Rockbox 3.0 Vs iPod Photo Part 1

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="230" caption="From Wikipedia"][/caption]

The iPod has been one of the most important personal devices of the last 10 years, and if Apple have anything to do with it, the dominance will continue.  The problem is that as time goes on,  us technophiles get bored with the same old, and rehashing of the same old.  Now when it comes a device that I use every day, and don't want to break, you tend to find yourself at the mercy of the manufacturer for something new.

The problem with the iPod being such a closed platform, something new normally means a new purchase.  Even though the iPod has been pretty good over the last few versions, it is still a new purchase worth $$$$.  So how can you breath some new life into an old iPod?  One way is to turn it into a Rockbox.

What is Rockbox?
No, it is not some dodgy cliche from the 80's,  Rockbox is an open source firmware for mp3 players.  I looked at some other open source projects previously for the iPod, but even by my standards, the installs were tough, and the feature set didn't really warrant the effort.

Rockbox caught my eye, firstly because of the cool and screen shots of colourful themes (yes I am that shallow), then as I was reading though the install docs, I discovered a super-easy install utility.  There is a couple of requirements, but nothing insane, so with a sweet look and a relatively easy setup, the next step is to see what the benefits are.

The main reason for using Rockbox is getting a customisable interface and some different looks.  There are many themes, and the manual has a number of pages just on all the setting options (not that it doesn't sound better and look good straight after install).

Second reason it caught my eye was for the playback quality.  Now us audiophile iPod users know that the audio quality on the iPod is bad.  Well, now there may be an answer as Rockbox has almost a full set of sound settings, plus over 15 sound codecs including FLAC.  I'm still testing out the quality, but right after the install without any playing with the settings, I could hear the difference.

There are many things to make you want to have a play with Rockbox and a few more would be movie playback, games, plug-ins and spoken interface.  All this and it just syncs with iTunes as normal, so no worries about losing the ease of use that us iPod users are so used to.

If you have a spare iPod sitting around, it is worth having a play with it, mainly because the install and setup are so straight forward.

So what are the bad points?

I will write more about this as I get more of a chance to play with it.  First impressions are good, though the OSX install is giving me problems, the interface at times is a little sluggish, and installing the themes through the utility isn't working on the latest version.  Also you can't play those purchases from iTunes storeDRM!).

(Damn you,

But for a open source project, Rockbox is very polished.

Jason Remnant
...if it's broken, why fix it?

Part 2 of "Rockbox Vs iPod Photo" here.

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[Iodimilox]

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