Rockbox rocks!!

JC 2K3

I've just been playing Doom on my iAudio X5!!

I've only just put Rockbox on, but it's amazing how much extra stuff I can do with my player now and how customised I can make it.

I'd recommend trying it if you haven't already.

www.rockbox.org

Creamy Goodness

it is truely great, turned my iriver h140 from a great player to an absolutely amazing player.

now if only they got rockbox working on the 80gig ipod, then i'll be impressed and probably buy one.

swingking

Is there a way to convert back to my old ipod 30g firmware if I don't like rockbox. Also will my ipod will continue to use itunes

Am tempted to change but am not sure

Creamy Goodness

rockbox allows you to dual boot between rockbox and orignal firmware.

and if you don't like rockbox i'll eat a hat.

tman

Sounds cool... gonna give it a whirl on my 30GB iPod tomorrow

swingking

reading through the features, sounds really cool


Defo gonna give it a go tomorrow

Will report back with feedback;)

magick

a few newbie Qs on rockbox

does it play WMAs and WMVs on the ipod?

if you have rockbox on ur ipod how does itunes interact with it?


thx

Rebeller

magick wrote:

a few newbie Qs on rockbox

does it play WMAs and WMVs on the ipod?

Rockbox doesn't support WMA format due to Microsoft's use of DRM technology in purchased music. Although it offers smaller file sizes WMA offers substandard audio quality when compared with other compressed formats such as OGG or even good old MP3.

DRM is anathema to Rockbox's spirit of freedom of use and increased functionality.

At this stage video playback on the ipod under rockbox is pretty crappy. If you use your ipod as a video playback device then I'd recommend sticking to the original apple firmware.

However, if you want to expand the functionality of you player and gain increased file format support then flash to rockbox

if you have rockbox on ur ipod how does itunes interact with it?

Rockbox allows you to use your ipod as a UMS device meaning it will be recognised as an external hard drive when plugged into a computer. Transferring files is then simply a case of copy and paste. You can then arrange the files on the ipod in a number of ways with the standard manner being in a file tree (i.e. like your files and folder are arranged on your windows pc).

The benefit of using your ipod as a UMS device is that you can use it with both macs and PCs at the same time In other words no need to reformat every time you want to switch between computers running different operating systems.

While I understand the attraction of iTunes for many people, I personally prefer the flexibility of being able to copy and paste and arrange my files in whatever way I want without the use of proprietary software.

Bear in mind that any music purchased from the iTunes music cannot be played running rockbox.

You should also be aware that Rockbox is a work in progress meaning that you may experience minor issues such as your ipod freezing etc etc. It is fairly stable but not perhaps as stable as the native apple firmware

JC 2K3

magick wrote:

a few newbie Qs on rockbox

does it play WMAs and WMVs on the ipod?

if you have rockbox on ur ipod how does itunes interact with it?


thx

WMAs aren't supported yet (hard to decode due to them not being open source I think), but it's not exactly hard to convert WMA to MP3.

Videos aren't currently supported either, so no WMVs I'm afraid, I think it can play greyscale videos in RVF format. However, you can dualboot iPod's original firmware also, so to play vidoes you could use that.

And I don't know too much about iTunes, but I know that Rockbox can convert iTunes databases to Rockbox ones, I presume you can use iTunes to put music on your iPod as usual and get rockbox to update its database accordingly. Or you can just drag and drop your music to it like an external hard drive and abandon iTunes.

Creamy Goodness

Rebeller wrote:

Rockbox allows you to use your ipod as a UMS device meaning it will be recognised as an external hard drive when plugged into a computer. Transferring files is then simply a case of copy and paste. You can then arrange the files on the ipod in a number of ways with the standard manner being in a file tree (i.e. like your files and folder are arranged on your windows pc).

this is what's wrong with the ipod as a music player, if rockbox was on the 80gig i'd buy one right away

swingking

Thank you very much :rolleyes:

My ipod is now fooked:mad: , I can't boot it up at all after installing rockbox, it's crap, terrible useless

My ipod won't connect to my computer.

grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

JC 2K3

Did you install it properly?

Were you using a compatible iPod?

Does anything happen when you try to turn it on?

Did you read the Rockbox iPod FAQ:

Recovering from a crash

If Rockbox ever crashes and stops responding, then you can always force it to reboot as follows:

* Reboot your iPod by holding the MENU (top) and SELECT (middle) buttons (MENU+PLAY for 3G users) for around 5 seconds.

Your iPod also has an emergency "disk mode" which gives you access to your iPod even if all the software installed on the disk is corrupt:

* Whilst the iPod is rebooting, hold SELECT and PLAY (REW+FFWD for 3G users) together to enter disk mode.

If Rockbox is acting strange, try to unzip rockbox.zip to the iPod's root again. If you get strange errors from your ZIP program, files have been corrupted, and you can fix this by running (in the command prompt) chkdsk /r X: where X is the drive letter of your iPod.

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IpodInstallation#Recovering_from_a_crash

I suggest you try and enter this "emergency disk mode" and then try connecting to your PC.

Makaveli

swingking wrote:

Thank you very much :rolleyes:

My ipod is now fooked:mad: , I can't boot it up at all after installing rockbox, it's crap, terrible useless

Nobody told you to install it. If you went ahead and put it on your ipod without reading up about it and the potential risks then it's nobodys fault but your own.

swingking

Thanks a million jk2c3 you saved me a new ipod:)

After doing the install of rockbox, my ipod would not start up, I could not play anything on it and when I tried to connect it to the pc, was not recognized

To all those who are going to try this new software, beware!! Make sure you know what are doing

Explosive_Cornflake

Or just read the many disclaimers along the way, and follow the instructions?

Creamy Goodness

swingking wrote:

To all those who are going to try this new software, beware!! Make sure you know what are doing

that goes without saying when using some third party software that is currently in beta release. (couldn't think of a better word for beta for rockbox situation (software that's built daily - yeah that will do) ).

Dingatron

Anyone running it on an IRiver H10? Looking for some views from some converts if possible. Is it worth losing radio support in changing over to it?

Creamy Goodness

i have it on the iriver h140 and it's great no problems, and afaik it has radio on the h140.

don't know if they do on the h10 but the great thing about rockbox if you follow the instructions properly you won't feck up and you can boot into the orignal firmware aswell and act like nothing has happened.

Dingatron

AFAIK radio is not supported on the Rockbox firmware for the H10 yet. It ticks most of the other boxes though and its on my list of things to do, but thats a long list lol. Maybe in February I'll get around to it as it's quite a boring month..... Mind you one of the reasons I got the IRiver was because of Rockbox!

Makaveli

I really need to update mine. It has been ages, last time I put it on it was really just begining to flourish on the H3XX. Then I lost my net connection for a while and lost touch. Now I have to go back and read up on it all over again.

Are they still using boot loader version 5?

maxitwist

What does it to do on ipods since they already have games, trying to convince my freinds to use it but I need a list of what it does first...

Makaveli

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/WhyRockbox#Key_Features_of_Rockbox

That's a list of stuff it does.

Here's the FAQ
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IpodFAQ

The main advantages are multiple codec support, gapless playback (I think the new Ipods have this now anyway) and crossfading.

You can dual boot anyway, so if you want to play the iPod's games just boot into the iPod firmware.

Ghost Train

Makaveli wrote:

I really need to update mine. It has been ages, last time I put it on it was really just begining to flourish on the H3XX. Then I lost my net connection for a while and lost touch. Now I have to go back and read up on it all over again.

Are they still using boot loader version 5?

I'm the same, have had the same version of rockbox on the h320 for the last few months, don't know what version but it has the album art and stuff, don't use the iriver much these days

checked the misticriver forum a few weeks ago and there was mention of video support through rockbox, which sounds good, but yeah the h300 has had video since before the video ipod days(the good ol' days eh ), so not so important

the flac support was always the thing which made rockbox great for me, keeping up to date with development, and changing versions is the hard thing

Makaveli

I really think FLAC on a DAP is overkill. Most of the them aren't good enough to give you the sound quality you need to get the most out of FLAC. Also the files take up too much space.

JC 2K3

^What if you like to link it up to speakers and have 60GB+ player?

Ghost Train

Makaveli wrote:

I really think FLAC on a DAP is overkill. Most of the them aren't good enough to give you the sound quality you need to get the most out of FLAC. Also the files take up too much space.

Well i went and converted 70 or so cds to flac last year, wanted a backup of my main cds, and didnt want to ever have to go back and redo it again if i wanted better quality or a different format, so flac made sense, did a 192kbit mp3 of the flac files at the same time, only needed a few dvds for 70 cds worth of flac files.

I agree for portable audio its probably overkill, especially if space is an issue, but would argue about the hardware being good enough to get the most out of flac, it's only 16bit 44khz audio. With compressed audio at high bitrates there aint much differance, but there is a differance and depending on the music this can be noticed. Wouldn't switch completely to flac, but i do like having a few of my cds on the iriver in flac