Rockbox Technical Forums
Rockbox General => Rockbox General Discussion => Topic started by: starmanj on November 10, 2005, 08:43:45 PM
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Iriver only sells H10 series now. The IPOD port is not interesting to me, as IPOD has a proprietary interface and doesn't support UMS-- I want an MP3 player that shows up as a simple HDD to any machine, so you can drag and drop music in and out of it. Is Rockbox officially Manufacture Discontinued software? Any inkling of porting it to a currently sold device?
Starman
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The problem is that a Rockbox port takes time, and when the port is done, the manufacturer has already stopped manufacturing the player in question.
The iPod port will work as a UMS device, just like the other Rockbox players.
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IPOD has a proprietary interface and doesn't support UMS
iPod has UMS and once Rockbox runs on it, it'll be the Rockbox interface on it.
But sure, feel free to get Rockbox ported to a more current player. I'm sure there won't be many people who object!
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I'm still waiting for a hardware manufacturer to wake up and realise that they can get a super-functional player dirt cheap if they design their hardware with Rockbox in mind. Whether it will happen, I don't know, but I live in hope.
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Wait-- this is really big news. Are you saying that with Rockbox, you won't need ANY client software to upload or download music from the IPOD?? So with XP or Linux, you can plug in an IPOD into the USB port, and you see ordinary folders storing your music, just like the Archos?
Hot dang, if that's true, I might break down and buy one!
Starman
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In particular, HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE-- the bootloader can choose either Apple firmware or Rockbox, right? The Apple firmware REQUIRES its proprietary file structure to work. Rockbox uses ordinary FAT file structures, right?
So I don't see how you can have it both ways. How is music stored with the Rockbox version-- if you load Rockbox then you won't be able to use the Apple interface. (Which is fine by me, UMS is far more important than preserving the Apple interface!)
Starman
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As already said ipod is a UMS device. The apple firmware just needs the songs to be in a database before it will play them.
If you want the files to be used in both the apple firmware and rockbox then they will need to be in a sane directory structure and in the database. That pretty much rules out using itunes to manage the database because it uses cryptic filenames and directory structure making it impossible to navigate with rockbox. There are plenty of third party apps that can build the database, if they allow you to keep your directory structure and filenames then using the same songs with both rockbox and apple firmware should be possible.
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the_winch-
I'm not sure what you are saying. My question is simple-- will Rockbox use/require the Apple database structure, or will it simply access the UMS standard (non-apple) file structures to play mp3's (just as it does with Archos)?
The Ipod stores its music in the hidden folders "Ipod_Control/Music/Fxx/xxxx.mp3" (where the x's are numbers). Of course, when I drag a music folder into this structure, the iPod can't see it. Are you implying somehow the iPod can? You can't have it both ways-- you either use the iPod music structure as above, or you use drag-and-drop to copy your music over (ex. artist/album/song.mp3 structure) to the player. So you can't have both Rockbox and iPod firmware access the same music structure with "usability".
Rockbox can play the iPod-databased music, but it can't make sense out of Fxx/xxxx.mp3, right? So you can't find your music! What good is that? So how can Apple firmware co-exist with Rockbox?
Starmanj
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I'm not sure what you are saying. My question is simple-- will Rockbox use/require the Apple database structure, or will it simply access the UMS standard (non-apple) file structures to play mp3's (just as it does with Archos)?
At least initially, Rockbox on iPod will behave like any other Rockbox - either playing files directly from a FAT32 filesystem or using Rockbox's own tag database format.
The iTunes database is simply another tag database format, and Rockbox could be made to read that if we wanted it to. But the problem is that iTunes will only sync "supported" types of audio files to that database. If you try to add Ogg, FLAC, AC3, Wavpack, Shorten or MP2 files to your iPod, iTunes will tell you that your iPod can't play them.
But if you install Rockbox, why would you want to play music using Apple's firmware? I don't see it as an issue.
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Exactly, I would never use Apple's firmware. But it was posted that you could "dual-boot" into either firmware and I wondered how that would work if you drag-and-dropped your music in artist-album-track format.
I am very excited about this then. Bringing sanity to the Ipod would push me to the tipping point of buying those overpriced but elegant suckers. I simply wouldn't touch them before since it didn't support UMS music playback.
Starmanj
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I will try to port rockbox to the Toshiba Gigabeat players. All models (except for the plash players) have the same major components. This morning my player was send and should arrive soon.
For information: http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/GigabeatInfo