Rockbox: an open-source portable music platform

I've been hearing for a couple of years about iPodLinux, but the fact that it didn't support my iPod model ( nano 1st generation ) kept me aways from trying it.

But recently I discovered another alternative, open-source project too, under the name "Rockbox". It stated that it had support for my iPod model, and it also offered an easy installer for setting it up. Here's a screenshot of the installer, you can see it's quite simple:


Rockbox is mainly an operating system designed specifically to run on portable music players, like the iPod for example. The most interesting thing about it is that it's relatively new, yet enough feature rich to blow minds.

The system has had many positive effects on my iPod, like it being now able to manage the files stored on it ( in disk-mode ), have a TON of games and useful utilities, and have the ability to be skinned ( have it's theme changed ).

On the downside though, the built-in music player itself lacks some features ( but in the same time offer some unique ones ), like Album Art - which the player cannot read unless you put it explicitly in the same folder of the file as a JPEG image - . And it lagged when I was playing a 320 Kbps bit rate song, I admit it's quite a large file for a song, but nonetheless the player should NEVER skip audio.

Overall, I found the Rockbox experience to be pleasing and fun, and I plan to keep installed on my iPod.

Here's an attempt yo shot you how it looks ( sorry for the bad quality thisa is a cellphone camera ) , I have picked the vista theme for my iPod:




And here's a screenshot I grabbed from the internet: