. JPD are the only people I can find to import a Japanese one, and they're quoting extortionate prices for it :-(
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Emphasis on the word "might" because you won't know until you've spent the money. Playing MP3s using Linux might give poor sound quality.
/. readers who have great sounding MP3 players that they built out of components they found in the trash or bought for $0.35 on eBay. I submit that these folks are simply *lucky*.
I've got a machine that plays MP3s fine under Windows 95, but under Linux the exact same MP3s sound scratchy and staticy. I've also got a laptop running NT that has similar but slightly different sound quality issues.
Now I know there are
The folks designing MP3 players like the Archos, Nomad, and NEO25/35 are presumably testing different components and configurations, using the good and discarding the bad, and mass producing the end result. This is something simply cannot be done systematically by one person who wants one MP3 player cost effectively. There's no way to buy low cost components and get guaranteed good quality. Even a "no questions asked" return policy will leave you out $10-$20 for every component that doesn't measure up.
I think that's a bit harsh and, well, untrue :)
But huge mix CDs, live bootlegs etc, do take up a lot of space.
You also rapidly fill up a lot of disk space when you start ripping all of your old and new CDs to put them in one large collection. That's what I do.
- doctea
I don't know about the US, but here in Germany, you'll have to pay royalties at Gema for that.
:-)
It isn't a lot of money, but still, it's money for something that a company does not really need to do, so most companies here don't play "real" albums on the phone while you are waiting.
This is the main reason why (here in Germany) most "on hold" music is royalty-free. There are special music royalty-free collections for this purpose. Usually, these are short melodies and most of them suck.
A friend of mine has composed a few more interesting royalty-free tracks for this purpose. These are often instrumental tunes or even songs made for one particular company, sometimes featuring the company's name. Still, they will also go on your nerves after a short time...
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You may like my a cappella music
I used to own a Libretto 50ct. A great product.
(I want it back desperately, especially because of some of my thesis files left on the harddisk when the laptop was stolen from a hotel room... sniff.)
However, its sound quality is poor with a lot of background noise from the mainboard circuitry and the harddisk. It features a not-quite-standard 2.5 mm headphone jack that requires using a bulky adapter (I always feared that I might rip the audio jack apart if I touched that adapter while plugged in). Battery time was 60 minutes, rarely more.
I haven't compared more recent models of the Libretto, but I doubt that audio quality was the engineers' main concern.
So yes, there's a good reason to build a dedicated MP3 player with a harddisk to overcome these problems.
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You may like my a cappella music
Now, one of the little cheap ones like the Rio 600, that I can see, sort of. But until those big ones get down into the $200 range, I don't see much use for them save for the early adopters and people with too much money to buy toys.
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Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
hey what about vorbis any players that do it in hardware ?
the rio does MS$ sound as well
any other players for other codecs ?
john
(a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)
22khz ought to be good enuff for an on hold solution, though... what kind of phones are you using? :-)
After buying an average of 8 CDs a month since 1988, I have over 1100 CDs. After spending months ripping to MP3, I have 70+ GB sitting on SCSI drives (I put each album in it's own folder with an Artist (year) - Album Name format to make it easy to select a directory in Winamp).
:-)
I'm now trying to get MisterHouse to read that many playlist
These are the DSPs I'm talking about, and while I'm sure they have a general purpose core deep inside, there's no way to access it directly.
-bugg
Seriously - it encourages the use of a vastly insecure legacy protocol amongst users, which is unforunately popular enough. Telnet is deprecated by SSH, which is nearly as ubiquitous and just as cross platform as Telnet, in addition to allowing X authentication that's possible to understand, and, or course, a reasonable level of security [though even SSH isn't perfect]. Most large environments these days are beginning to put Telnet on their list of banned procols, even within their internal networks, now that router manufacturers have discovered SSH. Vote with your dollars against the ones that haven't.
I'd like to think the Slashdot guys have enough sense to avoid installing Telnet clients and servers on their machines. God knows most Linux distributions don't, but then again, they install sendmail and wuftpd on workstation machines anyway, and generally love daemons which run as root.
A while back I replaced the 850 MB 8.5 mm drive in my Libretto with a 3.2 GB 9.5 mm drive. You have to take the case apart and remove a couple of little clear plastic spacers, then the 9.5 mm drive fits in just fine. Nowadays you can get 20 GB drives in this size. 850 MB was kind of cramped. But I have enough room on the 3.2 GB drive for both the Win95 that came with the box and a Linux installation as well.
I learned how to add a 9.5 mm drive through this excellent, illustrated page by Dr. Xin Feng. The link on the adorable Libretto page doesn't work, Dr. Feng moved his stuff.
Since you have a Libretto, another must-see page on his site is this one, which describes how to make an external battery pack for your laptop using real cheap lead-acid camcorder batteries which will run your Libretto in full-power mode for about four hours. With only $50 worth of batteries, I can use my Libretto all day long in the field.
I suppose this is kinda dumb and irrelevant, but if you ever get your laptop out and use it in a public place, have you noticed how so many of the ladies strolling by just love the Libretto? Weird, but repeatedly women have stopped and told me they think it's so cute! Maybe that's why that web page is titled adorable Libretto. Something worth thinking about, for you single guys; if I were still single I'd think I might take it down to the park, find a well-shaded park bench, and hack away...
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Or, you could pick up a Toshiba Libretto on eBay and pop in a 20GB drive for an MP3 jukebox you can telnet from.
Hmmmm... isn't the Libretto a relatively old subnotebook? I highly doubt you could put in a 20 gig hard drive. I tried to put a 12 gig drive into a friend's laptop (P133) and it only showed up as 8. I'm guessing the Libretto is saddled with the same limit.
Awww, but what the heck, while we're dreaming anyway, I want one with a 12Ghz processor, 64 gigs of ram, 6 pcmcia slots, and USB 8.0... and let's shrink it to the size of a dollar bill. =-)
Unfortunately most 20GB harddisks are 9.5 mm high. That size does not fit in a Libretto. They can only use 8.5 mm disks and the largest I have seen is a 6GB.
using it to play "on hold" music on a company's automated button-pushing phone number? Some of the music (like for United Airlines) never changes, and it gets old, fast. I think one of these with a hard drive would provide enough music to handle a lot more customers. Sure, it sounds stupid, but when you're on hold waiting for someone, do you really want to hear "Please hold . . . your call is important to us." (30 second gap) "Please hold . . . your call is important to us."
Does anyone know of a comparative review of the Archos, Nomad, and NEO 25/35, and other type devices? I would prefer one that has at least a 4-6 GB hard drive, good quality contruction and sound, and can play both to headphones and rca outs for my car stereo inputs (I could use a 3.5mm -> rca converter, but that would lose quality, wouldn't it?). Thanks,
John
Black holes are where god divided by zero
How do I add a 20G HD to my PJB100?
In all seriousness, I have 100's of CD's. I'd be glad to dump my 50+ CD stereo jukebox. Press the "xmas playlist" button and I could sleep through the entire holidays.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Jeez I'm up to an 8GB mp3 collection.... and that's just what I've downloaded.
Does anyone even know 20 gigs worth of songs? That's a hell of a lot of music.
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These aren't the droids you're looking for.
I've ripped every album I own and have about 35 gigs worth of mp3's right now (this includes all the live/rare/acoustic stuff i collect too). Not really difficult to fill 20...
don't you mean ssh?? oh, it's timothy, sorry :)
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I'm not ashamed. It's the computer age, nerds are in.
They're still in, aren't they?
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I'm not ashamed. It's the computer age, nerds are in.
They're still in, aren't they?
There are several reasons why I recently decided to buy a Archos 6000 over a libretto / laptop:
1) size - the 6000 is small enough to put in your pocket! Imagine trying to use a laptop to listen to music while rushing around a busy town or city centre...
2) battery - the 6000 now ships with two pairs of rechargable batteries, one charged pair lasting over 5 hours. Can any (non-transmeta) laptop hope to last that long which so much hd access? No.
3) cost - at $350, the 6000 is still the cheaper option, and the fact that it can be used as an external USB hd as well as a good mp3 player is an added bonus.
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ManicHawk
ManicHawk - Just because you're manic doesn't mean the walls aren't bouncy
Personaly, I just use a P-100, 24M ram, and a 20 Gig HDD for my mp3's... telnet, web, wap, ir, lcd - it suports them all, plus I can upgrade it anytime I want.
Why waste time hacking a comerical product when you can make your own for less?
Driven by 100% sarcasm - fueled by the need to be heard.
http://www.mpython.com/pjb/upgrade.htm
I don't think that this link mentions that, if you're so inclined, can clone your old hard drive to the new hard drive using dd or similar utility, but there's a lot of information in the PJB100 group at egroups. The Toshiba is the only hard drive bigger than 6 gigs that will work.
i figure 2 gigs/day so.... a 60 gig hd could hold a month of mp3's. holy shit. Now the only problem is finding egnoug mp3's to fill it up.
Maxtor and IBM and others have really really big hard disks, like, 80GB+. Why'd they pick only 20GB?
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
... damn 2.5" hard disks...
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
I have a nice 14 GB collection, and I know i could fill up 20 GB. hell I could fill up 100 GB... those things look really cool by the way... i wonder if I have 350$ in the couch cushions.... lol
Shit adds up at the bottom...
I am a DJ and I have ammassed a huge collection of music via ripping my own cds, I have around 90 gigs of goth/industrial/darkwave/noise and if I didnt have it ripped I would have 900 cds or so. That is way too much to carry around, its much better to have it on an external firewire drive and hook it up to a laptop running amp and you have so much music at your fingers its silly. I couldnt play music any other way, cds are a good way to transport the data before you get them to your harddrive. Bands like Velvet Acid Christ even encode older un released albums in mp3 format on their new albums as a dual session cd. This is a great thing, I just hope they use LAME. And if your wondering how someone could get 20 gigs of music, its easy, its called High School. There isnt any other good use of time than to bring a laptop and use the schools T3, or to rip classmates cds. Too bad for most people in my area that their taste in music is a bit lacking.
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
It surprises me how rugged hard drives must be when used in such appliances. Grab an ordinary hard drive, bump it around a little bit, do a surface scan and you'll be surprised at how many bad sectors were created in the process. I'd still rely on solid-state or optical storage, albeit solid-state is too expensive and too small.
By the time prices for DVD burners have leveled, surely DVD-R(W) will be a better choice -- expect that to happen at least a year and a half from now, however.
Join the NFSNET. Our prime goal is making little numbers out of big ones. http://www.nfsnet.org/
You have to realize that there seems to be two different groups of mp3 collectors. There are people that collect songs, and people that collect albums. Each of them has a different perspective on what a reasonable size collection is. 6 gigs for the song collector is more than enough. When you are collecting individual songs, you can stick to the hits and can be very efficient about what you have in your collection. However, for the album collector, the largest hard drives on the market are not big enough. I used to be part of the first group. However, I have started to collect bootlegs and rip the cds that I own just for the convienience of having them just a few clicks away. The amount of hard drive space my collection now requires has become enormous.
So thought I a couple of months ago. But I've been quite selective and somehow managed to acquire 4GB+ in a short time without trying too hard. When you have broadband internet access it is quite easy. When you run across someone who has a fast connection and has something you might want, the temptation becomes to grab it while it's available. With DSL and an appropriately fast source I have downloaded entire albums in less than 5 minutes. Cable can be even faster under optimum conditions, much less the connections some university students enjoy.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Really, do we need the 20Gigs? Maybe.. However, the bigger thrill involved is voiding your warranty, and at the end, if it still works, being able to just tweak. :)
I wonder how many of you have never taken the case off of your machine.. I almost considered getting a new $150 case for myself for Christmas, just because I tweak so much... Isn't that the whole motto?
Seeka
...to think of enough tracks to make up my paltry (that's paltry as in small, not poultry as in chicken) 1.7GB collection.
How on earth do you amass 6GB of tracks, let alone 20?!
I know we all love our pet audio compression formats, but guess what? MP3 still rules the day. I know Tompson and Fraunhofer (sp) are still getting their royalty their bite this, but until the vorbis project is completed and in sidespread use the chances of any standalone unit being produced in the near future are slim to nil.
I'm all in favor of new and improved formats but it is very hard to replace de-facto standards (read VHS, M$ Office, etc)
The simplest act of surrealism is to walk out into the street, gun in hand, and shoot at random
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
Could this be a possibility for a small compact webserver?