to rockbox or not to rockbox..

I own an iPod for the last three years, happiness fluctuated in that time (mostly because of Apple’s crappy customer service). Lately I became fed up with Apple’s proprietary stance, especially its repeated attempt to make the iPod unusable from platforms other than Windows and MacOS got on my nerves.

I was able to circumvent the other short comings as the iTunesDB which a little painful to use through Linux as well as the limited audio codec choice the firmware offered.

I knew about the alternative firmwares like rockbox and iPodLinux but my earlier attempts where rather frustrating installation was hard, usability not as good as Apple’s and the battery life-span suboptimal.

The day before yesterday I retried rockbox and am very positively surprised: I suspected another cryptic command line installation routine but got a graphical tool (rbutilqt) which allowed a single-click installation. The same tool downloads all needed files and firmwares, also it used for installation of new themes. This is the first advantage above the normal iPod: rockbox has theming support.

The first impression isn’t too impressive for rockbox: it just shows a simple navigation list in a way to small font. I never thought that my iPod’s display would be that high-resolutioned..

The first configuration step was to select a better theme. I don’t want to hear the critics (you know who you are) that will claim that the only good looking and usable themes look like aqua-ish or media player-ish copies. At least they work better than the normal iPod GUI, which in hindsight now looks rudimentary. The theme that I currently use shows details as battery state in percent, estimated rest battery capacity in hours, acute volume information. Apple could copy that. The drawback is that while the ‘Currently playing’-screen is themeable (and some themes are great) the music selection screen is just the list, rendered in a way too small font (which is configurable, but changing it might break some themes). Rockbox could copy Apple’s simple music selection. I use my iPod as a music player, not as a small computer.

Are there other advantages from using rockbox? Quite a few! Crossfading and volume normalization are features that you can easily get used to. Also rockbox supports around 15 different audio formats (compared to the original iPod’s four), of which I use at least ogg and flac regularly. I can also get 10-12h of playback time out of my iPod – I don’t have the times ready for the original firmware as it didn’t really state it.

And desecrating an Apple product is also quite fun..

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