Improve your iPod with Rockbox (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

Improve your iPod with Rockbox (NewsForge)

Posted Apr 14, 2006 21:29 UTC (Fri) by dreadnought (subscriber, #27222)
Parent article: Improve your iPod with Rockbox (NewsForge)

This is cool but looks to be more work than needed. I have a Samsung YP-T6 and I am pretty sure it supports Ogg. Infact I recall being surprised by the packaging mentioning it and it factored heavily in the purchase decision although I havent put any Oggs on it yet. You cant beat the feature set as its got a voice recorder, a fm tuner, a fm tuner recorder, a mp3 line in encoding port! And it acts exactly like a USB thumb drive. Did I mention its also inexpensive?

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Improve your iPod with Rockbox (NewsForge)

Posted Apr 14, 2006 23:41 UTC (Fri) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

Rockbox plays 9 codecs (vastly more than any proprietary firmware that I'm aware of) with two more in development. Rockbox has FM tuner capability, FM recording, lossless PCM recording, on-device encoding to MP3/WavPack, tons of games (including a Game Boy emulator and Doom), PDA functionality and more.

The weakest aspect so far is the somewhat spartan user interface (at least compared to the flashy Apple firmware). That's being worked on and it can be improved greatly from what you see after the default install through the myriad customization options.

We're working on a 3.0 release now (I'm just a very minor participant, not a core dev) so we're in code freeze mode. After that you'll begin to see a flurry of new features getting merged.

Good, but not good enough

Posted Apr 17, 2006 9:30 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

I see on the Samsung product page that it supports ogg alright. However, there are some limitations which might become irritating.

The voice recorder only seems to record to MP3. Well, it could be useful as a portable recorder if it recorded without compression; sound quality is probably not very good, but the line-in connection could be used with a good preamp and a mike. I'm looking for a replacement for my minidisc, which is awful, but everything I find is overpriced or lousy. Maybe free firmware could turn this device into a good solution.

Also, on the Australian product page (?) it says: "Record straight from FM Radio *", the small print reads "*(subject to copyright restrictions)". Which restrictions? I would guess some kind of broadcast flag. But the same note appears in "Record straight from CD or other external source - no PC required *". Since copyright is established by law and laws are interpreted and applied by courts and judges, I would prefer if my MP3 player would abstain from enforcing it; free firmware could come in handy.