LWN: Comments on "Rockbox 3.6 and beyond"

Rockbox 3.6 and beyond

nix — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:48:30 +0000

FWIW, I've tried to cost-justify cell over the years but never could, so I don't have a cellphone either.

People like you (and me) are why they invented pay-as-you-go plans. Yes, it's insanely expensive to make calls with such plans, but that's not a problem if all you use them for is to receive calls from people with more expensive plans :)

Rockbox 3.6 and beyond

stolennomenclature — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:06:08 +0000

I will not be very happy to see the demise of standalone mp3 players. These modern generic one-size-fits-all devices need to have a large screen to be useful in that role, so they are relatively big and heavy. I have never used one but I am willing to bet that sound quality is not high on their list of priorities - I like the best sound quality I can get. Some dedicated mp3 players do have good sound quality (Sansa Fuze, Cowon D2, etc). I have never understood how people can fall in love with a phone, nor why anyone would want to carry one with them. Now a mobile toilet would actually be useful - but for me the best thing about phones used to be that they were fixed and you could get away from them. As to these PMP devices, I fail to comprehend who would want to watch a movie on a 5 or even a 7 inch screen (most movies these days are'nt worth watching even on a large screen). You can stick all these multi-function gadgets as far as I am concerned.
As for Rockbox, it is a great piece of software, and I can hardly wait for them to release the Fuze V2 version so that I can finally listen to iTunes songs on it without having to convert them into Flac files first.

Rockbox 3.6 and beyond

Duncan — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 02:35:07 +0000

Did they ever get rockbox running on a 100-gig plus player, in particular, one that's actually still available to buy when it gets rockbox support? That's what I've wanted all along.

When the netbooks came out, I gave up on a dedicated 100-gig-plus mp3 player running rockbox, and bought one of the first 100-gig-plus netbooks (Acer Aspire One, AOA150L, L meaning Linux, naturally), tho I did wait and get one with a SATA port, so I could replace the drive if/when desired, and reasonable reviews. I've been very happy with it, especially after putting Gentoo (compiled to a dedicated 32-bit build-image on my 64-bit workstation) on it, but if rockbox finally has support for a 100-gig plus player that I can still actually buy, I'd still consider it, as something smaller to haul around than the netbook.

FWIW, I've tried to cost-justify cell over the years but never could, so I don't have a cellphone either. Of course, with 4G coming out, and with it, at least sprint has a reasonably priced unlimited data plan (not this pitiful 5-gig-capped 3G stuff) that could reasonably substitute for my obviously fixed location cable service, the need for a 100-gig player might change, as streaming can replace it, but it'd still be useful to have a smaller-than-netbook freedomware based player I could fit most of my collection on, and just grab it, rather than worrying about figuring out what I might want to listen to beforehand.

Duncan

Rockbox 3.6 and beyond

nix — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 20:26:49 +0000

I had a hang when it first rebooted after the install that totally disabled all controls

There is a reboot option in hardware. On the 5G at least it's something like flipping on then off the hold switch and then holding down menu and select...

Who is the author of this article?

nikanth — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 04:48:00 +0000

oh, ok! Thanks for the clarification, jake.

Rockbox 3.6 and beyond

jdd — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 22:17:36 +0000

I really, really wish RockBox could run on the 6th gen iPods. I know it's probably never going to happen, but I would be so ridiculously happy if it did.

Rockbox 3.6 and beyond

alankila — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 19:03:43 +0000

Ah, that's great. Somehow I missed that when skimming features list, I only noticed it says it doesn't have any "proprietary DSP". I didn't see any mention of having DSP of any kind in response.

Rockbox 3.6 and beyond

jmnovak — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 18:15:09 +0000

This article got me to install Rockbox on my old iPod 3G, which had been sitting in a drawer collecting dust; made an old toy feel like a new toy again! Alas, my setup wasn't as painless as the author's -- for some reason, the automatic setup wasn't able to find my device -- but the manual install was pretty straightforward, once I figured out how to get the iPod showing up as a raw disk drive (hint: USB is better than Firewire, unless your system is already configured properly... :-) I had a hang when it first rebooted after the install that totally disabled all controls; had to let the battery run down to get it restarted. (Of course, battery is nearly dead, so this went well enough.) Building the database on the iTunes-installed mp3 library worked, though it took hours. Had a couple other minor glitches, but it played a couple albums of tunes just fine. Tried out the Sudoku game -- amusing, but I think I would get frustrated very quickly with the controls. Nice to have so many options to play with now.

Now to get some ogg tunes on the device and see how it works...

Rockbox 3.6 and beyond

Ribbit — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:23:54 +0000

Rockbox already has a crossfeed option.

Rockbox on my DAP forever (I hope)

jmalcolm — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:36:36 +0000

I use Rockbox 3.6 on my Sansa e280 and I love it. Many, many thanks to the developers.

I use my Sansa in many places that I do not want a phone. For example, when I am at the gym, not only do I not want my phone going off but my phone is too big and heavy for me on a treadmill. You might think the size difference is minimal but I doubt you would agree after running a marathon.

My phone is probably going to be a somewhat expensive device for the foreseeable future but I got the Sansa refurbished for $30. Why would I risk dropping my iPhone into a river on an wilderness hike when I am out of cell range anyway?

I often listen to my Sansa as I fall asleep and sometimes I crash wearing it. I wrecked two Blackberries (cracked screens, gimped jacks) doing that before I got the Sansa. The smaller Sansa seems much stronger. The iPhone 4 may be built to be strong but all that glass still has to be a liability. Music players do not need giant screens.

It is illegal to use the phone while driving where I live. Do I want the music to stop when a call comes in?

Back in the bad old days of Palm Pilot mania I used to say that I would not be happy until it was all built into my phone. My phone was always with me everywhere that I needed a Palm Pilot so that seemed obvious. I still only want to bring one device in such settings, so I certainly want my phone to play music. That said, I hope the day never comes when I cannot buy a dedicated music player. I also hope that the Rockbox guys will pump out firmware for it because I love what they do.

Long live Rockbox (firmware edition)!!

Who is the author of this article?

jake — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:42:50 +0000

> Here it says, this article was contributed by Zonker, but the mail
> notification says, by jake!

It is Zonker's article, but I was the one who dragged it into the system, edited it, and so on. So the mail notification is telling you who *posted* it (me), not necessarily who wrote it ...

jake

Rockbox 3.6 and beyond

alankila — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:21:08 +0000

Rockbox looks like it might use one hobby project of mine.

There are not a whole lot of open source headphone filters, but I integrated one of mine into pulseaudio last weekend. It's nothing very fancy, just a simple trick that limits the extreme separation of the stereo image by mixing attenuated, delayed and processed copy of the audio from the other ear to the other ear:

http://bel.fi/~alankila/linux-dsp/

I guess it's fairly similar in idea to what bs2b sounds like, but very, very much simpler, something you could easily turn into an integer version and add somewhere in the audio stack. I integrated it into pulseaudio, myself, and have been using it for a few days.

Numerous 15 second clips are provided on the page for evaluation purposes.

Who is the author of this article?

nikanth — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 05:20:44 +0000

Here it says, this article was contributed by Zonker, but the mail notification says, by jake!

Rockbox 3.6 and beyond

spotter — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 04:59:47 +0000

yes, my car kit supports basically all the ipod's functions, most importantly browse (artist/album/playlists). Basically, I keep my iPod in the glove box at all times (except when bringing it inside to change whats on it), and being able to do wma/ogg on the iPod over car kit is great, but not outweighed by losing all "database" type functionality.

and as I said, i know rockbox has a database function, but its not really made to work with the ipod accessory support.

Rockbox 3.6 and beyond

Trou.fr — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:16:59 +0000

I've been running rockbox on my Sansa Clip+ (cheap but cool player) since its pre-alpha state and it's _awesome_ : way better than the original firmware : longer battery, cleaner screen, cool features (replaygain !).

The devs deserve a lot of thanks, I wish manufacturers would start using rockbox from the beginning instead of releasing buggy firmwares.

Rockbox 3.6 and beyond

alex — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:44:51 +0000

It certainly supports some of the accessory protocols as I can dock it and control it (play/pause/next/back) from my Ikon Radio. I assume you need more?

Are the protocols used by cars documented anywhere?

Rockbox 3.6 and beyond

spotter — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:32:04 +0000

I'd love to use rockbox on my ipod, but its missing good support for one feature that I really need. Namely, the ipod accessory protocol. I have an ipod kit for my car and it enables me to fully control my ipod from the radio. As rockbox doesn't fully support it (would probably need Rockbox's database support to do it right), its more useful to me in iPod mode than in Rockbox mode.

Rockbox 3.6 and beyond

nix — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:36:38 +0000

Rhythmbox 0.12.8 on Fedora 13 didn't want to transfer files over to the iPod when the iPod plugin was enabled

This is completely expected. With Rockbox in place, all these horrible proprietary databases and protocols you have to use to talk to things like the iPod are gone: you just have a mass storage device with a plain and simple directory tree. Thus, the special plugins to talk to things like the iPod aren't needed anymore.

Undefined instruction error

Every time I've seen this it turned out to be a toolchain bug.