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Thanks guys!

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malexmedia:
In my experience, you only hear from somebody if they have something to complain about, so I'm going to try and break the mold a little bit. ;)

I've never owned an iPod before today, and I was all the happier because of it. After all, I'm no fan of DRM and stupid design flaws like no gapless playback made avoiding the iPod a no-brainer for me. Instead I bought into the Rio Karma because of the wide codec support and java-based music management. (Runs great on Linux.) I also fell in love with the ID3 database and neat dynamic playlist fun.

Sadly, with rio out of business and my karma falling apart from sheer age, what could I do? Most of my music is either ogg/vorbis or flac with a few old-school mp3s to shake things up, so transitioning to a different player was surely going to be painful.

Painful, that is, if rockbox wasn't around!

I bought my 5.5 gen 30GB video iPod this evening and the first thing I did was try to install Rockbox on it.

My main computers are all either Linux or Mac, so my iPod decided right away to be HFS+, and my initial attempts to FAT32-ize it nearly ended in disaster. (I followed the instructions, but when I was done, the iPod got stuck at the apple logo and started making an ominous, repetitive clicking noise.) (After twenty minutes, the clicking noise starts messing with your head...) Anyway, I managed to actually follow the directions to force it into disk mode, and used one of my poor, rejected winderz machines to "restore" it to FAT32.

From there the rockbox installation went smooth as silk!

It's really late here so I won't be doing any more experimentation tonight, but I've loaded up a few songs in ogg/vorbis, flac, and mp3 format - and they all sound great!

Tomorrow I'll start messing with the tag database (gotta have that, yo) and alternative themes (since the default look hurts my mind) as well as loading up tons and tons of music. I'm really looking forward to it. :)

So, in conclusion, Rockbox is totally going to save my music! A hearty "Thank You" to everyone whose contributions have made rockbox what it is!

--Alex Markley

bascule:

--- Quote from: malexmedia on February 06, 2007, 02:18:32 AM ---Instead I bought into the Rio Karma because of the wide codec support ... I also fell in love with the ID3 database and neat dynamic playlist fun.
--- End quote ---

My experience exactly. Rockbox is the only alternative to come close to the excellent Karma that I have found...

If you haven't found the tag database info already, check the link in my sig... ;D

scorche:
Just come close?  ;)

malexmedia:
Hehe... I've been using rockbox all day now with database support enabled. Aside from a few random/minor glitches, everything's been working like a charm. :D

I've taken my entire music collection and seperated it out by codec. The oggs and flacs I just copied straight to the iPod. I loaded all my MP3s into iTunes and copied them to the iPod that way, so the original firmware has something to play whenever I load it. (It's still good for playing videos, right?) ;)

My only question is this: I have a number of mp3 podcast episodes which exist on the player and show up when using the original firmware. However, these mp3s don't show up in rockbox, even though the database was supposed to have indexed all of the files on the filesystem.

I'm not noticing any other audio 'missing' from the database, but out of literally thousands of tracks there could be a few.

Any thoughts on that anybody?


--- Quote from: scorche on February 06, 2007, 08:20:01 AM ---Just come close?

--- End quote ---

Man, if you haven't used a karma, you don't know what you're missing. :P

My initial impressions (whatever they're worth) are that rockbox has the potential to become better than karma, but it needs some polishing first: Karma didn't have any frills or fancies, but it had a great user interface, snappy response during every operation, it had 15+ hours of battery life, and it was really stable. On the other hand, the rockbox interface can be confusing, it has exhibited signs of sluggishness (even with the database in RAM), it looks like it'll have trouble exceeding 7 hours of battery life, and it's crashed on me a couple of times today.

Anyway, I don't say any of that to detract from rockbox. Rockbox is an amazing achievement, and I'll be entrusting it with all my music-playing duties from now on.

Llorean:
He was asking regarding Features.

Rockbox on the H120 is much faster, has much more than 15 hours battery life (20ish), and is incredibly stable.

What *features* does Rockbox lack relative to the Karma, as what you've listed is mostly the fact that your hardware isn't well supported by Rockbox yet (though the menu being confusing is a matter of debate still, it's hard to improve it really).

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