Main reason is that no one has submitted a patch that is commitable.

"No" meaning that USB mode works in the Apple firmware? If so, that sounds like a strange iTunes problem. It should not try to recover the iPod if it is working correctly.

You mean USB mode stops working in the Apple firmware? That isn't something that rockbox has any influence on. If it isn't working, you need to troubleshoot it.

Dual booting works fine on the 6/7g. What problem did you have?

I'm also curious what build of rockbox you're running?  If you can get a stable USB connection you could try to format and then copy over a new build of rockbox.  Formatting should be relatively safe, but I would not risk flashing the firmware itself in this state.  Any glitch during a flash of...

Does the Sandisk firmware boot?

Before you open it up, see if you can boot off of a phone charger.

Does it power up at all?

The dev builds have essentially replaced the releases at least until we get around to doing them again. There shouldn't be any difference in stability with stock devices (releases are just old dev builds). With a modded device you never know. A lot of these adapters seem to work poorly or not...

If your adapter is that unstable you should probably just use the apple firmware.

Crashes and inability to build a database is pretty common with SD card adapters. Aren't you using one? If so, try sticking to the file browser. It is much less sensitive to disk corruption.

Almost all software uses the default FLAC encoder. If you're getting USB problems and audio playback problems, I'd question if your storage is actually working OK.

  They're speex files, but yeah, that is the idea.  You generate them on PC from the word list and then the system decodes and mixes them when needed.  

Loading the database into RAM has been restored, and as of today, a few other fixes have gone in.  If there are still performance problems with the database on very large libraries, people should probably report them.

  Sorry, they are one setting.  Dither turns on/off dithered noise shaping.