Author Topic: iPod Classic 160GB can't get EmCore to install/run (Read 24213 times)

RockBoxNewB · « **Reply #15 on:** May 20, 2014, 07:31:18 AM »

Hi [St.], and thanks for your awesome, ongoing support for this.
I've never used IRC so far, so I hope I'm doing this right. I have now logged in as "RockBoxNewB" over there, and posted a message that I'm looking for you. I will try to keep my machine running for as long as possible today, hoping to catch you there at some point.
If there's something else I should do, just let me know.

Thanks in advance,
RBNB

RockBoxNewB · « **Reply #16 on:** May 20, 2014, 10:43:22 AM »

Hi again [Saint],
while I was in the IRC, some member called "TheSeven" sent me a build with the EMCore disk mode you talked about (a .ubi file). So if that is just what you meant, you don't need to wait for me in the channel anymore ;-)

Best

[Saint] · « **Reply #17 on:** May 20, 2014, 11:21:55 AM »

Hi RockBoxNewB,

It seems you came and left in the short period that I was offline - not to worry.

I'm glad you got some support regardless, and I hope this updated binary allows you to mount your device and in turn make use of Rockbox on it.

It may interest you to know that the member you spoke with, TheSeven, is the man that made all this (emCORE, and Rockbox for iPod Classic) possible.

[Saint]

RockBoxNewB · « **Reply #18 on:** May 21, 2014, 10:10:46 AM »

Hi [Saint],

I ended up being online in IRC for several hours...for a long period you were shown as "online", but I was unable to reach you. But that's no problem, of course.
Just to get you up to date: The build with the disk mode sounded like a great idea... but it didn't work. I didn't even get as far as I did with the official build... because the EMCore Installer was unable to format the drive. It always got stuck with the message "Formatting.." on the display. Therefore, I could not even TRY to use this build.
However, I eventually GOT a huge step further. I had the (desperate) idea to connect the iPod (with the standard EMCore build installed) to a THIRD PC. Miraculously...it worked! The iPod was recognized by the machine (also a Win 7 one), and I was able to run RockBox utility from there! I successfully installed the complete version of Rockbox. After the installation was completed, the Rockboxed iPod was also recognized by the Win XP machine! I managed to place music on it and everything. I hope it will CONTINUE to work in the future. On my WIn 7 laptop, however, the problem persists, even after completing the RB installation. It pops up as a USB drive for a few seconds, and disappears again.
TheSeven didn't mention he was the creator of all this! Although I didn't know that and although he couldn't help after all... I sent him many thanks, and now that I know this, he truly deserves them :-) Just like you do. I will DEFINITELY make a donation to the RB team. Your work has brought many Digital Audio Players to a new level!

RBNB

RockBoxNewB · « **Reply #19 on:** May 21, 2014, 10:39:11 AM »

When I asked TheSeven what I can do to support what you do, he told me it would be helpful if I share my experiences and report bugs. As he mentioned that you actually own a RockBoxed iPod Classic, I'm going to do that here...because maybe those things are already known.
Until about 10 minutes ago, there was only ONE bug I could report, which is the EQ presets. I've only been using the presets so far, as they work very well for me. I selected "Browse EQ presets"... but nothing happened. I cannot open the menu.
Unfortunately, one MAJOR error has come up now, causing that I cannot play music from the iPod anymore. I was trying out different themes... when I suddenly received a "Prefetch abort" error, causing the entire system to crash. I restarted the iPod using MENU+SELECT... but even after resetting everything, whenever I try to play a music file, this error occurs. I don't know what to do :-(
The precise error codes vary slightly, this is an example:
"Prefetch abort at 709C2298
FSR 0xF7
(domain 15, fault 7)"
Is there ANYTHING I can do to get rid of this? Do I need to re-install RB using RB utility?

RBNB

[Saint] · « **Reply #20 on:** May 21, 2014, 05:47:54 PM »

The EQ presets were removed because they were *very* resource intensive and taught people the exact opposite of how they should be using a full parametric EQ.

The removal of these files blends in with the fact that we cannot actually forcibly remove deprecated files from the device file system (I guess we could, but, we don't). This didn't actually affect you, though, because those EQ presets were never actually installed on your device (your initial install was never completed, and the successful installation no longer includes these files and hasn't for some time) if I have followed your situation closely enough.

So, think of this menu as the place you will find EQ presets if *you* create them.

The second issue you speak of sounds rather like a miss-match between the main binary and the codecs, this suspicion is backed up by the fact that it magically disappeared after you forcibly reinstalled Rockbox (I know you don't mention that here directly but I have been following your exploits over IRC).

[Saint]

RockBoxNewB · « **Reply #21 on:** May 22, 2014, 06:02:37 PM »

Hi once again [Saint],

I just noticed I totally forgot to update this thread... so it relieves me that you were actually able to follow the discussion on IRC after all :-)
I'm also glad I asked you about the presets - my suspicion that those issues are already known was actually correct. If you say that it's actually "good" that those presets are not installed on my device, then so be it. No big deal.
So far, the full parametric EQ was too difficult and detailed for me to work with - but I guess I should get acquainted with it. Can I read up somewhere what those presets would actually "look like" in the full parametric EQ? What frequencies are emphasized and which are not, for example? "For starters", if you will ^^

So far, since the re-installation of RockBox, the system worked fine. And how it feels nice to have RB on the iPod, I can't say that often enough.

Anyway...is it actually even POSSIBLE that this major error was related to me browsing themes? I've now kept the "XPLORR" RB theme to prevent another crash (I knew this one worked and didn't cause the crash), but of course, I would like to try a different theme. What I need is the song rating displayed in the WPS, which only very few themes have. XPLoRR is supposed to show the rating... but ALL 5 stars are always shown. Even when a song has a totally different rating. I tried one of the "CNI" themes (because they even show ReplayGain info, which would be even more awesome), at least I WANTED to... but that was when the error came up, so I didn't dare try that again.

[Saint] · « **Reply #22 on:** May 23, 2014, 09:37:19 PM »

Ratings in Rockbox are a tricky thing that seems to surprise a few people.

Honestly, I'm not sure why we have our own implementation, it seems weird to me, but I don't use either one so the desire to do something about it isn't that great and I am only reminded of it very infrequently.

I am assuming you have your own ratings embedded in the file metadata?
Naturally, I would suppose you would like to see these ratings in the while playing screen?

Here's the thing - you can't.

You can only display Rockbox's *own* ratings system, which is tied to the Database, and that is all.

It might pay for you to have a read over our fine manual. We don't actually have a manual for the iPod Classic (due to its "unusable" release status), but we do have a manual for an incredibly similar device, the iPod Video. Nothing in this manual will be wrong, but it will mention a few features present in the iPod Video builds that are not (yet) present in the iPod Classic builds, namely recording, iPod accessory support, FM radio, etc.

Edited to add: I have seen some people work around this issue by exporting their ratings into the "comment" metadata field and having their theme display the comment instead of the rating. There are various ways this could be done and made pleasing to the eye, but ultimately its always going to be a hack-ish workaround.

But I guess you're starting to sense that rating (possibly several thousand) tracks (again) by hand, on the device, isn't really a non-hack-ish solution either...

Edited to add: I'm not implying you should "RTFM" because if you had, you would have known this...blah blah blah. I just realized now it sounded that way when I read it back to myself. I suggested it because it can tell you many /other/ things you may be curious about or unaware of. Sorry if that sounded harsh.

[Saint]

RockBoxNewB · « **Reply #23 on:** May 24, 2014, 05:10:27 AM »

Hey [Saint],

no hard feelings, don't worry ;-) I still prefer "harsh(-sounding) feedback" to "no feedback at all". And after all, I understand why there was not much you could do but refer to the manual.
The thing is: I think you got me wrong, but that is simply due to the fact that I AM actually going an "unusual" way here ;-)
It is like this: Prior to me getting RockBox on my DAPs (wow, I'm just noticing that the iPod Classic is already my FOURTH RB'ed device: Sansa Clip plus, Cowon X5, iRiver H340 and now the iPod), I did not use any database, and no ratings for my songs. However, with my song list growing more and more, my own personal song rating was the most useful way to divide my collection. As there were no ratings from other software to import, I started the enormously tedious work of rating each and every song on the device (yeah, I know it sounds silly). Maybe you remember me asking questions here in the forum about how to export/import ratings between devices...this was due to the fact that I had to switch from the Cowon X5L (30GB) to the iRiver H340 (with an 80 GB HDD built in) as storage space was becoming too small (for the same reason, I bought the 160GB iPod), and I didn't want to start my rating work all over again.
I'm extremely proud to say that I managed to migrate my ratings from the H340 to the iPod (which I did not expect to work).
Now all I need is to DISPLAY those properly. So, in order to finally get to the point: The problem with the "stars" shown in the WPS of the XPloRR theme is probably just an error, as I AM using RB's own rating system as you can see. It's just that in XPLoRR, ANY rated song has ALL 5 stars displayed, and not 4 stars or 3 depending on my rating (I hope you get what I mean here ^^). On the RB theme site, you can see on the screenshots that the CNI themes are able to display e.g. 3,5 stars or 4... but as I said...it was when I tried those themes that I received the major prefetch error.
Sorry for this long text, I hope I was able to express myself more clearly now XD

RBNB

[Saint] · « **Reply #24 on:** May 24, 2014, 07:37:41 PM »

Ah. My mistake.

That probably just points to the theme being broken, then. Which isn't entirely surprising at all.
We can only check that a theme has "valid syntax", we can't actually check if it works as intended any more, or if it ever did in the first place.

As a rule, we do *try* not to introduce skin breaking changes, but, things happen. This coupled with the fact that most authors seem to upload a theme and them promptly forget about it and leave it to whither, can lead to situations like this.

If you are incredibly lucky, the author has left you enough breadcrumbs to follow on the theme page in order to contact them and inform them of the issue.

If you're *super* lucky, they might even still care about it.

Failing that, you could always just add ratings to another theme of your choice.

Something like:

Code: [Select]

RockBoxNewB · « **Reply #25 on:** May 25, 2014, 04:50:40 AM »

Oomph, I'm relieved I finally got my message across XD I see you know now what I actually tried to say ^^
I've now sacrificed myself (and my iPod) as a guinea pig for this. I reinstalled the CNI themes to determine whether I have been talking crap all this time or not. As it comes... I have NOT.
I selected one of the CNI themes on my iPod (it seems not to matter which one or whether you pick it in "browse themes" or just as a WPS)... and I think you know what happened then. Prefetch error. Thus, we can be very sure that these themes will not work (anymore) on the iPod Classic. Maybe we should add a note to that theme here on the website to prevent others from having similar troubles...
I have checked the theme overview... for both the CNI and the XPLoRR themes, the full names of the developers are indicated. But... how can I contact them? Maybe I'm just too stupid, but I cannot find any means of contacting them, as there are no email addresses or other things.
I thought I was clever when I exported database modifications prior to this experiment. However, I was not clever enough to export settings as well, so I had to take care of that all over again ._.
Anyway, someone over at the IRC told me that a complete forced re-installation of Rockbox was not necessary and that a simple "clearing the Rockbox configuration" from the EMCore tools menu would also do. And it did.
I remember having tried to "reprogram" another theme so that it includes the rating... and I didn't get it working. But I guess I'll try that again.
If I insert the line you indicated in your post, will that add stars as ratings on the WPS? If it did simply indicate the number (0-10), this would be even better! Could you paste the line I have to add in order to achieve this?

Thanks once again!

RBNB

RockBoxNewB · « **Reply #26 on:** May 25, 2014, 04:09:19 PM »

Damn it... I swear I will NEVER EVER again try to modify Rockbox in any way without first asking you or one of the developers.
I have spent the last 2 hours trying to undo the damage caused by my own curiosity.
First things first: I have tried some other themes... and ALL of them caused the Prefetch error! So far, XPLoRR is the only theme that works at all. As I didn't have much choice, I tried to modify the rating display just like you indicated with the XPLoRR theme then. I replaced the line originally written in the XPLoRR .wps file with the one you pasted, and it was fine. I wanted to experiment some more... because I felt instead of "1-10 stars" I could get the WPS to display words like "Instant classic" (for songs with 10 stars) or "Terrible" (for songs with only 1 star). All I did was modify the line like this:

%?rr<No Rating|Terrible|Bad|Quite Bad|Below Average|Average|Solid|Good|Great|Awesome|Instant Classic>

I thought this was not much of a change... but it caused a lot of damage! I received error after error, up to the point that the iPod seemed completely bricked...
What did I do wrong? I only replaced the words, so why was that so much different from what you indicated?

Best,
RBNB

RockBoxNewB · « **Reply #27 on:** May 29, 2014, 12:48:31 PM »

Hey [Saint]!

In case you read this: I would still highly estimate your feedback on my latest posts!
It would really help me understand how RockBox works.

Thanks in advance,
RBNB