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[yonkiman]

I just downloaded Rockbox for my brand new 5G video iPod.  It's amazing!  I can't believe there are only 3 posts in this whole forum even mentioning it!

Finally, on an iPod (of all things) I have a portable player that:

- Plays perfectly gapless ogg and flac files (verified with side 2 of Abbey Road last night)
- Has a feature that pauses the player when power is removed and restarts it when power is reapplied (so I can use it in my car without losing my place and running the ipod's battery down because I forgot to pause it before I got out of the car)
- Bookmarking (save where you are on multiple files)
- ReplayGain (though I'm not 100% sure it's working yet)

There are a lot of other amazing features (everything from different skins to a port of Doom!) you can read about here: http://www.rockbox.org/

The only feature it doesn't have is MediaCenter support!  Right now I just drag and drop directories.  I would love to have the hotsync, playlist, podcast, etc. features I have with Apple's ipod software + MC11.1.  This seems like a natural fit: MediaCenter is developed by a great team of people who "get it" and are constantly improving their software.  It's the same for the RockBox guys.  At the end of January they had just gotten basic sound working.  3 months later they have a product so good I don't know if I'll ever boot back into Apple mode.

If you're nervous about trying it out - it's easy to install, and you can choose between Rockbox or iPod whenever you reset your iPod.  I used this installer: http://tinyurl.com/fubmc  If you have a 5G video ipod, use the DOS-based version 4 (the higher GUI versions don't work for the 5G yet).  Other ipods can use the latest GUI installer.  All the different versions of the installer do the exact same thing, the only thing that's changing is the user interface, so don't sweat using an older installer.  There's also an uninstall option.

I highly recommend anyone with a:
Apple: iPod 4th gen (grayscale and color), 5th gen (Video), Nano and Mini 1st/2nd gen
Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 and Ondio
iRiver: H100 and H300 series
iAudio: X5 (including X5V and X5L)

check this out, and let the great developers at jriver know if you'd like to see MC support for it.

I would, in case that's not clear yet.

Cheers,
Fred

[Zoom]

I agree.  I have installed rockbox a long time ago for my HP120.  If MC could integrate better with Rockbox it would be a match made in heaven.

[hit_ny]

- Plays perfectly gapless ogg and flac files (verified with side 2 of Abbey Road last night)

No gapless support for mp3s is the deal breaker for me here and the iPod as a whole. CUE support for mp3s in particular.

[Alex B]

.... The only feature it doesn't have is MediaCenter support!  Right now I just drag and drop directories.  I would love to have the hotsync, playlist, podcast, etc. features I have with Apple's ipod software + MC11.1. ...

Drag and drop? From Windows Explorer? - In MC11.1 you can configure any drive or folder to be a Handheld that can be synchronized.

No gapless support for mp3s is the deal breaker for me here and the iPod as a whole. CUE support for mp3s in particular.

Rockbox has an mp3 decoder that can play LAME 3.9x encoded mp3 track files (that have a LAME info header) gaplessly in most cases just like MC11.1 can.

CUE support is obviously a difficult thing to implement in Rockbox. At the Rockbox forum there is no consensus about how it should work if at all.

[hit_ny]

CUE support is obviously a difficult thing to implement in Rockbox. At the Rockbox forum there is no consensus about how it should work if at all.

Same way it works everywhere, winamp, FB2k, MC. Getting it to be sample exact is harder, but that can always be worked on.

Given the choice to encode, its always preferable to rip as one file as that will be played gapless by 100% of mp3 players out there, which is what i have curently. Rather than rip with lame 3.9xx and be limited only to players that have support for it.

[Alex B]

Same way it works everywhere, winamp, FB2k, MC. Getting it to be sample exact is harder, but that can always be worked on.

I think so too, but discussion of this should take place at the Rockbox forum.

The best thing MC developers could do now, is to make cue track transfer with conversion to work properly. MC should be able to convert cue tracks to fully tagged and properly named track files on the fly.

If the source file is lossy (e.g. mp3) splitting it by re-encoding would reduce the audio quality, but when higher bitrates are used the additional loss can be quite inaudible. Also, conversion to lossless FLAC track files could be used with Rockbox if the user can afford to spend the extra space needed.

[yonkiman]

Drag and drop? From Windows Explorer? - In MC11.1 you can configure any drive or folder to be a Handheld that can be synchronized.

Outstanding!  I'll play with that tonight!

Thanks!

[yonkiman]

Drag and drop? From Windows Explorer? - In MC11.1 you can configure any drive or folder to be a Handheld that can be synchronized.

That was an excellent tip.  Initially it put everything on the root directory of my ipod (volume "R:").  So I went into options/Handheld/Advanced Options/Files and Paths and changed:

Audio Path: [Artist]\[Album]

to:

Audio Path: _Music\[Artist]\[Album]

and all the files are now nicely tucked away in the topmost visible directory (I also changed Playlists\ to _Playlists to move it so it immediately follows _Music at the top).

Once again I am awed at MediaCenter's ability to be both amazingly powerful and elegant at the same time.

Thanks Alex!

[pank2002]

Could somebody give me some help with this Rockbox.
I have been wanting to try it out for a while and I installed it on my iPod photo a couple of days ago. I followed the instructions found on the Rockbox-wiki. I have installed Rockbox, but rather than choosing the ordinary bootloader (which starts Rockbox by default) I chose an alternative bootloader (bootloader-color-nodefault.bin) which loads Apple's firmware. The instructions says that Rockbox should be loaded when Menu is hold. However I this doesn't seem to work for me. The bootloader runs when restart the iPod but almost instantly it starts to load Apple's firmware. It doesn't seem to 'react' on the menu-button being pressed.
Does anybody have any experience with MarcusBrito's bootloader? I would quite like to try out Rockbox.

Thanks,
Rasmus

Edit: It seems that you have to press select too

[bob]

You should change the supported types in advanced as well:
mp3;ogg;mpc;flac;aac;alac;ac3;wv;jpg

[lpr]

I agree, it's a great piece of software.

I was "forced" to try it when I realized with horror that the iPod 5G video doesn't support gapless playback of albums! Now it works and I can play .flac!

As previously posted -  the Windows iPod Rockbox Installer is a great find:

http://www.ipodwizard.net/showthread.php?t=8585

and also i found these experimental iPod builds to be really usefull - scroll down the thread to find the latest build.

http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=4342.0

And if you want something that looks nice, check out the themes:

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/WpsGallery


Now for the people who use it with MC.

Anybody manage to have album covert art  work with latest patched themes?

Rockbox is looking for a 100x100 .bmp and I have 300x300 .jpg in my folders. It looks like MC doesn't move/convert them with the music files when I use the iPod as an external drive (Rockbox firmware) but it works well when MC sees the iPod as an iPod (original Apple firmware).

Later.
lpr

[JimH]

I'm not sure it will work, but try adding flac to the filetypes supported in this file:

C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 11\Data\Default Resources\PDT.xml

[lpr]

I'm not sure it will work, but try adding flac to the filetypes supported in this file:

C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 11\Data\Default Resources\PDT.xml

Hello,

I just tried this and it didn't work.

Lets say I drag a complete folder of .flac music with one cover.jpg inside it in the handheld player window and push transfer. It will move the .flac inside its music/[album artist (auto)]  - [album] folder without the cover.jpg file. The .jpg would be move in /images/ since it thinks its an image. This is happening because it sees the ipod as en external HD, i've ask MC to ignore the detection of the original iPod firmware, I needed to do that to work with it in Rockbox mode.

Take care.

[meehawl]

The only feature it doesn't have is MediaCenter support!  Right now I just drag and drop directories.  I would love to have the hotsync, playlist, podcast, etc. features

Do a search in these forums for people with Archos and iRiver players with Rockbox. I've been using MC since version 8 (MJ!) on the Archos and it works pretty well.

[lalittle]

If we have Rockbox on the iPod, can we still let MC sync it as an iPod -- i.e. will Rockbox still "see" and read the files after the sync?  I know that this won't work well for the "file tree" view, but Rockbox also offers a tag-based view.  Will this work?

On a different note, since Rockbox does not (and supposedly never will) support Audible files, can we simply boot the device to it's native "apple" mode to listen to audible files, then boot back to the Rockbox for music?
Thanks,

Larry

[lalittle]

If we have Rockbox on the iPod, can we still let MC sync it as an iPod -- i.e. will Rockbox still "see" and read the files after the sync?  I know that this won't work well for the "file tree" view, but Rockbox also offers a tag-based view.  Will this work?

Just to answer my own questions, it appears (so far) that this DOES work.  Rockbox is able to use the "Tagcache" function to view the files via their tags, so it appears that it's just a matter of synching the iPod normally, and then using the "update" or "initialize" function in the Tagcache menu.

The only issue I've found so far is that cover art does not seem to be supported since Rockbox does not access cover art in the same way that the native apple firmware does.

On a different note, since Rockbox does not (and supposedly never will) support Audible files, can we simply boot the device to it's native "apple" mode to listen to audible files, then boot back to the Rockbox for music?

The answer to this is "Yes."  By holding "Menu" during the boot, you force the unit to boot up with the native apple firmware, at which point Audible files will work.

Larry

[lalittle]

The only feature it doesn't have is MediaCenter support!  Right now I just drag and drop directories.

Why not just let MC treat the iPod as an iPod and sync it normally?  This does not interfere with the Rockbox functionality.  You sync the iPod in MC as you normally would, then you just do the Tagcache "reinitailize" (in the Rockbox "Tagcache" menu) afterwards.  It's a bit annoying to have to wait for theTagcache initialize again, but it does work.

Note that with all the new Rockbox builds, things get a little funky now and then, so you may have to manually delete the tagcahe index files once in a while before doing a Tagcahce initialize.

Larry

[brickf]

Wow! I have been out of the loop for a while, but I'm really excited to see Rockbox finally for IPOD. I used Rockbox with my Archos and loved it.

I just loaded it today on my 5g and it works great. I'm amazed at how many features there are already. I found it easy to load and easy to switch between the apple firmware. As the previous poster says you can tagcache the files that are in the IPOD database without a problem.

It does support album art, but you have to load the a theme that supports it and an album art patch, which was not as easy to figure out, so I'm going to wait on that until it's integrated better into the full version. I look forward the development of this.

brick

[lalittle]

It does support album art, but you have to load the a theme that supports it and an album art patch, which was not as easy to figure out, so I'm going to wait on that until it's integrated better into the full version.

Rockbox also has specific rules on where the art is stored (I believe you have to have it in the same directory as the songs.)  Rockbox cannot (at least not yet) use cover art embedded in the mp3s.

Larry

[brickf]

Yes, you have to have a seperate art location. I think you can customize a string for where to search for the art, but doesn't sound like it can pull it from the file yet. This would sure be nice. Either way I'm impressed with how far they've gone with it.