LWN: Comments on "The Grumpy Editor plays with Rockbox"

iRiver H340 is still sold

anton — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 14:22:24 +0000

I just looked at our local price-watch site and found that the iRiver H340 is sold by six dealers (and the site does not present anything from iRiver that I would consider a replacement). Maybe they just stopped selling the H300 series to the US market?

The Grumpy Editor plays with Rockbox

ortalo — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 11:41:06 +0000

What about creating a new form of mutual insurance fund for hackers in order to address the innert paperweight urgent replacement issue and, most importantly, the spouse explanation problem (which is indeed a difficult issue every mature linux hacker has problem dealing with)?

"LWN.net insures your expensive technological device against brown paper bag programming errors for $10/year! (1)"

(1) Provided that you disclose detailed technical explanantion on how you locked it up with software-only advanced manipulation and promise to never try to address the same problem again yourself...

Just bought a new H340

reepy — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 11:52:35 +0000

This article finally made me go out and buy an H340, which I had been looking at for a while. Knowing it was discontinued also kicked me into getting one while I could still buy one.

I now have my two day old H340 running Rockbox and playing FLAC files. The Australian H340 I bought had a really old firmware version (1.08e) but it upgraded perfectly to the 1.29e+rockbox firmware.

The MisticRiver Forums, are an excellent resource for everything iRiver, every question you have can be answered by them.

Thanks for another great article.

iRiver software

ChristopheC — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 04:56:57 +0000

It's the record button that allows you to switch between the different playing modes (A-B is used to replay a given part of a track). Indeed D is the mode our editor is looking for.

...approaching an iPod

bk — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 23:52:37 +0000

As it happens, though, the lack of focus on OMG FEATURES!!! is the precise reason why the iPod does so well.

The iPod does so well because it is very, very flashy. I tried out someone's iPod Video a few weeks ago and was taken aback by all the eye/ear candy. The ironic thing, though, is that for all the bling it really is a feature-poor device.

...approaching an iPod

nix — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:45:52 +0000

There seem to be a lot of ordinaries using Rockbox. (Many of them are ordinary except inasmuch as they are blind.)

The Grumpy Editor plays with Rockbox

nix — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:44:36 +0000

The APIs are inspired by POSIX, but they lack e.g. dynamic memory allocation (by intent).

Embedded systems development is a bit different from what you may be used to...

...approaching an iPod

gypsumfantastic — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 15:09:44 +0000

I was just being naughty. I agree with you, actually. Which is why I run iPodLinux.

As it happens, though, the lack of focus on OMG FEATURES!!! is the precise reason why the iPod does so well. But then, this is a periodical for Our Sort, not, you know, Ordinaries. We want to break our consumer electronics, dammit. It's what we do.

...approaching an iPod

corbet — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 15:05:31 +0000

Perhaps an iPod with a much wider range of codecs, plugins for all sorts of features, voice menus for the blind, configurable screens, bookmarks, and various things that my son's iPod doesn't have?

iRiver software

shane — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 10:55:52 +0000

The iRiver software cannot generate playlists at all (they must be loaded from a computer), and, annoyingly, it can't do basic things like "treat this directory of files as a playlist and stop when you get to the end."

This isn't true, actually. One of the play modes is "D", which means "play the files in order in this directory until the end". There is also an option to shuffle a directory, and so on. I think the record button or maybe the "A-B" button does this.

In fairness, it took me a while to find this feature.

The Grumpy Editor plays with Rockbox

gypsumfantastic — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 10:55:47 +0000

Sounds to me like it turns your iRiver into something approaching an iPod.

Um...

Forget I said that.

USB mode

shane — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 10:13:22 +0000

I was surprised to read that the bootloader USB mode is not working
properly. I'm listening to music on my computer that is being played from
my iRiver H340 mounted as a USB device with Rockbox; it says "Bootloader
USB mode" on the screen. I haven't tried to write to the disk, so maybe
that's the issue?

BTW, I had been wanting to try Rockbox for a long time, but was a bit
scared. When I saw Mr Corbet had posted to one of the Rockbox mailing
lists about his experience, I figured it was good enough for me. Thanks
for pushing me over the edge, Jon! :)

The Grumpy Editor plays with Rockbox

tajyrink — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 09:17:05 +0000

iAudio is also great for their out-of-the-box FLAC support. They have nearly the only players capable of playing FLAC in addition to Ogg Vorbis. Rio Karma was one but I think the manufacturer has been bought and is concentrating on smaller devices (with which FLAC is not very useful as it takes much disk space).

The Grumpy Editor plays with Rockbox

bk — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 02:55:58 +0000

Rockbox (as with all free software projects) can always use more developers! Rockbox is written in C and has its own original kernel, but it uses all the familiar POSIX and ANSI C APIs (with a few exceptions) so jumping in and fixing a bug or adding some missing feature that's nagging you isn't too difficult.

It is unfortunate that iRiver is moving toward more locked-down devices, luckily there is some talk within Rockbox about a port to the iAudio devices (the X5 and M3 series in particular). As long as there are users willing to code there will be ports to new players.