Throw the Mind [dot] Com

In 2005 when I fist got an iPod it was a 20gb 4th gen.  Which was right before the color iPod came out, and a few years before the iPod Video came out.  This meant that the screen consisted of black text on a white background.  This also meant all my music didn’t have Album Art.  See I had to rip all the CD’s I purchased, but what was I suppose to do with album artwork.  So for the past 5 years, I haven’t cared at all what the Album Artwork was.  Sure I have noticed high profile album’s artwork, but nothing about it much mattered to me.  I didn’t see it everyday.

Cut to 5 years later, and I have an Android device which I use as my phone and iPod.   I listen to podcasts and stream music from Pandora or Slacker Radio.   I also have a windshield mount for it.  This all means that when listening to audio while driving, I can see album artwork.  Its a little thing, but after 5 years its nice to see the work artists put into their album covers.

The other day I noticed my iPod was almost filled up, but should have only been about %50.  So I decided to give Rockbox a try, and manage my own music directory.  I figured it would be easy to just use rsync to synce the Music on my computer with the music on my iPod.  Installation was easy as pie and after a reboot I was using Rockbox.  I immediately went to look for a podcast menu.  To my surprise there was nothing in rockbox for podcasting.  After doing a little Googling I ran across a way to insert a menu into the batabase section.  Which gave me a listing of “All Podcasts”, “New Podcasts”, and “Old Podcasts”.  This was kind of cool, I was able to modify the interface to my liking.  But when I clicked on “All Podcasts” saw about half what I was suppose to.  This was because some podcasters don’t modify the ID3 tags correctly.  After modifying the tags accordingly I still didn’t have all of them.  This was because the database had to be updated.  All this and I finally got podcasts to show up, only to find out bookmarking only works on playlists which I couldn’t get working, other than the dynamic one, which consists of my current directory.  GAAAA!!!!!!!!

List of Suck for Rockbox

• No podcasting support out of the box.
• Bookmarking works on playlists, though I can’t verify that because I wasn’t ever able to save a playlist and go back play it again.
• Battery didn’t seem to charge while plugged in and syncing.
• Rockbox can’t sleep, only turn off, so you have to wait for it to boot before it can play your track.  Though you can make it continue on start up, which is nice.
• Every game/app has a different way to exit, and doesn’t ever tell you what it is.

Basically if you want to just play music, you might find this useful.  Though in my weekend of playing with it, I found it to have a huge learning curve.  I’ve gone back to gPodder and gtkpod.  That is until my iPod breaks, in which case I will look for a different podcast device.