For those of you that bought the Archos MP3 player for your Element, there is new firmware just released. Rockbox 2.3 offers lots of new features. One of the most useful feature I found is the talking menus. By default, you can now navigate through all the built in menus with voice prompts in many languages found here (http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/VoiceFiles)

With the addition of downloading the files here (http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/VoiceHowto) your Archos will now Talk in a human voice and say the names of all the different folders you made to sort your music. This is great when driving around as you don't have to look at your mp3 player anymore to select playlists, folders, mp3's etc.

What a great job these open source guys have done supporting and rewriting the firmware. Also if you reflash your Archos with the up to date firmware instead of just copying the new file to the root dir, it will boot up in less than 10 seconds. take a look! (http://www.rockbox.org/docs/flash/rockbox_flash_boot.avi)
They also added new games, a plugin to view movies and pictures, stopwatch, a dayplanner, calculator loads of new fonts, text viewer and a metronome,
I can help you if you have problems understanding how to upgrade, but they have made it pretty simple.

Anyone with an IRIVER, these guys are starting to rewrite the firmware for those as well, so stay tuned, they will add probably 50 new features to your player like they did the Archos.

Man, the Archos was my player two MP3 players ago. The RockBox guys not only made it usable back then, but extended the life of it in my world for half a year or more...then my hard drive died. :(

Anyway. They rock. :P

I left before they got the whole modules things put together. Glad to see they've continued the great work and are moving it on to more contemporary hardware. Wish they'd chosen the Neuros, I love its screen. :)

-brendan

[quote:d8dbe21004=" "]Man, the Archos was my player two MP3 players ago. The RockBox guys not only made it usable back then, but extended the life of it in my world for half a year or more...then my hard drive died. :(

Anyway. They rock. :P

I left before they got the whole modules things put together. Glad to see they've continued the great work and are moving it on to more contemporary hardware. Wish they'd chosen the Neuros, I love its screen. :)

-brendan[/quote:d8dbe21004]

Spend $90 and by a 2.5in 60GB hard drive and you will have a 60GB mp3 player :)
Instructions to do the easy hard drive replacement are on the rockbox site.

[quote:98b5520713=" "]Spend $90 and by a 2.5in 60GB hard drive and you will have a 60GB mp3 player :)
Instructions to do the easy hard drive replacement are on the rockbox site.[/quote:98b5520713]

Well, in addition, the unit is beat up pretty badly. But, I definitely should get it working again.

-brendan

Just an update. I see a different opensource group is tackling the AV300 ,Gmini and 400 series of archos players and putting Linux on them for an OS...good things to come!

300 and 400 series (http://linav.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=home.php)
Gmin series (http://www.donat.org/archos/)

Hmm, an mpeg4 player that doubles as a PVR in the home and stores 80 hours of video for the car to hook up to a flipdown screen...I see one in my future Brendan :)

I hesitated buying one of these and was thinking of a picture Ipod because I thought I'd be stuck with the mfg firmware. Glad I ran across these sites.

another Archos opensource project here (http://avos.sourceforge.net/)