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.  

You can just look at the code. Unless something changed it operates in 16 mode. If you want to measure it, turn off noise shaping and dither, and then use rmaa. Or just compute the ratio of a peak signal to quantization noise. Should be about 100 dB in 16 bit mode.

  Yes I do?  What I meant is that the dynamic range due to quantization error is not directly related to the noise floor you see on an FFT.  You can have very low noise/Hz but still be 16 bit.  See for example noise shaping in rockbox.  

No audio player ever made can do -140db. Are you sure you aren't confusing the FFT (units of dB/Hz) for dynamic range (dimensionless, usually given in dB)?

  One of the two has a very high output voltage.

  The two devices actually have very little overlap, since the kind of headphones the X3 is made to drive are almost unusable with the Clip, while for the kind of devices the Clip is made to drive, the lack of analog volume control means that the X3 will not work as well.  I'm not sure how much...

  The Clip Zip came out in 2011, and its still quite a bit cheaper than the X3. 

  Forums are up and down at the moment, but should be migrated to a new host eventually.       At the moment, no one is directly working on the X3. If you want to use the voice interface, I recommend buying an old mp3 player like an ipod or sansa that has been around for a long time and...

  Then it sounds like the volume scale is off by one and it should be adjusted so that -1 dB is actually 0dB (or however much is needed so that 0dB is max gain).  

  In rockbox this is expected for any positive gain.  0dB and below should not clip.  Is that what you see?

He means the rockbox forums: rockbox.org Battery life in rockbox is much better than in the apple firmware. It was much worse in 2006, but I and others spent a few years optimizing the port and ultimately got higher efficiency than Apple.