[Rastpokruczltan]

This is the part where I am all ears because I'm only a few months into any sort of quality music hardware, and obviously you know better.  So why is a nexus 4 and neutron player inherently worse, no contest?
 
I'm still looking around for what to buy and stick with for a few years, so now's the time to school me.

 

[julian67]

So today I was chatting with the developers about Rockbox and how many of you here think it's the best thing since sliced bread. So they asked me, what do people like so much about Rockbox? And... it's your turn to answer that question I have a few ideas myself, but I'd rather open a thread for you guys to chip in with your thoughts.

We might even fit it in our firmware one day? :tongue_smile:

The best things:

Audio:

true gapless with every codec/container that supports it.

choice of crossfeeds.

dithering can be toggled on/off.

UI:

totally user customisable display.

Can display all standard/commonly used metadata fields. The Composer (Writer in Apple products) tag really matters in Classical music and is also very helpful for audiobook tagging. Also useful is that the Comment field is displayable.

Utility:

Totally customisable bookmarking and resume options.

Ability to play entire albums and random autochange directory, not just shuffle tracks.

User can run Rockbox as a database based player or just as a simple file tree based player, or even minimally as a collection of playlists. You can dump all your tracks in root if you like, or run a a well ordered directory hierarchy. It works however you personally prefer.

Database searches are fully customisable.


Convenience:

Superb battery life, better than original firmware on my Sansa Fuze+ and iRiver H140


From my Fuze+ with my customised While Playing Screen is an illustration of how useful proper metadata display can be: The top line of metadata text alternates between Composer tag and Artist tag. The middle line displays the Album tag. The third line alternates between the Title tag and the Comment tag. As you can see this displays a wealth of information without being congested or needing tiny text and is attractive and legible. The second image is using the exact same template but with an album without Composer or Comment metadata so the display falls back automatically to the usual Artist, Album, Title. If there is no metadata the directory name and file name will be displayed.






(top line: "track num/total" "time" "track position/duration"
bottom line: "volume" "crossfeed status" "play/pause indicator" "battery %")

I own a FiiO E7 and line out adapter and love it, and would love to buy a FiiO X series player but the metadata support is not good enough. It leaves the player useless for Classical music, both in terms of displaying it nicely and because it means the database is broken by design.

If you ship a player with Rockbox or assured to be able to run Rockbox then I will buy one. Meantime I'll stick with my old Rockboxed players from iRiver and Sansa or my Galaxy Note running UPnPlay and MPDroid.

 

[Hal Rockwell]

No down sampling of Hi Res files as it does in the current state of RockBox. Now all Hi Res files are down samled to 44.1kHz/16bit.

 

[tackytiger]

  No down sampling of Hi Res files as it does in the current state of RockBox. Now all Hi Res files are down samled to 44.1kHz/16bit.

That doesn't sound like a feature from Rockbox you most want to see in X series players.

 

[Hal Rockwell]

That doesn't sound like a feature from Rockbox you most want to see in X series players.

That's why there's a NO in the beginning of the first sentence.

 

[tackytiger]

That's why there's a NO in the beginning of the first sentence.

Yeah, I got that, just wondered why you were asking for a feature the original firmware already had, in a thread asking which features people would like added.

 

[fburgos01]

1- Replygain
2- A library that handled correctly the multi albums
3- shuffle albums

 

[VanSquall90]

As some others have already requested, true gapless playback for all lossy audio codecs besides OGG Vorbis would really be appreciated on the X1 firmware.

 

[Prowler]

1. Auto resume for audiobook/podcast files (or any spoken word content). Something like a dedicated "audiobook" folder so all files (including files in sub folders) will always automatically resume (but all music files will not auto resume). I still use an old 5.5G iPod with stock firmware primarily for this reason.
 
2. Replay gain (use album gain, if not present then use track gain).
 
3. Gapless playback as seamless as Rockbox/foobar2000/Winamp.
 
4. Browse the database by the Album Artist tag (if not present then use the Artist tag).

 

[420204]

the ability to add tracks to now playing and save that as a playlist!
sorting by title and album artist.

 

[nekromantik]

Is anyone actively working on Rockbox for X3?