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Dec 6th, 2006, 10:03 pm
http://www.rockbox.org/
I have been playing around with Rockbox the alternative firmware for the Apple iPod and other popular MP3 players. So im basically just going to go over some of my likes and dislikes of the software so far.
Likes
I have been playing around with Rockbox the alternative firmware for the Apple iPod and other popular MP3 players. So im basically just going to go over some of my likes and dislikes of the software so far.
Likes
- For one if you are strictly an opensource guy and follow that like a religion than you will like the fact that Rockbox supports ogg format which the Apple firmware does not. I havent really used this yet considering most of my songs are ripped in mp3 format and only on occasion do I download a podcast in ogg. Although I have heard several people tell me that ogg has a much better sound quality.
- It is very themable you can find a lot of themes on rockbox's website. Now you are probably saying well so is the iPod. However I have themed the Apple iPod firmware before and it was much more of a hassle than rockbox.
- One of the ultimate advantages to using rockbox is the drag and drop support it adds to your iPod. This is helpful when you have to put one or two songs you just got onto the ipod w/o launching into itunes or loading up some other software like anapod. Also useful in other OS's when they do not have software that can easily recognize the iPod and you need to add a file.
- DOOM and other games are available to play on rockbox. You might have seen videos of this awhile back just do a youtube or google search and you should be able to find one. Now I would say the rockbox games are much easier to put on than the iPodlinux version of Doom. WARNING CLICK WHEEL NOT AS STURDY AS IT SEEMS!!!
- Slightly better performance in terms of battery and how fast it loads the playlists. The music database can be loaded into your iRam and it makes for much faster loading.
- No video or video w/o audio. So far I have only heard claims of being able to play video on rockbox, but have been unsuccesful in my own attempts. Other people still say that you can get video but no audio.
- Like most people with iPods your music is all stored up in iTunes and your music is in ipod_control on your ipod in ambiguous folders. Well this is not good if for some reason you do not have all these random files tagged correctly or at all. For one some songs might not show up in your playlist and when you goto put album art on (like i just tried to do) it will not know what the hell to look for. So just a warning if your planing to use rockbox and have some untag songs either tag them or use itunes to convert the itunesdb file to ID3 (saw it on some forum dont know if it actually works).
- The search functionality for the playlist doesnt work to great or at all. Im sortof thinking this is more likely for different mp3 players or just forward thinking.
- It isnt all that intuitive of a menu it takes some time to figure out. For example if listening to a song you have to press down pause to go back to the playlist view and if you hold pause long enough it shuts off the iPod like normal. If in the playlist pressing menu does not bring you to the upper level of the menu, but to the main menu setting menu.
This blog entry was written by mikeandike22. It has received 14,420 views, 0 comments, and 49 linkbacks.
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