Rockbox

[UpstartXT]

Anyone use rockbox on their device?

What made you decide to use this and what are your thoughts?

 

[gorcorps]

When I had a device that ran it I used it. I liked being able to customize the UI, and now it's much easier to do such things on it. The boost in sound quality was noticeable, and the extra control over the equalizer was worth it.

 

[gsaldivar]

Use it and love it on my iPods, but we're still waiting for a stable release of the Android version...

 

[vshah]

i ran it on my old iAudio x5, loved the tweakability

 

[UpstartXT]

I've just gotten into using FLAC and am re-ripping all of my CDs. It got me thinking about a protable solution and I have an old iPod Video laying around that I wasn't using anyway.

I'm definitely going to do it if you say you are hearing a difference.

 

[gorcorps]

You should definitely do it on an ipod. I can't stand how limited ipods are in their equalizers and such.

I've done a lot of testing and I can't personally tell the difference between FLAC and properly ripped high quality mp3s. I don't use the BEST headphones, but I do use some damn good ones. If you have the storage space I would definitely rip the CDs in FLAC, but I personally would encode to mp3 for the ipod. I find it rare that people can hear the difference, and even if you could I don't think it's worth the much larger file size for a portable. That's all up to you though. I just think lossless vs lossy is blown way out proportion on portables.

 

[UpstartXT]

What bitrate on your MP3s do you use for your portables?

 

[ChaoZ]

I did it for the gapless playback and faster changing of tracks. The default Sansa firmware is extremely slow. The trade-off is that the UI is pretty ugly now.

 

[gorcorps]

I use V0 on the LAME encoder, which is the highest quality variable rate LAME has. Even down to V2 is hard to hear a change in quality, but the space savings aren't worth the potential quality drop.

 

[dpodblood]

I use it on my Sandisk mp3 player because the stock OS does not allow me to use SD cards > 2GB. I like the interface a lot better than the stock OS. On the other hand I lost the ability to playback video on my device, but that was functionality I never used anyway.