Rockbox Development > New Ports

Rockbox Player - Project to design and build a Free/Open hardware audio player

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ZincAlloy:
just being designed for Rockbox IS a unique feature in my humble opinion. just take a look at the unsurpassed set features that Rockbox has to offer.

add to that a digital input, great audio quality, a decent screen, a large capacity hard drive and put it into a sturdy casing and you've got an Ipod killer. The audiophile crowd will love it for sure - and not only them. A player that focuses on great music playback is what many music enthusiasts are looking for.

I DO think that it is worth spending time, effort and money on this idea. And I'm sure you will be able to sell far more than 100 players.

spark:
That's a nice input. Audio Professionals seem to be the right users.
I think, having a line-in jack with analog + SPDIF input is definitely a good and unique feature.

Professional audio means large files. so we definitely need a HDD as large as possible.

A decent sized LCD is important for easy use. Bright backlight for outdoor use.

We need some more good inputs. Any professional audio people here? Please tell us what feature you feel is important and is not there on the likes of ipods.

ZincAlloy:
I think this kind of device would appeal more to bootleggers and audiophiles, but audio pros sure would find some uses for a digital input, like plugging into a digital output for a quick bounce of a mix to check it on different speakers, headphones or a car stereo. personally I don't see too much use in a digital input, but it seems to be the reason why the iriver h100 series is still very popular.
An analogue line input will be important for people who like to digitalize their analogue media. You might want to provide them a cable and some adaptors as well, so they will be ready to go. Nice bonus would be if a little microphone was included (like iriver did it with the h300 series) for voice recording without hard drive noises - though an internal microphone will be more handy in every day situations (I've seen several journalists recording interviews on h300 series players with the internal mic).
Musicians sure would love some kind of primitive multi track recording, or at least being able to record while playing back music. I think hardware limitations made it impossible to implement such a feature in existing targets, but you'd better ask somebody who knows this kind of stuff better than me. 

audiophiles do need big harddrives for they want lossless compression (flac!!!) or none at all. they sure don't like the audio quality of ipods and don't use stock headphones. You'll want to give them good audio hardware that is able to drive bigger than average headphones (but they'll power really big-ass headphones with external amplifiers, so a line out is important).
You can expect audiophiles to disklike the quality of itunes downloads, so they are not bound to itunes or ipods with their music collections.

in a nutshell: rockbox is a bit geeky, focused about music playback and many like it for it's vast amount of features. consequently, the player needs to be all about music playback and features, too. less flash, more features :) .... hey, that's a great slogan...

can't hurt to add an fm reciever, btw...

AlexP:
I actually use the digital output much more than the input on my h100, as I don't do much recording.

ZincAlloy:
interesting. what are you using it for?

edit: just a little thought: a player made to run open source firmware could be a big thing in the news. there's quite some marketing potential there

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