Is RockBox for iRiver Stable Yet?

[agile_one]

Hello all. I've used RockBox on an Archos Jukebox 20, and love it.

Been following the RocBox development for iRiver, but have not jumped in the pool yet, as the codec's seem to be changing frequently, so am waiting for first official release.

Anybody using RockBox on an iRiver H120/140 with satisfactory results? Am I just a wimp for not jumping in now?

 

[micaela]

I've been using it for a couple of weeks & its been very stable. Its a huge improvement over the original firmware & well worth the download IMO. I am a big chicken when it comes to stuff like this - especially when it involves my player -- so I waited a long time before taking the dive - but it really did go easily & has not been unstable at all.

 

[kyrie]

I've used it for several days, and it's not as stable as I would like, but stable enough.

Operation sometimes becomes horribly slow (and/or doesn't work) when you try to adjust the volume or balance by a large margin during playback. One time, it just randomly stopped playing. It rebooted fine.

Navigation can be slightly slow at times, if you have a large number of tracks or folders.

There are noises when you jump to a track that are sometimes unpleasant, and also when you turn the player off.

FLAC playback is pretty good. It plays fine real-time to about compression level 6 or so. Any higher and you start hearing occasional skips. Certainly better than the Iaudio players that only support up to compression level 2.

Overall, the bootloader makes the whole process pretty safe; since you can load up either the rockbox or the iriver firmware, you don't have to worry about your player crashing permanently.

There are a few minor problems, but all in all, it's definitely worth switching over at this point.

 

[agile_one]

micaela & kyrie, thank you both for the quick and helpful responses. Your comments and experiences have pushed me over the top. Will d/l latest build tonight, and get my iRiver rockin'

I am usually bleeding edge about firmware and such for pc's, routers, etc, but for some reason didn't want to take any chances to screw up my music. kyrie's reminder that it is essentially a dual boot system was the clincher - very easy to just reboot to the iRiver os.

Thanks guys.

 

[Redly Rocket]

Hey, have you checked out the threads at www.misticriver.net ? these guys know what they're talking about. also it is an essential site for all iriver enthusiasts.

 

[agile_one]

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^
Redly: coincidentally, I just dicovered www.misticriver.net earlier today via a Google search. Thanks for the reinforcement, and vote of confidence for the info from there.

 

[micaela]

yeah - mistic river is a must for me when it comes to all things i-river. you can also find there which daily builds are the most stable - some are better than others. one other thing that I found neccessary when i switched to rockbox was to adjust the font. check out the wps thread on i-river. its under the rockbox forum. it will offer you a variety of screen set-ups to choose from. the original rockbox font was just way too small for my eyes! but this is probly the same as the archos version since you've used that already.