General concerns and questions

[ipsilonv]

Well, this is my first post, but It has more than a year of rockboxing behind it. I'm not going to lie... the reason for why I really enjoy rockbox are the miscelaneous gadgets like the txt reader and gameboy. The music player is pretty good, but it has certain flaws that if it werent for the add perks, would lead me to use the normal firmware. This being said I will say ask a couple of things and make certain comments.

1. I'm kinda sad that those "Gadgets" are not being developed further, they need minor tweaks in order to be great. I'm not complaining, since I'm not going to do it myself because of lack of knowledge and time to learn.

2. Are there any prospects of fixing the scroll issues of the Ipod? I've used the search function to read about this, but I only see explainations to why the scrolling is laggy and makes the music skip, but no solutions or anything. Are there any possible fixes? This is really weird to me, since a little pice of hardware like the sansa clip can scroll smoothly. It doesn't make sense to me, but I'm sure there is a technical explanation. Also, if anyone has a good setting to minimize this problem, please tell me.

3. Does using a theme waste a lot more battery than having the raw, skinless interface? I use the latter and would like to know if this makes a difference.

4. This one connects to the second one, why does changing a song sometimes takes 3 seconds? I know technically why, but when comparing again to the sansa clip, I just can't help and ask.

5. Is there an easy way to change the function keys for the text viewer, and the emulator for that matter? I can manage some small code changes and stuff if needer, if the functions themselves need to be coded then no (Unless maybe if it's coded in C ). Heh, sory if I'm being lazy here.

I hope to see some cool developments in the future, you can be sure that as long as I have an ipod I shall use rockbox. Althought that might only last until this ipod dies, since i hate ipods.
Thanks for everything you've done guys, I really love Rockbox, even if it is for the wrong reaons (Text reader, gameboy, etc). Hope i put this in the right section :$.

[Llorean]

1. Volunteer effort, etc, etc. I'm sure you've seen this answer if you searched at all first - if people want them improved they're welcome to improve them.

2. What build are you using? Music skipping should be much, much, much less likely now than in the past.

3. Current builds come with a builtin theme. Again it sounds like maybe you're using a quite outdated version. As it stands though, yes, themes can alter battery life. There's no hard numbers on it, just experiment. Pick a theme, and see if it lasts between times you can charge. No theme should shorten it to unusable time periods, at least.

4. The Clip doesn't have a disk to spin up. This should be somewhat obvious - we can't read from the disk until it spins up, so if the data you need is off-buffer it takes time. The Clip doesn't have to wait.

5. There is no easy way. But Rockbox is in C.

[ipsilonv]

1. Yeah, I knew that, that's why it was a comment and not a question or request.

2. I'm using 3.2, and music skips when i scroll, not if i'm going really slow, but maybe it's because of my scroll settings?

3. Ok

4. Yeah, it's pretty obvious until you compare it to the Ipod firmware, and see that this didn't happen. Which is something that i should have mentioned in the original post, both the scrolling and the song chaning worked fine with the ipod firmare. I'm quite sure you guys are not stupid, and there is a reasonable explanation, but as an observer, it's hard to understand.

5. Alright, given that i couldn't even handle theme modification, i'll stay away from this though.

[Llorean]

2) What format music, what options do you have set, etc? Does it skip immediately, or after you've been scrolling for several seconds, or what?

4) The Apple firmware still has to wait on spin up if you try to skip to a song that's off buffer. It  may be that they choose to buffer a few extra "beginnings" of songs so that it appears more songs are in the buffer, instead of optimizing for better battery life for continued listening, but they can't magically avoid the need to spin the disk.

[cool_walking_]

5. Rockboy already lets you change key mappings from it's menu, though it says "(buggy)" next to the setting, and I don't know how well it works on iPod (never had a problem with it on Gigabeat S).

[ipsilonv]

@Llorean

2)I play all mp3, i won't change because I need compatibility with family and other apps. It skips when I scroll faster.. if I go slowly, it works fine.
Settigns:
speed 15
delay 400
size 3px
*I changed it from the original because as far as I remember, it took forever to scroll through my playlist

Yeah, I see what you mean, when i put them side by side (Ipod, rockbox), they seem to be similar. I think what annoys me is the fact that ipod locks in the display of your current song until it spins up, and rockbox puts a question mark or something like that.. It's not a big deal now that I see it, it's more psychological than anything else. Actually, i am not really replicating what sometimes happens with rockbox which is that it will take 3 or more seconds to play a song after I press next. Maybe it's the fact that the other song keeps playing that makes me aware that it's taking a while to change, but i don't remember this happening on the ipod. Maybe it's because as i said the ipod stops playing the current song and rockbox keeps playing it.. i don't know.

The scrolling is really annoying though. It was hard to find a suitable scrolling setup, which might be the source of my problems.

@cool_walking_
I haven't used the gameboy in a while, the last time i did it didn't work, but that was pretty long ago. Mostly, I want to change the function keys for the reader, because I hate that the next and previous buttons go to the begining and end of the document, its really counter-intuitive. But maybe thats because I use it to read books, wereas most people might use it for something than needs it to be like that.

I do get a bug with rockboy where sometimes it wont let me go one way... and I will have to touch left and right  repeatedly until it lets me go that way. It's not too big of a problem since basically the only playable games are rpgs (pokemon, which is all i need). This would have to go in a different section though, and i don't think it's likely to get solved anytime soon.

Thanks for the fast responses though. I hope you clear up my doubts and help me find a less annoying scrolling setup grr.

Apology (Optional read (I mean more optional than the rest of the post))  I read my first post, and i feel like I sounded like a bit of an unfair jackass. My english is not my first language and sometimes i fail to make my reasonings clear. I think the rockbox music player is a ton better than the original one from ipod. But basically there is a tradeoff to rockbox, for me that is. I need to choose between easily watching videos (no reboot) videos and a decent music player or having the gadgets (which I enjoy a lot) and a better player. I don't like the inconvinence of dualboot because I'm lazy (Althought I use it at times). I NEED one of the two because I sometimes have long trips where music is not enough. This is why I wouldn't use rockbox if it werent for the gadgets (Actually, I wouldn't use my Ipod as a whole). I was also a little negative at the time because my 4gb sansa clip was put in the washing machine and died (I like small players when i go on short commutes). As a final comment, i said what I said, but in the end, rockbox is the only thing keeping my ipod alive... otherwise i would have made it disappear. I feel like i dishonored rockbox, which I have showed off to my family and friends with a feeling of superiority countless times. I feel like a douche .