Interscription

This past weekend, Khidr and I found that rockbox didn’t really play all that well with our Xbox 360s.  I had written this off a couple of months ago when I went to visit Tygerfyr at his casa, and I excitedly plugged my rockbox into the 360 to let them listen to some tunes I had just purchased.  Upon plugging in the rockbox, the 360 only saw two old podcasts.  Two.  And no music.  I assumed that this was because these were the two podcasts I had copied to the iPod via iTunes "back in the day", and that this would just be the cost of doing business with a rockbox’d iPod.  I’m happy to report I was wrong!

On Saturday, I verified that this same symptom was occuring on Khidr’s 360.  He plugged his rockbox in, and found a list of music!  When trying to play the items, though, it would immediately give the "no" sign next to the track, and skip to the next track, over and over…this actually also happened when trying to play the two podcasts that were listed on my rockbox.  We plugged in my rockbox into a PC, and turned on "Show hidden files and folders" in the XP folder options.  Suddenly, a folder named "iPod_Control" appeared.  In a leap of blind, stupid faith, we deleted this folder in hopes of tricking the 360 away from thinking this little white MP3 player was ever an iPod.  After ejecting the iPod, we plugged it back into the 360 and hoped for the best.  SUCCESS!  The 360 now views the rockbox in a folder view (awesome; ID3 tags are almost impossible to keep perfectly clean in a large collection), and it is incredibly responsive.

The downside, of course, is that you’ll have to do a restore on the iPod if you want to have the ability to use iTunes (or anything that "looks" for iPod functionality).  Thankfully, most things also understand basic hard-disk-based MP3 players, so this probably won’t be an issue for most.  Happy surgery, folks!