Is Rockbox Compatible with Rhapsody or WMP? Please help!

[blitzymighty]

I'm a proud new Gigabeat F40 owner and I just installed the latest version of Rockbox and it seems to work great. However, although the Gigabeat shows up in "My Computer" neither Rhapsody nor Windows Media Player recognize it. I tried to "install a new device" in Rhapsody, selected the F40, and it said it was installing an update in order to support the new device, but the Gigabeat still doesn't show up in the Rhapsody sidebar. Is there some setting I need to activate in order for this to work? I can't quite believe that installing Rockbox would kill all support for using it with other programs. FYI: I'm running Win XP SP2 and I didn't install any of the Toshiba software on my PC, because it wasn't mentioned in the Rockbox install instructions. Any advice??

[jewman]

Any Rockbox-supported player, when booted into Rockbox, will show up merely as an external hard drive. Even if WMP or Rhapsody could recognize it, it would be useless because Rockbox doesn't supported DRM-protected audio files (music from Napster, iTunes, Yahoo!, etc.)

[bascule]

So the remaining question is why do you need these programs to recognise it?

If it's just to transfer music, then drag-and-drop can't be beaten; if it's to synchronise music (and possibly playlists, video etc.), then you probably need something less proprietary than those two.

There are many PC-side players that happily synchronise with a Rockboxed player such as Foobar, MediaMonkey, even good-old Winamp.

A forum search for 'synchronze' returned lots of useful threads...

[blitzymighty]

I needed Rahpsody to recognize my new player because I have a paid Rhapsody to Go subscription, which lets me transfer millions of songs to my portable device. I admit I'm surprised that I've seen no documentation mentioning that installing Rockbox kills key features, because I researched it pretty thoroughly. Hopefully I can uninstall Rockbox without messing anything up....

[Febs]

Rockbox does not "kill" any "key features."  It is not the original firmware.  Rockbox has its own feature set.  That feature set does not include support for DRM-protected music.  Use the original firmware if you require such support.

[LambdaCalculus]

Hopefully I can uninstall Rockbox without messing anything up....

You can uninstall Rockbox easily if need be, and nothing will be affected as long as you follow the uninstallation instuctions in the manual.

Just keep it in mind for the future that Rockbox doesn't, and may never, support DRM-protected music. If that's something you need, Rockbox may not be for you.