Rocking the Rockbox
by codemonkey on Feb.25, 2010, under Dave's Rants
I am in Utah, with my iPod. I normally only use it for the airplane, but I decided to go snowboarding with it. I didn’t have any relevant playlists, so I just picked one band, Hollywood Undead (yes, I like them. Not sure why), and it was great to snowboard with tunes.
But, I was now in trouble. I loved boarding with music, but I didn’t have any way to create a playlist. My iPod syncs with my iMac at home, not with my work laptop. So, I got annoyed, and used an iPod extractor to extract the music that I liked from it. (I had itunes just “filling” the rest of the 80Gb with random music). So, I pulled off about 2.5 Gb of my “Must Haves”, one of the few playlists that I actually use. (Normally, I just fill my ipod / iphone with a “must have” playlist of stuff that I’m listening to at the moment).
Once I had the music off, I refreshed my Rockbox to the newest version, and actually read the manual. I was floored. While it is not intuitive like the iPod, the rockbox software had MANY features that I loved:
- Car mode – when power goes off, the ipod shuts down.
- Pulling out the headphones pauses.
- Announcing of songs with voice (gonna enable that for when I’m boarding)
- Fade in/out when pausing / changing songs.
And, I also noticed one other thing in the manual. The “Database” mode, which I had been using, is very limited in features. Rockbox’s full feature set is mainly available when using the filesystem, not when supplementing it’s database from the iPod strange method of storing files.
So, I deleted all 80Gb of data from my iPod, added on the extracted music into a music folder, and moved to Rockbox. I think the only functionality I have lost is podcasts & video’s purchased from Apple. And, I can always reboot to the Apple OS if I need to use that. I’m going to stop syncing music with iTunes, and make this a rockbox only device.
Happy times ahead.