Advice on buying/installing/customising an MP3 player for a blind friend

[Idaho]

Hi everyone.

I've been reading around this topic for a while, and have been dipping in and out of various threads, wiki entries, etc around this site, but still haven't worked out what my strategy should be and wondered if any of you could offer any advice or suggestions?

What I am looking to fix up is an MP3 player which doesn't have a touch screen, does have a large capacity, and has a simple button interface. I would also want to add speech support, and to perhaps simplify the menu interface. I have been trawling through the list of supported players, which has been pretty slow going. Many seem to be US specific models (I'm in the UK).

I am happy enough to follow any install instructions, and don't have any problem with the technical side of it. The problem I am having is trying to work out which physical unit will give me the largest capacity (my friend will mainly want it for mp3 audiobooks), be simple to operate once Rockbox is installed, and, most importantly - be easy to buy. It seems that most of the players that Rockbox is stable on are now old or discontinued machines.

Also - I have been looking at the speech support features. My question is - would these also work on files in the SD card of a player?

Apologies if the thread is in the wrong place.

[saratoga]

A Sansa clip with an SD card would probably work pretty well.  You could set the start screen to be the music folder, and turn on auto-resume.  That ought to allow using it with minimal interaction with the UI. 

[Idaho]

Thanks for the reply  Now you're going to get more questions so run away while you can...

In all my reading around I hadn't realised the Clip had a card slot! Presumably the advantage of the Clip over the Fuze is that it's a more stable port and is generally simpler?

Is it possible to have the start screen to have two options - music and books - and then drill down from there?

Will the spoken voice menu feature work on the sd card stuff too?

Does the sd card come under a different menu, or does Rockbox see all available memory as one thing?

[saratoga]

In all my reading around I hadn't realised the Clip had a card slot! Presumably the advantage of the Clip over the Fuze is that it's a more stable port and is generally simpler?

The newer Clip players do.  The Fuze series are nearly identical to the respective clip models.  The fuze+ is something else.

Is it possible to have the start screen to have two options - music and books - and then drill down from there?

I don't know.  If you just want to have two folders, I would make two folders on the hard drive and set the start screen to be that folder.

Will the spoken voice menu feature work on the sd card stuff too?

Does the sd card come under a different menu, or does Rockbox see all available memory as one thing?

Yes, depends (db combines them, file system shows each volume as its own folder). 

[Idaho]

Excellent, thanks for the info.

I've been digging around trying to see more about the voice menus. I've read everything on the wiki, trying to work out if you can voice read out across several SD cards. So for example if I filled up 3 different sd cards with audiobooks, they could be swapped and the voice menus would still work. From what I can make out the voice reader plug-in would be on the main drive, and the individual files that read the names are all located next to their respective file/folder... ? Am I right? So as long as the .talk files are all in the right place on each of the SD cards then they should be swappable and be navigable by voice when plugged in?

Also - the wiki says that the Rockbox Utility programme generates the voice files. The details are bit thin. It doesn't say whether the files are created in situ, or they are just all dumped to a single file and you have to put them in the right place yourself.

.. and in the words of Columbo... just one more thing...

The Rockbox database. Did I read somewhere that it can be manually configured?