Rockin the Box

A long time ago, I set out on the quest to find the perfect MP3 player.  My requirements were simple, but non-negotiable.  I needed a substantial hard drive (none of those 4gb doohickeys), and I wanted to be able to drag and drop my mp3s and instantly see my music from my computer and home network, saving valuable disc space by not having to duplicate my music collection. 

I settled on the Iriver Ihp-120, a 20 gig ipod competitor that was fat32 compliant, had two audio outputs, a built in fm-radio, ogg vorbis support, and the ability to record mp3s with a built in mic or attached mic.  It was music player bliss…  then I discovered rockbox for the Iriver.  I did what anyone 100% satisfied with their mp3 player would do…  I immediately downloaded and installed the brand-new OS onto the unit. 

Things were good for a while, but eventually, my mp3 player bricked, and I had to send it back to the Iriver farm.  I was told 6-8 weeks until my RMA would be back in my hands.  That was, what I would call, an unacceptable loss, so I went out and joined the ipod generation. 

The decision was based almost entirely on the 60 gig hard drive, which seemed like it should be able to store all of my music and then some, and surely the most popular mp3 player in the universe would have some dedicated folks out there bringing the functionality close to what I had on the Iriver right? Wrong.  There was no drag and drop. Sure there were plenty of programs to manage your musical goodies outside the nonsense that is itunes, but nothing to really do what I could already do with the Iriver.  That was, until I discovered rockbox for my Ipod! 

With Rockbox, you can skin your music player, adjust eq, play pong, record music, play ogg files, wav files, set on the fly playlists, and most importantly, drag and drop your mp3’s directly onto your ipod for immediate playback and recall. 

Now, the only current problem is that my rockbox ipod is confusing my 360, which thinks it looks like an ipod, but doesn’t really think it’s an ipod, and refuses to see it as a removable drive like the rest of the windows world. Basically, that means it won’t play music.  Well, that, and the battery sucks now.  (However, there is an issue with CPU scaling, which is a little technical for this post, but they know about the battery problems, and are working on it).

The moral though, is get rockbox if you’re an ipod user, and don’t mind getting a little dirty.  It really exponentially expands the ipod’s little universe.