Yeah, especially Apple is very 'do it our way or we'll screw it up for you'. Reason no. 1 why my iPod's the only Apple thing I use.
What kind of SSD were you using again? I'm probably going back to the original firmware, funny enough. Talking with Tarkan and the emCore guys, I've found out that it probably handles hard drives more stably, and I'm tired of troubleshooting my 840 EVO.
I've also found out that you don't need Rockbox at all for capacities above 256GB. I could swear that was mentioned here before.
EVO 840, But it got stolen, so now only have sdxc and hd pods! I am hoping it quickly goes all ipod-sad-face on whoever stole it, and they probably won't know how to fix it.
I've found rockbox is far more stable even with my hard drive ipods. But then something funny was going on, almost like a disease that spread from the ssd and sdxc to the hard drive ipods - all of them started going into a perpetual apple-icon reboot loop either as soon as I finished synching (if I filled beyond 200gb or so) or immediately I next connected it to a PC. Rockboxing seems to have solved that entirely, so I'm sticking with it. As I say, either orignal firmware didn't like the sheer number of tracks, or something in the itunes library was corrupt.
Besides I like the themes and am a fan of the general idea of open-source - its not actually the issue of free vs paid-for, so much as the feeling one is constantly dealing with corporate attempts to manipulate you and control what you can do with your own stuff - it gets so annoying after a while, when ever anything goes wrong and you need to rescue data or you need to change "platforms" you can't because they don't give you control over anything.
The only trouble I have with rockbox is that getting the database to build can take a couple of attempts before it works properly.
The only reason why one would 'need' rockbox for over 256gb is that if you aren't using high bit-rates or flacs you'll hit the maximum track-count limit of the original firmware, no? If you have <50,000 or so tracks it should work OK (though, as I say, it didn't for me - though I'm actually very close to that 50,000-or-so danger point).
Edit - oh yeah, the other thing was, I really don't think much of iTunes, because (a) it has so many bugs (at least the latest version did) and (b) the interface is terrible - there's no consistency about what you can do with the mouse and the keyboard - most proper windows programs allow you to do most things with either the mouse or keyboard, according to preference, but iTunes is all over the place - some things can only be done with keyboard shortcuts, other things will only work with drag-and-drop and still others demand right-click menus. You constantly have to switch from the mouse to the keyboard to do anything. I don't understand what they are thinking, I don't know how it is on a Mac but its as if they don't know how to write windows user interfaces - nothing obeys the normal conventions.
