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Saturday, April 02, 2005

We don't need no stinkin' iPod, we gots a Rock Box!

: ;

Have you ever had iPod envy? Well, I haven't, but after seeing all the cool stuff they could do that my Archos Recorder V1 couldn't, I was starting. Somehow, even though I've hacked into my xbox (http://www.xbox-scene.com), it had never occured to me that there might be a community of hackers out there makeing firmware upgrades to popular items. Sure, I'd heard about it on some select DVD players, but I never figured that my MP3 player might have such an option. Enter the Rock Box (http://www.rockbox.org).

It's a complete rewrite of the firmware for a host of Archos MP3 players. It takes something that once only played MP3s (and that poorly) and upgrades it to be a crappy PDA with calender functions, calculator, games (Wormlets ROCKS!), hell, even a greyscale image viewer and movie viewer. VERY nice. And yes, it still plays MP3s. Infact, it plays them better. I don't know why, I assume the makers didn't take much time to make sure it worked right, but now when I fast forward to the next song, it WORKS (before, it would sometimes crash the player)! It even has a car adapter mode (which the original firm ware was sadly lacking).

Very impressive. I'm hooked. I went out and blew $30 bucks yesterday on adapters for it. My MP3 player went from almost useless (I still used it as a big moble HDD, 15 gigs is hard to pass up), to being my third most carried gizmo (right behind my crappy cell phone (kyocera KX414) and my Nintendo DS).
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