So as I mentioned a couple weeks ago, my Christmas present to myself was an Archos jukebox MP3 player. With a 6 gig hard drive, it can store about 150 CDs of music, and is about the size of a portable cassette player.

They had a show special of $299 ($50 off) and I bought one. They said it would ship as soon as they got back to their Aneheim office on Monday, and I'd receive it a few days later.

Well, after several emails and a few voicemails (nobody picked up the main line) I started having a sneaking suspicion. Going to their website last week, I found that their DNS servers didn't even recognize Archos.com. Today their site is back up. well, kinda.

Damn. The player was much more solid and had such a superior design than Creative's Nomad Jukebox, and it looked like they were going to do things the 'right' way (hardware support for stereo 48Khz input with firmware to follow, a track record of MP3 codec firmware improvements, etc). Now I'm loath to get one of the remaining Archos machines in the channel, because it may never be supported, but I don't want to get a Nomad either. It's too big, uses a proprietary drive, and while it has sound in for recording, it only records 22Khz mono, which is worthless to me.

I know it's only another 6 or 8 months until MP3 jukeboxen start coming to market all over the place and prices come down. I guess I'll just have to wait... I hate waiting.