http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IpodPort

And from the IRC channel:



Amazing work, the entire Ipod project started just a few months ago, and it appears that people are submitting updates for the ipod port almost daily.

I have a 3G, which isn't supported, but it looks like someone is working on that too, so maybe I'll get to try it out soon

oh my!!!!!!!!

Very good news. I use Rockbox on my H340, and like it. Hopefully this development will also spur the creation of a color GUI, or at least something more than the 1 bit black and white Rockbox currently uses.

Heh just saw this on CVS:

Playing Howlin' Wolf while writing this with Rockbox on H340 with full color GUI. 24 bit color BMP support and BMP transparency just implemented in the "H300 Optimized" release. Get it here. Not that color is very important to me, but it's there already, and more seems to be coming along... Nicest in switching from iRiver are getting gapless, replaygain-from-tags (not from ape2 tags on mp3 yet, but works fine with Vorbis, Musepack, Wavpack and FLAC), additional support for Musepack, Wavpack and FLAC, superfast booting....... Most negative are shorter battery life, but that will be worked on, they say...

I might need to sell my H140, if the Ipod port gains enough momentum.

One question: Does the ipod have line in?

now if they would just get MPC support Id be in heaven

If they could get it running on the mini anytime soon I'd probably spooge my pants. I want gapless and non-skipping so bad. MPC would be nice as well.

The headphone jack can double as a microphone/line input jack. The dock connector also does have pins for a Line input, although I'm not aware of any accessories that use it as such.

Why is everybody so big on Rockbox, BTW? After looking at it, it looks far less advanced than the default iPod firmware, to me. Am I missing something? I mean, yes, clearly it's better than a lot of other default player interfaces, but one of the best things about the iPod is the well designed and functional interface. Rockbox doesn't even appear to come close to that sort of thing.

i could care less for aesthetics. Rockbox is easy to use, works as external USB drive for fast transferring, and plays back gaplessly, has replaygain support, and supports many more file types than the ipod firmware.

Rockbox is made to be a damn good audio player firmware, not a "hip" item that only has basic music playing abilities.

I really wasn't talking about aesthetics.


External USB drive = So does the iPod, and without any drivers on the PC.
Gapless = I really don't need it, although I realize many people disagree with this assessment. It would be nice, but it's not really necessary.
ReplayGain = The iPod firmware has it too, in the form of SoundCheck (foo_pod actually uses real ReplayGain info in there instead).
File Types = If it plays my files, why would I care that it can play a dozen other types? I have MP3 and AAC files, and both can play those, right?


The problem is that I'm not seeing where Rockbox is any better than the iPod at playing my music. It seems to lack realtime rule-based dynamic playlist support, for one thing. That's a deal breaker for me, personally, as nearly all my music is played back via Smart Playlists on the iPod firmware.

My point is that most of the features I see in Rockbox have very little to do with playing back music at all. File Management, several games, recording, a text file reader, custom font support, screensavers... None of these seem oriented at music playback or management. It has very basic playlist support, lots of extraneous format support, weird stuff like "speaking menus" (which I admit is cool), but in the end it doesn't seem to be any better at playing music than the iPod is by default. In fact, it lacks many important features that I use a lot. And yes, the interface for Rockbox is nowhere near advanced as the iPod's is, for the specific purpose of selecting and playing back music. If I want to play a whole artist, or album, or genre, or even my favorite tunes that I have not listened to in the last 2 weeks, these are just a couple button presses away on the iPod.

Like I said, I agree than Rockbox is far better than the Archos or iRiver firmware, for example, but it really doesn't seem to offer a lot when stacked up against the iPod firmware. One big benefit is that it is open sourced, and so it one day might be up to par, but I'm not seeing it at the moment, that's all.


Oh, and the goal of my original post was not to cause controversy or troll or anything like that, I was kinda hoping somebody could point out something I was missing, like some cool must-have feature that the iPod lacks normally.

Not many people would try to argue that the iTunes/iPod combination is easy to use and meets the DAP needs of a lot of people.

The intention of the Rockbox port to the iPod is not to try and improve upon that combination and to convince all existing iPod users to switch to Rockbox. I think it will appeal to either existing Rockbox users looking to upgrade to a newer player, to new Rockbox users looking for an easily available player that Rockbox can run on, or for those iPod owners who are either not satisfied with the functionality of Apple's firmware, or do not wish to use iTunes (or a third-party equivalent) to transfer their music to their player.

You're right in that you can access the disk in your iPod without drivers from your PC - but the Apple firmware will not play any music files that you transfer in that way. Rockbox will.

As for the Rockbox UI - Rockbox was originally developed for small black and white LCDs where screen real-estate is valuable. The UI was designed to display the maximum amount of information in the smallest amount of screen space.

It is only in the last few months that Rockbox has been running on devices (iriver H300, iPods) with large colour LCDs. Work has started on adapting the UI to make full use of that potential, but it is only in the very early stages. The actual music playback functionality on these players has obviously been a much higher priority.

Rockbox is designed to play music files back from the filesystem - the recommended way to organise your music is in a simple Artist/Album directory structure. Simply clicking on one track in a folder will play that whole folder. If you don't organise your music this way, then you'll find Rockbox very inconvenient.

Work is in progress on a "tag database" system for Rockbox that will require no software on your PC to use - the database will be created and updated by Rockbox itself running on the player. This is when you'll start to see rule-based dynamic playlist functionality appearing. This system should also "unify" any music you have transfered to your iPod using iTunes and music you have "dragged and dropped" directly onto your ipod's hard drive.

But constructive criticism of Rockbox is always welcome - please submit feature requests via the link on the Rockbox home page.

Flac is working now, and also the port for the H140 is under heavy development. Since the H140 is way better than the iPod, don't sell it unfortunateson. As For the Ugly Gui, Rockbox now support's 24bit bitmap's. Some screeny's of the H300



So UGLY. AW DAMMM
With Rockbox you can full customize your WPS, to whatever way you please, it's very similar to Foobar with Columns UI.

Well it's more about being able to have a DAP that can conform to how you've been using music on your PC, rather than the other way around. I've been playing round with ogg, aac, LAME, wavpack etc on my pc and it was just damn nice to get a DAP that I could simply treat like an extension of that (a rockboxed iriver h120).

If I got an iPod and there were no rockbox for it, then sure, there are good workarounds to transcode (etc) the non-playable files into something Apple thinks I should've be using in the first place. But it's at least nice to have the alternative to simply dump your files of whatever format on the thing and just have it (via alternative firmware) play them.

Rockbox for iPod will matter little for people who've already set themselves up to use the formats that Apple has benighted, or who've got the CPU time to transcode etc via your own excellent foobar component. If you've already conformed yourself to Apple's choices then rockbox offers you nothing new and then fine, don't use it. But it's a great boon to first-time DAP owners like me who just want a DAP that will do everything that it's CPU makes it capable of doing. Apple chose to constrain the iPod's capabilities for commercial reasons. It's nice to free the thing up if that better suits your existing habits.

Other points:

1) it's not a choice between Apple and Rockbox firmware; the rockbox bootloaders make it a dual-boot system. (though the iPod native database format and Rockbox's directory-based filing approach are incompatible, to be sure)

2) the new GUI features are in it's early stages, there wasn't even colour support until a month or two ago. it's early early early alpha days, so it's far to early to make any comparisons about this.

3) you're completely correct about smart playlists. iPod users who are used to them will miss them. But again it's early days for the iPod port, and I'd bet good money that someone who misses them (but likes everything else about Rockbox) will come up with something similar before the end of this year.

Basically, satisfied iPod users shouldn't be overly excited by Rockbox, and Rockbox enthusiasts should be mindful of this. But personally I now know my next DAP will probably be an iPod, because now I can change it to suit me. To each their own.

Read here how to install Rockbox on your iPod
http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IpodInstallation

See my iPod playing FLACs
http://img494.imageshack.us/img494/6522/p10002780qv.jpg

Well, i installed it on my nano...

it crashed on wrapped aac, dident try raw aac
it plays mp3 fine
it reads mpc's but doesn't play them yet
couldn't get volume to work
doesn't read the battery life

for my main reason for installing it, gapless playback is MUCH better than the apple firmware but not perfect, there is still a VERY small delay and click.

Also the fact you can just drop music in to folder on the device is ACE!!!! no more plugins for fobar, or iTunes

It looks very promising though, i'll keep up to date with it.


There was an error in the install guide though.

At stages when it says:

it should be:




Cheers,

Kristian

Yes, only AAC encoded by iTunes is working at the moment. The mp4 parser needs improving to correctly handle other encoders such as Nero.

There was a bug with musepack, but that's now been fixed. Musepack support is now working fine in the latest "bleeding-edge" build on the Rockbox site. Vorbis and FLAC have also been fixed, so it's now only ALAC which isn't usable.



Yes, sound settings and battery status are not implemented yet.



MP3 gapless still isn't perfect - I'm assuming it was MP3 files you tested? Other formats should be fine (apart from AAC, which has the same problems as MP3).



Good spot, thanks for reporting it. It's now been fixed.

Dave.

Hi,

Correct, with regards to gapless playback, it was a lame 3.96 encoded mp3 from my collection. Still better than the origonal firmware though, will it improve even more in the futre or is this as good as its likely to get?

I got the bleeding edge earlier today, and musepack wasn't working, I'll try again tomorrow with another update, hopefully it should all be fine then.


Cheers,

Kristian

FINALLY! :-D

This is a general Rockbox issue (affecting all players), and it's high on lots of people's priorities. We definitely hope we can improve it in the future.



The Musepack fix was committed to Rockbox CVS at 17.06 GMT today - so any bleeding edge build after that (including the one available now) contains working Musepack playback for the iPod.

Dave.

one question: how are the files accessed, by folder-strucutre or by database? - I'd choose a database over directories.

Rockbox does have a tag database, but it's been neglected over recent months. I've never looked at it, but I believe some people are using it successfully. However, efforts in that direction seem to have picked up recently, so maybe that area of Rockbox will be improved.

But for now, the only reliable way to play back your music is via directories and "static" playlists.

I just downloaded the lastest version, and can confirm mpc plays back fine Haven't tried a gapless test on mpc yet though.

Cheers,

Kristian


/EDIT

Just tried gapless mpc, there is a VERY small click during change, but no gap at all, excellent! Seeking isn't working with mpc at the moment though. Regardless, its still in early development, but i can see great things coming from this

Wow, this is good news indeed. Hopefully I'll be able to test this on my 5G video ipod soon (as audio playback isn't funtional yet on the 5G ipods, AFAIK).

Kritip:
There was a bug that would cause mpc playback to sometimes become corrupt during track changes, and this would add [sometimes loud] noise until playback was restarted. I fixed this, however in the process I also discovered that the first and last frames in mpc files were sometimes still not being decoded correctly, and this will sometimes produce a click. Unfortunately, I haven't had any time to look into this further (and mpc is now usable, at least).

Dave:
First, thanks for all your hard work on this!

I tried to install RockBox on my very new Nano and ran into the problem that your program would not find my Nano. I grabbed your source and recompiled it to dump the unrecognized sector to disk. I found that the text "iPod" was actually at decimal offset 83 instead of 71. I uploaded a text dump here:

www.wavpack.com/sector.txt

Should I just change the constant and be on my merry way? Is that safe, or do you want to have a look first? I suspect the newness of my Nano to be the culprit. Perhaps a bounded search would be better...?

Thanks again,
David

@bryant

Just curious, what version firmware does your nano have? I have 1.1 installed on mine. Also how many times did you search for it, ie. how many numbers high did you go. Mine was found at number 7!

KRistian

//edit
Version 1.1 is still he latest according to here: http://www.apple.com/ipod/download/. This is what i updated with, maybe if you updated with the same updater? If you are already are at 1.1 there are several tools to allow you to reload the same version using apples updater. ie. iHack or iPodWizard both found here: http://www.ipodwizard.net/cmps_index.php

Ah, I'm still at 1.0! I'll load 1.1 and see if it helps. Thanks!

That's a completely different boot sector to other ipods I've seen - mine (a 60GB iPod Color) is as follows:



You should be able to safely disable that check (or change the constant) and continue on your merry way. I would be interested to know how you got on.

Considering how different your boot sector is, I think I'll just add an || and check for either the "original" iPod string, or your example - assuming you don't run into any other problems.

Thanks,

Dave.

Great, thanks for the effort!

Are both displays of the ipod color supported?

I have an ipod color and have a scrolling menu in rockbox, and odd colors in apple firmware.

EDIT: rephrasing

thanks
.zamel

There are two types of LCD in the iPod Color/Photo - the Rockbox LCD driver for the first type of LCD has not been tested by any Rockbox developer, so it's possible that either bugs in that driver are the cause of your problems, or Rockbox is not correctly detecting your type of LCD.

If you have some time for testing, come over to #rockbox on IRC - details (and a web client) are here:

http://www.rockbox.org/irc/

(edited to correct URL)

Thanks for your quick answer Dave, I see I didn't need to rephrase :-). I'll be happy to do some testing. I'll try to stop by tomorrow (it's really late where I live).

.zamel

wow, the Ipod Nano is finally looking viable with this latest development...

I updated to 1.1 firmware and now my boot sector is identical to what you show here.

Funny, the problem was not that my Nano was too new, but too old!

I don't particularly want to take the risk of going back to 1.0 and trying again (and, in fact, I wouldn't really know how). Probably the safest thing would be to leave your program the way it is and force people to have recent firmware installed.

Thanks again!

First someone gets MPC to work on a portable, and now theres actually a few people interested enough to work on the decoder. I think hell just froze over.

Are there any plans to support older iPods? ie. the 4G? From what I've seen on the site their hardware is almost the same as the iPod photo, just without the colour LCD. It would be great to have alternative firmware to use as apple abandons support for these older iPods (I realise most people manage to break them quite quickly, but mine's still relatively unscathed )

As a matter of fact, we have someone working on a port to the 3G iPods right now. Last I heard, the LCD driver was being worked on.

Someone else reported the same boot sector as you on her Nano, so I decided to add a check for either boot sector signature. It seems to work fine, so I've released a new version of ipodpatcher.

Thanks for the feedback and I look forward to seeing those ARM optimisations for WavPack.

Dave.

Yeah, I see that the "high" mode WavPack files don't quite make it on the Nano yet...

I'm in the process of switching to Ubuntu, so I'll bug you guys soon if I have trouble building the tools. Maybe I'll even try IRC because I already have a client installed (except you're usually all asleep when I'm working!)

David

If ya'll need some help with that, let me know. I wrote a large part of the iTunesDB entry on the iPodLinux wiki, maybe it would be possible to make the thing capable of reading the normal iPod database (thus making it iTunes compatible... as long as the normal iPod folder structure remains on the thing, iTunes won't know the difference).

Glad the updater is sorted now and works with both software versions.

Just thought i'd update that i've tested vorbis, using the Lancer Vorbis Compiles and playback is absolutly faultless on transitions. Gapless playback is perfect which is fantastic news

High encoding speed, best quality at 128kbps and pure gapless support. Vorbis and the nano, are now my two best friends. Sadly, looks like it time to re-encode my 100G FLAC collection to vorbis

Cheers and keep up the good work!


Kristian

Cool, maybe I'll check it out, have a 3G model myself.

Realy great news! What about gain support?

As in ReplayGain? I didn't check to be honest, as the volume control doesn't work yet, it doesn't matter too much I'll check later on though anyway.

Kristian

Rockbox does support replaygain (track or album). I am not sure though if it's implemented on the ipod.

it also supports a 'track gain if shuffling mode' (which uses album gain otherwise) which is along with 'crossfade when shuffling' pure genius. even foobar doesn't have that

There seems to be some ambiguity as to whether sound is supported on the 5g video ipod. Can anyone confirm it working? I've got 1 1/2 hours to decide whether to run to Dixons and buy one so I can play my mpc files on it

Nope, there is no sound driver for the Video iPod (5g) at this time. I think we're all waiting for the iPod Linux team to crack this one.

Nano and 4g iPods do have working sound.

5G is Video, right?

No, it doesn't work yet. But it will, I'm sure.



BTW, shouldn't this be on the News section?

Its implemented (and working) on the Ipod simulator at least, so I think it will work on the real thing.

Great news! Great news indeed!

I have added "Apple iPod with Rockbox firmware" in the list of supporting DAPs in the HA wiki for FLAC and Vorbis.

The Musepack (MPC) page however does not (yet) have a section on "Supporting DAPs" so I haven't added it there sorry. Please, MPC fans, update the page

OT: The Rockbox page in the HA wiki is still empty. Care for some write-up?

EDIT: Added info of this development in the HA wiki page for Apple iPod.