A few newbie questions

[Walrus]

Sorry for the "I'm new and don't know anything" post, but I just have a couple of quick questions.

First of all, infinite thanks to all those involved in getting this thing running on the 80 gig ipods.

I've downloaded a bunch of themes from rockbox-themes.org, however, while loading some of them will change the background, it will not change the now playing screen to how it's supposed to look (at least how I gather it's supposed to look from the images).  

The Simplex theme works, but others, such as the phkTAPE themes only change the background, and not the now playing screen.  I installed all the themes at once the same way, so I'm not sure why some work and others don't.



Second question...I'm still running music off my old iTunes database until I have time to re-rip my CD's to .ogg format and build a new one.  However, once I do that, will a program like WinAmp recognize my ipod when it is plugged in and give me the ability to view and edit my library like it did for my old Nomad Zen?  I usually plug my ipod in while I'm at work, and it'd be nice to be able to control it from my computer.



Third question, although I doubt there's a way...now that there's WPS themes with album art, does Rockbox recognize album art embedded in mp3 or ogg files?  I know it won't recognize art from the iTunes library, but I have some files with art embedded in them, but I don't think rockbox will recognize it.  I like having artwork displayed while music is playing (it's probably my last tie to any kind of physical media, sadly), but I don't want to have to download, convert, and resize 1,000 different album covers to 100x100 .bmp images.  Is this the only way?


Thanks...sorry for the possibly dumb questions, but I didn't find answers in any of the documentation.


-Steve C.

[bluebrother]

I've downloaded a bunch of themes from rockbox-themes.org, however, while loading some of them will change the background, it will not change the now playing screen to how it's supposed to look (at least how I gather it's supposed to look from the images).  

some of the themes might be broken or they might require a patched build. The wps parser changed recently and is now much more strict when parsing -- if a wps contains errors it won't load. As a wps is only part of a theme the rest of the theme will load.

Second question...I'm still running music off my old iTunes database until I have time to re-rip my CD's to .ogg format and build a new one.  However, once I do that, will a program like WinAmp recognize my ipod when it is plugged in and give me the ability to view and edit my library like it did for my old Nomad Zen?  I usually plug my ipod in while I'm at work, and it'd be nice to be able to control it from my computer.

Rockbox' database has nothing to do with the Ipod's own database. You can continue using it, or you can stop. That's completely up to you. The Ipod will reboot to disk mode when connected to the PC, so you can access the files like on any other external hard disk.

Third question, although I doubt there's a way...now that there's WPS themes with album art, does Rockbox recognize album art embedded in mp3 or ogg files?

Rockbox does not support album art of any type.

There is a patch (and some customized builds using this patch) around that adds album art to the wps. This will only work with external Album Art files, not embedded album art. If you want to use Album Art you can try one of the unofficial builds, but beware that they are not supported. Find them in the "unsupported builds" forum.

[Walrus]

Thanks for your responses.


One more thing...I've looked at the page that details battery use, but it seems to contradict things I've read on other sites, which lead me to believe battery life with rockbox is about half of that under Apple's firmware.  Is that about right?   I'm also usually running uber-nerd headphones out of it, which automatically drains the battery faster than those awful little earbuds everyone uses..

[bluebrother]

The battery runtime is better for the most players supported by Rockbox. This unfortunately is not true on the Ipods (or to be more exactly, to all players that use the PortalPlayer chip). Which means the battery runtime running Rockbox is less than running AppleOS.

But as you can easily remove Rockbox once you find not to like it just try it yourself, and look what runtime you exactly get

[Walrus]

I know.  


I've just been wanting a player with .ogg support for a long time...unfortunately Apple is the only company that makes 80 gig players at the moment, so my options were kind of limited.  But if I can only get 4-5 hours of battery time without charging, it probably won't be very helpful. :\  

I'm gonna try it though, and see how it goes.