Pimp my pod

April 25, 2006 at 1:47 am · Filed under imported

So I’m a couple days into my status as an ipod owner and so far I’m really happy. To recap - I got a used mini last week after my iRiver finally broke and after learning that rockbox, the open source firmware I used to replace the system on my iRiver, had been ported to the iPod. Here’s a quick list of what I like and what I’m not so happy about…

    What’s to like?

  • The interface is as awesome as everyone already knows. The ipod wheel and organization just makes sense - I love it.
  • The size and weight. This isn’t really anything special about the ipod, ipod mini, or rockbox but having carried around a 20GB player for a long time I really appreciate the smaller and lighter 6GB device. In a couple months I may be pining for capacity again, though.
  • Rockbox - the games are better, the “while-playing-screen” themes have been improved a little since I installed the iRiver port about a year ago, and it’s generally just a great system.
    What’s not to like?

  • The interaction between rockbox and ipod is kind of lame. Rockbox doesn’t (seem to) read the ipod music library at all and ipod doesn’t read the rockbox filesystem structure at all. This means if you plug in your ipod and copy files over just using the simple filesystem (rather than the ipod or itunes? db) then the ipod firmware can’t find it - though this is exactly how rockbox wants your music structured. I’m guessing the converse is not true - if you used itunes to copy files over it would probably create some filesystem structure which rockbox could read, however it might not be as intuitive as whatever you would do it you built it by hand. Since I don’t use itunes, I don’t know.
  • I have gotten occassional “Codec error” messages when rockbox has tried loading a few ogg files. It has never crashed with this message and simply trying to play the song a second time works, but it’s still frustrating when you’re two miles into a run and Erik finishes explaining “WHEN THAT DAY COMES
    I’LL BE SMILING WHILE YOU’RE CRUCIFIED FOR WHAT YOU’VE DONE” and you expect it to go straight to “Maximum Piss & Vinegar” and instead you just get silence. This has been rare and is easy to work around, though.

If you have a supported ipod, I think rockbox is definitely worth installing. It dual boots so you can have your old world back and shouldn’t be dangerous to take it for a test spin.

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