Ipod - RockBox

[drjboulder]

I have only owned my Pod for a couple of months.
A 20g 4th gen hand-me-down.
Of course, the first thing I did was to look for hacks that I could do with it.

Discovered RockBox and loved lots of things about it.
Thought that it just blew the Apple Firmware away!

That was until the problems I had with battery life.
Expected it to suck more juice while playing.
However, even when it was not in use it seemed to be somehow sucking battery power.
One night, I went to bed with the Pod fully charged and powered off, but not connected to a power source.
Woke up the next morn and my Pod was dead!

Advise that I read in the Rockbox Forums were less than helpful & more trouble than just using the native firmware.
Have not used RockBox since.
Sure would like to tho.

Anyone care to share their Ipod/RockBox experiences.
It may have just been a problem with the "current build" that I was using.
However, I have no desire to do daily upgrade to the firmware on my pod - just want to listen to my tunes!
Would love to hear others experiences with RockBox and any other recommendations to the Apple firmware.

[Big_Berny]

Yep, I also used Rockbox some times ago. Advantages were for me that it supports Track-/Albumgain, Gapless-Playback, more codecs, better last.fm-support and enable/disable shuffle without going into the options.

But since I optimized my ripping and my pc for the ipod I have all these features also with the original software of the classic now:
Track-/Albumgain: All my songs are albumgained by MP3Gain, so now with SoundCheck I have trackgain and without I hae albumgain
Gapless: supported by newer firmwares
More codecs: Don't need that anymore because I only have MP3 now (and for lossless there would be the autosync-feature of MM)
Better last.fm-support: I use Lastpod to get better last.fm-support (ability to submit a song more than once). Almost (but not completely) as good as with Rockbox.
Enable/Disable shuffle: Can in the classic be done without going into the options anymore.

And I like the usability of the original firmware much more because it is optimized for the ipod. Rockbox is just optimized for a lot of player so not all buttons are very logical IMHO. Another plus is the battery which was a problem because rocbox doesn't support all power-saving-features - that makes a huge difference! With my new Classic I probably also had enough battery for rockbox because with the original formware I have more than 40 hours continuous playback! But since the Classics aren't supported by Rockbox I can't use it anyway.

I'm happy with the original firmware!

[tinana]

There are a lot of variables left out in your poll, like rockbox version, ipod generation, questions about likes and dislikes concerning various features of rockbox. That being said, I have the ipod video 80g, 5.5 (?) generation, and I tried one of the first versions of rockbox available for that model. I didn't like the vastly decreased battery life, lack of album art, fonts, look, etc. At the time I did like the greater variety of formats supported, variable speed, a/b looping and other features, but I wound up removing rockbox after a week due to the above mentioned dislikes.

[Teknojnky]

You also forgot 'I don't use ipod or a rockbox compatible player'.