Rockbox?

[nerdman978]

Does anyone here use the Rockbox firmware for their iPod or other mp3 player? I just wanted to know if there were any more users out there, as the Rockbox forums are like a ghost town :lolflag: !

[sushii.]

I do :D

[jpkotta]

I do. It was like getting a whole new DAP. I have an iAudio M5, and I'll be the first to admit that the default firmware sucks. With Rockbox, I get:

easier to use (albeit harder to learn) interface
recording in wav (not just mp3)
database (but I don't really use it)
lots of games and utilities
even more processing options
better battery life (I think)


I honestly don't see why iAudio doesn't make a simplified version of Rockbox their default firmware. I would go so far as to say it is better than iPod's UI (though I'm a geek, and it's not better in every way).

[Nrvnqsr]

I use rockbox on my sansa e260 for mostly games to kill time. since the audio driver is not optimized for the player and some other tweaks neccesary for the firmware, I have yet to commit myself completely to rockbox. but I have patience. :KS

[caish5]

I have rockbox on my nano. I like just being able to drag plain mp3 files into it with a file manager and have it be able to play them. However i'm pretty sure the battery life is poorer than with the apple firmware.

Probably worth giving it a try, you can always change it back.

[jdhore]

i user Rockbox on my 20GB 4G iPod Photo and i love it...actually, i even dual-boot my ipod between Rockbox and the stock iPod OS since for me, Rockbox doesn't have too many features i need

[augied]

I use it on my IAudio X5. Battery life isn't perfect, but it's slowly getting better. As far as features, it doesn't have that many over the default firmware (not many that I use, that is). The feature that made me switch was gapless playback. I also like the various playlist features.

[Brunellus]

Rockbox user, iRiver H340. Tremendously awesome. I particularly like the last.fm scrobbler utility.

[MrHorus]

I user Rockbox on my iPod Mini.

The build I was using was from the autumn and I was getting fairly frequent lockups so this morning I replaced it with the latest daily snapshot and I was like "ooo a pretty new interface!" hehe.

In all seriousness Rockbox is a great piece of software and I love being able to play high quality Vorbis and FLAC on my iPod and since the latest version (the one I put on this morning anyway) has a database function where you can search by Artist, Album etc, it's pretty much everything I ever want my iPod to do.

[epimer]

Have they got it working on 2nd gen nanos yet? I'm really wanting to try it out - I've heard nothing but good things about Rockbox.

[RChickenMan]

I use RockBox on my iAudio X5, for one reason above all others:

Gapless Playback!

For those of us who will only listen to full albums and want to listen to them exactly how the artist intended (with all transitions and timming intact) this feature is an absolute must.

Also, it supports just about every codec under the sun.

Of course, there is also the moral satisfaction of using open source software.

[DrOlaf]

I have rockbox running on my 5G 60GB ipod. It works great, and I even found some spiffy ubuntu-like backgrounds on the rockbox site so it looks like my ipod is running ubuntu :)

I like it because it can handle any music file I have, with the exception of a few DRM-hobbled AACs I bought from the iTunes Music Store when I was too young to know better. It does do a whole lot more than just play music, although I haven't really explored all the other options yet. It does result in a slightly lower battery life than the regular iPod firmware but I can live with that. It doesn't play video, but a rockboxed ipod is really a dual-booting machine, so it's easy enough to jump between OSes if you want to watch video. The only thing that I would really like to see in rockbox is a good way of viewing vcf files, so I could use it as a portable address book without having to go back to the ipod firmware. I gather there are some solutions in development for that, though.

[sushii.]

I used to use iPodLinux.. you should check that out.. but I switched to Rockbox.

[macogw]

My Zen Vision: M isn't Rockbox supported yet. They cracked the firmware, but are having trouble with the coprocessor or something (weird architecture, I think). They also tried changing letters in strings (not in the regular code) and it errored so there might be some Trechorous Computing at work...

[FuturePilot]

My Zen Vision: M isn't Rockbox supported yet. They cracked the firmware, but are having trouble with the coprocessor or something (weird architecture, I think). They also tried changing letters in strings (not in the regular code) and it errored so there might be some Trechorous Computing at work...
Thanks for that bit of info. I have a Zen MicroPhoto and was curious if someday you would be able to load Rockbox on it. It sounds like it might not be that far off.

[macogw]

Well if it IS Trechorous Computing, it's not doable. That means a chip inside is checking to make sure the firmware hasn't been modified and will refuse to work if it has :/

[FuturePilot]

Well if it IS Trechorous Computing, it's not doable. That means a chip inside is checking to make sure the firmware hasn't been modified and will refuse to work if it has :/

Oh, that's what that means:-?

[jpkotta]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing