IPOD Nano 80GB playback broken ?

[Art99]

Hi   I have an 80GB Ipod Nano I put Rockbox 3.3 on last night. Everything seems ok except the most important thing - playing songs. I have about 2600 FLAC files I put in a folder called SONGS. I see the songs in the database but when I select an album to play I see the correct songs but when  I choose one to play I see it on the 'now playing screen' but either it won't play at all or it takes like 3 minutes to start. Also if I'm lucky enough to get one to play, when I try to advance to the next song there is another very long delay. It's as if everything is working in very very slow motion. BTW these FLAC files have Artwork embedded inside the file. I use a very popular program called Tag and Rename to make all my id tags and it embeds the artwork in the file. Don't know if this matters. I don't care about seeing the Artwork just about getting the music to play right.

Has anyone gotten Rockbox to work well on an 80 IPOD Nano without any problems.?

Thanks for any help

[LambdaCalculus]

First tell us where we can get this 80GB iPod nano. Then we can help you.

But seriously, how were the FLAC files encoded?

[Art99]

You gotta be kidding me you've never heard of the 80GB IPOD - I see many many posts in the forum concerning 80GB IPOD's like mine. http://www.amazon.com/Apple-Video-Player-Black-Generation/dp/B000EPHR0C.

Some of my FLAC files I encoded myself off cd's with dbpoweramp music converter   - the rest I downloaded from various place. All play flawlessly in winamp ,  Windows Media Player and other players I've tried. There is nothing wrong or substandard concerning the FLAC files themselves. It appears that either Rockbox doesn't work right for FLAC or that it doesn't work right wih my IPOD or both. Later when I have some time I will just try mp3's instead. The reason I got rockbox was to play FLAC though. Not sure if it's worth the bother though.

[yapper]

Hi   I have an 80GB Ipod Nano

I don't think you have a Nano. It's most likely an iPod Video.

You mentioned embedded artwork. Currently Rockbox doesn't support this and it may cause problems:
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/AlbumArt#No_Embedded_Album_Art_Support

I don't have an iPod video, but FLAC playback works well on all the Sansas I have under Rockbox.

[Art99]

I've heard it referred to as Nano , Video and Nano Video. It's the only 80 gb model Apple ever has made as far as I know. I will make some new FLAC files without artwork embedded and see if that works.

Thanks for the help

[LambdaCalculus]

You gotta be kidding me you've never heard of the 80GB IPOD - I see many many posts in the forum concerning 80GB IPOD's like mine.

I have heard of the 80GB iPod... both video and Classic. Just not an 80GB nano.

And it was just in lighthearted humor that I said that.

[Art99]

Sorry about that  when I typed that I didn't realize you were a moderator until I came back later and noticed. I'd just spent 2 full nites trying to get it working and was rathar frazzled by that point

Well I think I finally got it working now but had to uninstall Rockbox and then go into ITunes and restore the ipod back to factory defaults. Then I reinstalled Rockbox 3.3 and added a few Flac files and they played ok and I was also able to advance to the next song ok too.

One weird thing I can't figure out is that after I restored the Ipod in ITunes and reinstalled Rockbox I unplugged the usb cable and booted up Rockbox. After it booted I went into database and it tried to intialize 400 plus files even though no files were on the Ipod. Is there any way to get everything off the IPOD including nonexistant tags off so it's totally 'clean' before adding songs ? It is very easy to add songs using drag & drop in the Windows file manager and it would be nice if you could delete them using the windows interface too but apparently that screws everything up and when you boot rockbox back up it still thinks the deleted songs are installed. I couldn't get anything to delete in Rockbox when I followed the instructions in the manual - I'll try it again later when I'm rested I guess.

Cheers

[Chronon]

You can manage your files with Windows' file manager just fine.  Be aware that operating systems sometimes like to move files to a hidden trash folder instead of deleting them.  You can either force the OS to delete or run the DiskTidy plugin in Rockbox to deal with this.

Restoring in iTunes writes a new partition table and completely reformats the drive.  There shouldn't be any left over files after this.  I believe that sometimes the count given while Rockbox builds the database doesn't directly correspond to the number of music files it has processed.  Did unwanted entries appear in the database when it was done? 

[Art99]

Thanks. I will try that Tidydisk plugin after I read up on it a bit. When I installed about 2450 Flac files Rockbox reported I had over 2800 after I added them to the database. From track 1 thru about 2400 it consistently took a couple seconds for each one to get entered but when the count hit 2400 or so suddenly it was adding 20 songs every couple of seconds instead of just one which I thought seemed odd. I think it's just a quirk that in the end doesn't make any difference in being able to operate Rockbox correctly. Despite my early trials and tribulations it certainly is better than converting Flac to Ape and installing them on the Ipod via ITunes like I used to do. Apple could easily support Flac but probably won't since Ape is a competitor to the Flac codec.

[Chronon]

Do you mean ALAC?  I didn't think Apple's firmware supported Monkey's Audio.

[GodEater]

It doesn't.

[Art99]

oops sorry  yes I meant ALAC not APE.  I have experimented converting Flac to ALAC so they would play on the IPod. It seemed like they didn't sound very good when I did this. I was trying to point out that both Apple (ALAC) and Microsoft (WMA) seem more interested protecting their proprietary lossless codecs then making a player with broader codec support that more people would be happier with. I remember reading an article in a PC magazine 2 or 3 years ago where they compared lossless codecs and they concluded that Flac was superior in sound quality than the others so that's why I decided to use it.

[Febs]

I remember reading an article in a PC magazine 2 or 3 years ago where they compared lossless codecs and they concluded that Flac was superior in sound quality than the others so that's why I decided to use it.

FLAC is not audibly superior to ALAC, as they are both lossless formats and bit-identical to the original audio data.  Moreover, if you converted FLAC to ALAC, that is (or at least should be) a completely lossless process so the audio data in the resulting files should be identical.

[pixelma]

After it booted I went into database and it tried to intialize 400 plus files even though no files were on the Ipod.

I believe that sometimes the count given while Rockbox builds the database doesn't directly correspond to the number of music files it has processed. 

The database doesn't say "XX files found", just "XX found", which is the count of all items it finds - that is all files not only music and directories are counted as an item too. On a fresh install of Rockbox, it at least counts the content of the .rockbox folder this way - you could compare the numbers with those the stats plugin gives you (number of files + number of directories). Probably also important here is that there is a bug where initialising never finishes when there are no music files on the disk (it is in the tracker somewhere).

[Art99]

I have figured out a lot of things since I first made this post. I have all my Flac files on Rockbox now and everything is working great Once you get the hang of it then it's pretty easy and well designed too. Thanks for all the help everyone !