Rockbox, your iPod, and you.

i never wanted to buy an ipod because i couldnt stand itunes. i never liked the concept of me not having explicit control over my music… from sorting to sharing with whomever i pleased. near the end of 2006, however, i found rockbox – a replacement firmware for the ipod (and many other players) that turned it into the mass-storage/media device it always should’ve been.

now, the rockbox team maintains an excellent set of centralized documentation that takes you through the installation, step by step. later on, i’ll update this article with my own tutorial for a sense of completion. for now, i’ll just go over the benefits and drawbacks of rockbox.

first thing is first – make sure rockbox supports your player! its open source, so they maintain whatever they have the resources, manpower, and will to maintain.

as for me, im sporting a 30 gig ipod 5.5 generation. thats the slim, black, glossy ipod video from a few years ago. the newest (6th generation “classic”) ipods from apple arent supported because they have a completely different hardware setup than their predecessors.

once youve got yourself a hackable ipod (check the docs for other players – ive never touched them), then we’re in business!

what rockbox does well:

• configurability - its linux-based, configuring is half the operating system! im still discovering new things to tweak.
• plays numerous audio formats – more than 15 according to their site, including OGG and FLAC.
• visual appeal – the stock rockbox is as attractive as any command line, but some of the skins available are truly stunning.
• painless file access – removes apples filename obfuscation and doesnt try to sort your music for you.

what rockbox does poorly:

• battery life – the battery life isnt as good with rockbox, because everything is reverse engineered. i get about 8 hours per full charge.
• quirky behavior – sometimes the buttons just dont work. when you take hold off and try to switch songs quickly, it just wont listen if it doesnt want to. im not sure why, but quirks are a natural part of open source software.
• new interface – the rockbox user interface is 100% different from the ipod’s. it will take some getting used to, but once you spend a few minutes with the manual and a few days to execute some common tasks, it becomes natural.
• random death – ive only had this happen to me once out of the few years ive been using this firmware, but my ipod did refuse to boot one fateful day. i ended up having to format it, reinstall rockbox, and start over. backups are good!
• ipod accessories that use the bottom jack dont work – its a new firmware, and thats a proprietary connector. eh.

after weighing the pros and cons, if you decide to move on to upgrading your ipod, you can refer to the documentation on the website, or come back whenever i get my hands on a camera and finish my tutorial.

personally, i love this software. i love not having to care what audio formats i get from torrents – windows media player might not know what it is, but vlc and rockbox do! i love not using itunes. i love the skin ive been using since day one. i love the fact that i can set the lcd backlight fade time and the time it takes to power down. there are a million more options available, and theyre all right there for you if you know what playing with linux feels like.

if you use it and like it, awesome! its easy to update and the community is very active.

if you hate it and want your money back, well, uninstalling it is almost as easy as installing it was.

once again, i’ll be back later with pictures and a step-by-step tutorial on installation, configuration, updating and uninstallation.