When is an iPod not an iPod? When it's running Rockbox, the open-source replacement for your MP3 player's brains.
Even 20GB of music storage isn't nearly enough for many music lovers these days. But for digital music's tech-savvy early adopters, even shelling out for one of Apple's sleek 80GB, fifth-generation video iPods may not entirely solve the problem. Even though Linux can talk to iPods now, an 80GB iPod does little or no good if you have about 80GB of OGG files: iPods can't play OGGs.
For the uninitiated, Ogg is an open standard for a free container format for digital multimedia, unrestricted by software patents and designed for efficient streaming and manipulation. In other words, it's the digital music file format of choice for open-source fans.
This problem was solved in May, when Rockbox was finally ported to (that is, altered to run on) the big-daddy iPod model. We've used Rockbox to teach our Apple iPod how not to behave at all like, well, an iPod.
Rockbox runs on a wide variety of media players now: iPods, iRivers, Archoses, Sansas, Cowon iAudios and Toshiba GigaBeats. You begin by downloading the latest version of Rockbox tailored to your specific device, as well as a copy of the Rockbox manual. The manual provides detailed installation instructions also tailored to your particular device.
With our iPod, installing Rockbox involved copying a hidden folder containing the Rockbox program itself to the iPod, and then running a Linux app (Mac and Windows versions are available too) to patch the iPod's bootloader so that it will look for the Rockbox program, rather than Apple's OS, on the hard drive.
After that, when we fire up our iPod, we see not the familiar (and, let's be frank, incredibly well-designed) Apple iPod user interface, but a screen telling us that Rockbox is booting. Just a couple of seconds later, our iPod's screen looks something like this:
Rockbox in file-browsing mode
Customising RockBox
Now, we went to some trouble to get things looking this good. Rockbox, just like a lot of modern PC apps, is skinnable. Since different media players have different screen sizes (and some of the older players that Rockbox supports, such as an iRiver, don't even display colour), Rockbox themes are device-specific. Most of the themes available for the video iPod are as ugly as heck; locating a theme that was clean and informative, and used larger fonts, took us some time.
If you give Rockbox a go, you'll probably want to replace the hideous default theme immediately and select one that meets your needs and your taste.
Comments