Rockbox

[divine`]

Wow.

This has transformed my iPod. It's brilliant, easy to install, easier to use and massively customisable.

I love it.

Have some picture of my, now new and exciting, iPod.

I highly recommend people give this a try on any player if there is a compatible version, it can dual boot too afaik, so you can switch between Rockbox and the OEM firmware/software

http://www.rockbox.org/

 

[divine`]

keep an eye on the battery life and let us know how it fairs. rockbox is great but it does giv e the players a good battery pounding lol

It's about half what it manages using the Apple software.

That's with the supposedly power saving 'Load to RAM' option used, so it reads the disk less.

 

[divine`]

Allsorts... more than I can remember and list out.

Wikipedia says:

Rockbox features

Beside the ability of playing and recording audio files, Rockbox offers a lot of playback enhancements that other firmwares may not have implemented already. Listed below are a handful of these features.

* Gapless playback
* Replay Gain[2]
* 5 band fully parametric equalizer[2]
* OTF ("on the fly") playlists
* True random shuffle (fresh randomly shuffled list every time)
* Custom UI themes
* Stereo recording to WAV/AIFF/WavPack (lossless) and MP3[3] (supporting devices)
* FM radio, including FM recording (supporting devices)
* Remote control (supporting devices)
* Digital SPDIF input/output (supporting devices)
* Last.fm support (even on players lacking RTC)
* Cue sheet support

[edit] Plug-ins

Developers of Rockbox are able to create new plug-ins, which provide the user with other enhancements that may not be available on various firmware modules.

At the current development stage, the following plug-ins are available.

* JPEG viewer (16 bit color/33 shade greyscale) [4]
* Rockboy Game Boy emulator (port of Gnuboy) [5]
* ZXBox ZX Spectrum emulator (port of Spectemu) [6]
* Doom (port of the PrBoom engine)
* WAV to MP3 encoder
* WAV to WavPack encoder
* MPEG video player [1]
* Various games including sudoku, solitaire, minesweeper, pong and many others (see http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/PluginIndex for an official list of plugins)
* MIDI player, realtime on some targets. Requires external instrument set, available on Rockbox page.

[edit] Unsupported features

Rockbox development is always ongoing. However, either due to the lack of support from external companies or platform drawbacks, Rockbox has a few features which are not yet implemented.

* Firewire
* Digital rights management (intentionally)
* USB host capability ("USB On-The-Go") (this is part of a Google summer of code 2007 project)

I use it because the SQ seems better, it can go a lot louder, the EQ actually seems to affect the music now and I can use a theme so that it matches my phone

 

[divine`]

Does it still sync with iTunes? As in play counts etc?

No idea, I stopped using iTunes a long time ago because it annoyed me.

I would imagine it still works with iTunes, as Rockbox is only a different boot really, the apple firmware is still there...

 

[divine`]

Why does it reduce battery life so hugely? Surely it can't need to access the hard drive that much more, the screen isn't on any longer etc. :/