IT Legends – Tech in Connecticut

I used to own a nice 4gb iPod Nano.  It was cool.  It was sleek.  It was black.  It was expensive.  It’s broken.  Haha.  I was dog sitting for someone who ended up lending me a car for a month when mine was being fixed, but her dogs ate my iPod.  Well, they cracked the screen anyhow.  Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) don’t work nicely with the cracked screens and the liquid seeping out.  I listened to music on the iPod, sure…  but my real passion became listening to podcasts instead!  Specifically, Security Now! and FLOSS Weekly.  I never got into buying music through the iTunes music store (though I did purchase Seasons 1, 2 and 3 of Battlestar Galactica – then the network execs yanked it from Apple’s store and I have to buy season 4 on DVD when I can).

So, I was thinking to myself, do I really need a new iPod?  I really just need something that will play MP3 format files.  If I want to buy music, Amazon.com sells legal non-DRM MP3 files.  Or I can just buy the handy CD-ROM and rip it with Windows Media Player (or iTunes, you just have to configure it to use MP3 format).  So I ended up picking up a refurbished Sandisk Sansa e260 from buy.com (same place I bought my mighty Thinkpad).  The refurb unit was $39.99 – price was nice.  Has 4gb of built-in memory, a microSD card expansion slot, FM radio, and voice recorder to boot!  Not bad.  This is the version 1 of the device.

One of the features I didn’t like in the Sansa e260 was the ability it has to scan through audio files.  It was tedious and time-consuming.  Some of these podcasts are 1.5 hours long, and if I hook my Sansa up to my PC (say for new content or to charge), I lose the place I was in listening to a file.  It wouldn’t be so tedious if all I had was music, but my main purpose for the device is podcasts – much longer files than your typical song.  In order to scan, I’d have to turn the wheel and each full rotation of the wheel only got me a few seconds.  So to skip to 30 minutes… well you do the math because I got frustrated with it.

Then I just happened to be listening to FLOSS Weekly Episode 43: Rockbox.  Rockbox is an open source system that gives you an alternate interface for an MP3 player.  They said they support some Sandisk Sansa devices.  So I go check, yep – they support the entire e200 series (this includes my e260), provided its the version 1 of the devices (yep, check that as well!).  Scanning through a file now is a much nicer experience.  And multiple bookmarks, which I haven’t figured out how to use yet, but I imagine will allow me to keep my place in many files instead of just the last one I played!  I even get to play minesweeper on my MP3 player while listening to audio files.  And a whole bunch of other things.  They even have voice-enabled navigation which helps the hard of seeing rather nicely.  And huge fonts you can choose.

So, I love Rockbox, i’m so glad they made it so easy to hack my mp3 player.  I had to do a manual install, which wasn’t too difficult for me to manage.  They have an auto installer, but it wouldn’t work on the device.  the manual install basically has you copy the Rockbox files, the fonts it needs access to, then I had to download an updater program that would allow me to modify the Sansa bootloader so it would load the rockbox firmware instead of the Sansa firmware.

If you’re not happy with your MP3 player, take a look to see if Rockbox will run on it.  You might be impressed with it again :)

Rockbox doesn’t now, and likely never will, support DRM-encoded/encrypted files (but neither did my Sansa e260, either).  This is by necessity since all of Rockbox is open source, and in order to natively support the DRM files (like iTunes or Audible.com), the source code must be released and that violates the agreement you sign up for when you are given the code to process these files.  However, rockbox does have a plugin architecture…  so perhaps someone could write a free, or cheap, closed-source plugin that will allow the use of DRM files.  That would be very nice, because I want to be able to use Adubile.com on this device (currently I use my TomTom for my audio books).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 11:53 pm and is filed under Geekstuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.