Player recommendations? How's the X5 port?

[simulant]

First off, many thanks to all the RockBox devs... been using Rockbox since the Archos JB and absolutely love it.

My last two players, an Iriver h120 (my favorite so far) and an Ipod Video 30G, were both ripped off and I'm once again in the market for a new rockbox compatible player.   H120s are hard to come by and I didn't much like the Ipod (crappy battery life and I hate that damn wheel....)  so It looks like X5L might be the winner.

How's rockbox running on it these days?  At least as well as on the Ipod?  How's battery life?   Any caveats?

I'd appreciate any advice.....

    TIA,

          Simulant

[LinusN]

The X5 is right on par with the iriver port. The only thing not supported is the USBOTG chip and battery charging. The battery life is just as good as the original firmware.

[simulant]

Thanks.... Does that mean it won't charge via USB?   I can probably live with that.

[xlarge]

Thanks.... Does that mean it won't charge via USB?   I can probably live with that.

It does charge via USB just not while rockbox is running.

[bk]

The X5 is a little unusual in that when you plug in the AC adapter or USB (while the player is off) the official Cowon fw will automatically start up and start charging or connecting. So you don't actually have to intentionally boot the OF to charge via USB.

BTW, the X5 port works great. I think it's a great player, however the sound quality is very slightly worse than the H120 (which is the best sounding player ever made, IMO). Not enough to really matter, though.

[painless-shadow]

does it have recording capabilities?
(i mean the port, 'cos i know the x5 has a built-in mic).

[xlarge]

Yes sir it does.

I have tested mic so far (rockbox supports line in aswell) and it encodes to mp3 realtime or saves as wav...

[gnarayan]

The X5 port is great - very minor stability issues. Doom is awesome, as is the ID3 cache which Cowon still has not gotten around to doing. The plugins are awesome and I like turning on clock at night when I sync the player. Battery life remains around 27hrs on the X5L for me.

Only two things have frustrated me thus far - the rockbox firmware seems a lot more sensitive to the ff/rw setting. With the iAudio and the rockbox firmware if you tap the stick to the right you are supposed to skip to the next track but with the rockbox it seems to fast forward instead most of the time rather than not. You end up having to tap the stick to the right a couple of times before it actually goes to the next tap. This has quickly gotten annoying and I wish there was some sensitivity setting for the stick on the X5 builds.

The other thing is that since you cannot switch between the two firmwares you lose the video and audio playback. You can do video only tracks but thats no fun. There are some older instructions on rvf files and I tried those as well on a variety of different videos and it sadly did not work on the player.  

[evenreven]

About switching between Rockbox and Official firmware:
I do that all the time for playing .wma files and video. There's a dualboot patch made by Raenye (I think the handle is) that works wonders. Search for it, it's great.

[xlarge]

The X5 port is great - very minor stability issues. Doom is awesome, as is the ID3 cache which Cowon still has not gotten around to doing. The plugins are awesome and I like turning on clock at night when I sync the player. Battery life remains around 27hrs on the X5L for me.

Only two things have frustrated me thus far - the rockbox firmware seems a lot more sensitive to the ff/rw setting. With the iAudio and the rockbox firmware if you tap the stick to the right you are supposed to skip to the next track but with the rockbox it seems to fast forward instead most of the time rather than not. You end up having to tap the stick to the right a couple of times before it actually goes to the next tap. This has quickly gotten annoying and I wish there was some sensitivity setting for the stick on the X5 builds.

The other thing is that since you cannot switch between the two firmwares you lose the video and audio playback. You can do video only tracks but thats no fun. There are some older instructions on rvf files and I tried those as well on a variety of different videos and it sadly did not work on the player.  

I must say i don't have the same issues with ff/rw as you do... I switch songs easily and never had it ff/rw on me unintentionally.

(i have the doubleboot firmware on mine, so i can boot original firmware if i need usb otg since that is not supported in rockbox... Yet.)

Threadstealing; What do you use when syncing player and computer mp3-libraries?

[gnarayan]

Ok I finally got the dual boot to work - thanks for the tip and thanks RaeNye. With that fixed I have to say that the x5 port is absolutely awesome and vastly extends the functionality of the player.
Oh btw if you have the first keypress enables backlight option to Yes then you might have similar ff/rw problems to mine. I could have sworn I never touched that setting but there you go...

Sorry xlarge I don't have anything fancy to sync - just a perl script to recursively check the x5 music dir and copies songs not present but present in my music dir to the x5. I'm working on an excludes file but I'm probably not going to do anything fancier. I want most of my music on the x5 anyway and I have only around 20gigs. If anyone knows some good sync software let me know.

Ok back to work on my fancy new WPS

[xlarge]

Ok I finally got the dual boot to work - thanks for the tip and thanks RaeNye. With that fixed I have to say that the x5 port is absolutely awesome and vastly extends the functionality of the player.
Oh btw if you have the first keypress enables backlight option to Yes then you might have similar ff/rw problems to mine. I could have sworn I never touched that setting but there you go...

Sorry xlarge I don't have anything fancy to sync - just a perl script to recursively check the x5 music dir and copies songs not present but present in my music dir to the x5. I'm working on an excludes file but I'm probably not going to do anything fancier. I want most of my music on the x5 anyway and I have only around 20gigs. If anyone knows some good sync software let me know.

Ok back to work on my fancy new WPS

Nopes sir... I have first keypress enables backlight... But then again we all have different ways of pressing keys... =) (that said, i experienced fastforward-instead-of-changing-tune once now yesterday... )

I agree with you, i really liked my x5 but now that i've got rockbox i love it. I'm eternally grateful to the devs.

gimme your wps when you are done...

[W00DY]

I love Unison to sync my MP3's

It doesn't look pretty but it works great
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

There is a nice GUI
For that you need to install the GTK binaries
It's all in the manual

Use "-fastcheck true" to speed things up

[SpaceDyeVest]

The X5 is right on par with the iriver port. The only thing not supported is the USBOTG chip and battery charging. The battery life is just as good as the original firmware.

Does this firmware overcome the 9999 file limitation?

-SDV

[RaeNye]

Obviously RB has no such silly limit (neither the other OF limits - DPL length, number of FM presets, number of directories, number of bookmarks, ...).