Some newbie questions...

[cliveb]

Hi,

I'm trying to do some research about Rockbox for my wife, who has a 4th gen Grayscale iPod, and have a couple of basic questions:

1. Gapless playback. This is the most important issue. All our MP3s are ripped with LAME, and have the necessary MP3_ACCURATE_LENGTH, ENC_DELAY and ENC_PADDING tags. They play perfectly on Foobar2000 and my Rio Karma. Reading the "How to do gapless" FAQ on the Rockbox site, I see no mention of whether Rockbox makes use of these LAME tags. Can anyone verify once and for all whether MP3s with these LAME tags actually play back gaplessly under Rockbox?

2. Battery management. From what I can see, this is still under development. But what is the general state of affairs at the moment? How much wose is battery life under Rockbox compared to the original Apple firmware?

My wife is very much looking forward to achieving gapless playback, and being able to ditch iTunes, which she finds rather irritating. (I told her to buy a Karma, but did she listen.... :-)

[Llorean]

1) The gapless FAQ is actually for the Archos devices. For any format that has gapless support (Ogg, FLAC, LAME encoded MP3s with necessary tags such as yours) Rockbox will play it properly gapless with no special hoops the end user must jump through other than of course having files properly encoded.

2) http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IpodRuntime

Remember, Rockbox hasn't been released yet, and power issues are somewhat low on the list right now as they're a function of several other things that are being worked on. So it's possible once those things are resolved, the battery life will be much better.

[cliveb]

Thanks very much for your reply, and for pointing out that the gapless FAQ is only for Archos machines. Revisiting it, I now see that it says in large letters at the top: "for Archos machines only!". Mea culpa.