So I talk a lot about geeky stuff nobody uses, but I thought this was a practical example of the awesomeness of open source.
I’ve been through two iPods. Neither last a full year. The battery life rapidly deteriorated to an hour or less, and the hard drive in each failed around the 11-month mark. Bullshit, right? Well, about two years ago, a friend upgraded his iPod, and didn’t need his ancient 20GB iRiver anymore. Since I was at the time without a Pod, he gifted it to me, because he’s a bro.
This thing is a tank. I’ve dropped it dozens of times on asphalt, seen it get run over by a car, basically treated it like crap. The battery life is still around 10 hours, and all the buttons work and everything. The backlight is bright as ever.
My favorite thing about this thing, though, is that I’ve installed some open source firmware on it, which lets me do pretty much whatever I want with the thing. Check out the display skin I use with it.
Check out all that information! This is so freaking geeky. Just on the top half of the screen, it has the following details about the current track:
- artist
- album
- track number
- total number of tracks on album
- track name
- genre
- time remaining in track
- total time of track
- track number in playlist
- total number of tracks in playlist
- format
- bitrate
Then, below that, it has information about the next song which is already queued in the buffer. Additionally, it has basic info about current settings on the device. So add these items to the list:
- artist of next track
- track name of next track
- track number of next track
- total number of tracks on next track’s album
- volume displayed numerically (so you know how loud it is without testing)
- mode (“shuffle”)
- battery life remaining in hours and minutes
Now, let’s compare this with the iPod-esque skin for Rockbox, which a user could of course pick if that suits him better.
Ton of wasted space, huh? This is all the information the user is greeted with:
- track name
- artist
- album
- track number in playlist
- total number of tracks in playlist
- time elapsed
- time remaining
- volume displayed numerically (again, so the user knows how loud it is without having to test)
Now, I know that such information overload isn’t necessarily for everyone, but it is for me. And I believe that the user should always opt for the choice between both options.
To this end, I should make it very clear that Rockbox does also run on most iPods, though not the very newest ones.
Rockbox is an open source firmware for mp3 players, written from scratch. It runs on a wide range of players:
- Apple: 1st through 5.5th generation iPod, iPod Mini and 1st generation iPod Nano
(not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd gen Nano, Classic or Touch)
I’ve had my iRiver H320 for 3 or 4 years now and it’s just as fabulous as you say. It’s been through so much, the extra size is more than worth it for the durability. have you ever seen one of these things opened up? there’s like quarter inch slab of foam surrounding all the guts. you could even take it out and add another drive if you wanted to (someone on misticriver.net did it once but the site isn’t loading atm).
I think yours is the model before mine, but on mine you can even watch video with the korean firmware, ^_^. (plus radio, recording from mic/input/radio, etc etc all before the ipod color came out)
lol@apple whores
My sole complaint is that mine is so old, the processor allegedly isn’t fast enough to run a clock while also playing music. This sucks because it means I can’t install Last.fm software and have my portatunes scrobbd. =(
If you have the slightly newer model, you should be able to scrobble. Look into it.
Also, must be space foam, because no foam would protect a drive from the shit I’ve seen this thing undergo. I once hurled it into the maw of a dragon. I once rode it out of an airplane while falling to earth.
I sometimes even tease it and call it fat to make sure it stays hard.