Thanks guys!

[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]

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.

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...

[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.

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?

Just come close?

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

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).

[link343]

Thanks For Rockbox Guys.  

My 30 gig iPod Video was getting boring fast and once I found rockbox with all its cool features and Games. Bejeweled (Jewels),  Bust-A-Move (Bubble), Pacman and Doom. Very great. Once there's support for the new nano's, I might look in to getting the 8 gig.

Thanks.

Mark

[malexmedia]

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.

Touche.

If the question was about features implemented in rockbox, that makes most of my comments irrelevant. However, I was comparing the overall user-experience of karma vs. rockbox on ipod, which might be more relevant than bullet-point feature comparison.

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).

Well, I'm not yet familiar enough with rockbox to be sure.

Rio's database was its strongest point, imho. For example, it could do fuzzy artist/album name matching. (As an example: "Echoing Green" and "The Echoing Green" would be considered by the database to be the same artist and would be filed under "E" instead of "E" and "T" respectively.)

It was also very good at creating playlists on the fly based on its knowledge of the music and tastes of the owner. (Things like "play approximately 1.5 hours of songs I used to listen to but haven't heard for 6+ months".)

Finally, the rio was really good at allowing the user to manually and arbitrarily construct playlists on the fly. You could add songs from the database, arbitrarily remove songs from the playlist, reorder the songs with the scrollwheel, etc.)

Of course, I realize that rockbox's database is under active development, and that some of those features are either being worked on already, or I just haven't discovered how to work them yet.

ttyl!
--Alex

[Llorean]

Rockbox on the iPod is very very seriously the worst Rockbox experience out there right now (not counting targets where music playback doesn't work yet). And the 5G iPod and 3G iPod are pretty much the worst among those. So just so you know, you're looking at the lower end of what Rockbox is like in terms of stability and responsiveness.

But iPods do have quite a bit of room for improvement, assuming we can learn what we need to know about the hardware.

[saratoga]

The Ipod port is a long way from being finished.  A lot of the basic hardware issues are still being worked out.  Come back in a year or so.

[malexmedia]

Come back in a year or so.

Why? I'm having so much fun with it now...

Btw, my previous comments about karma's manual/arbitrary playlist manipulation seem to be irrelevant. I've just figured out how to use the equivalent rockbox features, and they seem equally featureful to me.

ttyl
--Alex

[Yotto]

A more fair comparison would be Karma on the iPod to Rockbox on the iPod.  Rockbox wins hands down

I know what you're saying though.  Rockbox *does* have issues on the iPod.  My 5G sometimes locks up (though it's been a while), sometimes fails to bookmark, and sometimes doesn't shut down properly.  The battery life, while okay, isn't great, and there's no practical video capability.

But it still kicks the ever loving... fudge... out of the iPod firmware IMO.

[malexmedia]

But it still kicks the ever loving... fudge... out of the iPod firmware IMO.

My sentiments exactly.

[bascule]

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.

Two questions:
How are they tagged and are you using the default Database?

If they are not tagged, the Database will display them under an < untagged > listing. If they are tagged are you looking in the correct place in the Database for the files? E.g., are they genre-tagged as 'Podcast' or 'speech' or 'comedy' or any number of bizarre other categories I've seen used as genre.

Btw, my previous comments about karma's manual/arbitrary playlist manipulation seem to be irrelevant. I've just figured out how to use the equivalent rockbox features, and they seem equally featureful to me.

Just about the only things the Rockbox Database can't do vs the Karma is any of the date-time stuff, such as 'All newly loaded songs', 'play approximately 1.5 hours of songs I used to listen to but haven't heard for 6+ months'. This is because the Database is designed for targets without a Real Time Clock and  thus that data is just not available.

It can be somewhat simulated using the playtime attribute (see the examples in the Wiki)

It also cannot do one of my favourites 'Remove all songs by this artist from the playlist'. That was so useful for removing an artist that didn't fit a mood from a large auto-generated playlist

[malexmedia]

If they are not tagged, the Database will display them under an < untagged > listing. If they are tagged are you looking in the correct place in the Database for the files? E.g., are they genre-tagged as 'Podcast' or 'speech' or 'comedy' or any number of bizarre other categories I've seen used as genre.

Yeah, the MP3 files are tagged. I've tried looking based on the artist, album, genre, and even title of the episodes. For whatever reason, Rockbox isn't indexing those files. I'll look into it more today - I'm sure iTunes is doing something stupid...

[kamisamanou]

If they are not tagged, the Database will display them under an < untagged > listing. If they are tagged are you looking in the correct place in the Database for the files? E.g., are they genre-tagged as 'Podcast' or 'speech' or 'comedy' or any number of bizarre other categories I've seen used as genre.

They may be tagged, but probably with the wrong charset. I think rockbox only understand unicode tags.

Yeah, the MP3 files are tagged. I've tried looking based on the artist, album, genre, and even title of the episodes. For whatever reason, Rockbox isn't indexing those files. I'll look into it more today - I'm sure iTunes is doing something stupid...

They may be tagged, but probably with the wrong charset. I think rockbox only understand unicode tags.