[TheMarchingMule]

Okay dude, you seriously just opened a can of NASTY worms. It's lossless; THEY ARE THE SAME. THE ONLY DIFFERENCE IN LOSSLESS FORMATS IS HOW THEY ARE ENCODED.

 

[Schalldampfer]

Anyway, to the original poster: The battery will suffer. Oh, and my Rockbox can't seem to recognize the music currently. But I have a feeling that it'll be easily fixable.

 

[doctafonk]

I was also originally drawn to rockbox purely for the gapless playback feature, but there are a tonne of other features that make it great. eg:

- Replay gain support
- Playlists on the fly- Ive only really started using this one, but it is a killer feature. eg: while listening to a track, go back to your music tree and start adding songs to the playlist. then save/edit that playlist as you like.
- cutting/pasting/editing files/folders - I dont use this so much, but can be very usefull.
- dual boot - you can still boot back to original OS if you want to (eg: to watch a video).
- simple copy and paste music from your HDD to the iPod, no need for seperate software (itunes/anapod etc) to copy music.

and plenty more....

 

[wax4213]

Quote:

Originally Posted by astranovus i never get why people prefer flac to alac, alacs are usually smaller than flacs, when used on the same file. plus nobody can guarantee you, that flac will outlive alac

For me, I just don't like being tied down to a company for my formats. FLAC is open, and that concept appeals to me, whether it really is better or not, I dunno. Oh yeah, in order to use EAC and ALAC, I think I'd have to rip to WAV and then transcode to ALAC using iTunes, which is just another step.

Let's not even talk about sound differences between ALAC and FLAC. As far as I know, there's no reason one should sound different from the other.

 

[SlackerClerk107]

Quote:

Originally Posted by doctafonk I was also originally drawn to rockbox purely for the gapless playback feature, but there are a tonne of other features that make it great. eg: - Replay gain support - Playlists on the fly- Ive only really started using this one, but it is a killer feature. eg: while listening to a track, go back to your music tree and start adding songs to the playlist. then save/edit that playlist as you like. - cutting/pasting/editing files/folders - I dont use this so much, but can be very usefull. - dual boot - you can still boot back to original OS if you want to (eg: to watch a video). - simple copy and paste music from your HDD to the iPod, no need for seperate software (itunes/anapod etc) to copy music. and plenty more....

Oh well that's cool that I can dual boot. Makes me feel a lot better about trying it out when it's availabe for the 80GB.

 

[doctafonk]

Quote:

Originally Posted by SlackerClerk107 Oh well that's cool that I can dual boot. Makes me feel a lot better about trying it out when it's availabe for the 80GB.

yeah definately, made it a very easy decision for me too

 

[krmathis]

Rockbox cons:
* Does not support Mac formatted iPods (HFS+).
* Is not even it beta stage yet, so might be unstable.
* Does not support charging (inside the firmware).
* Does not support all iPods.
* Does not support DRM (media purchase from iTunes Store).
* No, or very limited, video support.
* Harder to install (especially for Mac users).
* Shorter battery time.

Rockbox pros:
* Support more audio codecs.
* Drag and drop files in Finder.
* Open source.

 

[gloco]

Custom EQ.

That's what sold me to rockbox my iriver's.

 

[IpaqMan]

For the Iriver H120, Rockbox provides a great alternative for problems in the original Iriver firmware:

1) Much faster startup, directory cacheing

2) Improved recording functionality including record level adjustment, record AGC, peak metering, countdown record timer, automatic file splitting, longer recording battery life.

3) Better EQ

4) Great on-the-fly playlisting

5) Bookmarking

6) Extended volume range

7) More codec support including compressed lossless

8) Customizable UI

9) Open source code available for custom patches

 

[wolfen68]

With a rockboxed ipod, you can actually consider your player as a backup to your computer, as it should allow easy recovery of songs back to your computer in case of a pc hard drive failure.

Ipods as is don't allow this unless you use a hack.

 

[bigshot]

It doesn't take a hack... it just takes third party software. I use PodWorks. A great Mac program that will run right off the iPod's hard drive, so you don't need to have iTunes installed to upload or download files. It also uses the tag database, so your files come out properly tagged.

See ya
Steve

 

[Electro Point]

Only disadvantage for me is the battery life when using Rockbox on my Video iPod.

Some of you are saying it does not support charging but acutally the Firewire charger works with no problems, Just not the USB charger.

 

[nfusion770]

Advantages
-lots of interesting features
-tedious, but not too difficult to install if you follow the instructions
-dual boot- you dont really risk anything
-easy to uninstall (reformat ipod) if you dont mind replacing your music.
-gapless for older ipods

Disadvantage
-a lot of time spent tinkering for benefits that are questionable. Don't get me wrong, when it is actually released I will give it a try, but I just don't have the will to spend an hour researching skins with larger fonts or why tagcache still wont display my aac files. I still dont know if you can even increase the font size- which was way too small for functional use. Anyway, its just a lot of research and tinkering at this point, something I get my fill of with my computers.

 

[gorman]

Quote:

Originally Posted by astranovus plus nobody can guarantee you, that flac will outlive alac

One being open source, the other being closed source... my money would be in any case on the open source one. Even for a very successful company like Apple.

 

[mnhnhyouh]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot Gapless playback was the only thing that interested me, but Rockbox has terrible integration with Mac, so I gave up on it. See ya Steve

Ahhh, still banging on about that filesystem so you can transfer 4Gb files onto and off your iPod.... oh, and resource forking.

Anything else?

h