I found my old iRiver MP3 player which came out in late 2003. It still boots a very old version of ROCKbox which is still an active project. The battery doesn’t seem to charge but I’m shocked the tiny little hard drive still works. I was thrilled to find some really old podcasts including The Tartan Podcast which featured Scottish musicians. There are very few archives of that show. Now I have a few more.

#vintagecomputing #rockbox #retrocomputing #mp3

bit of a shower thought but wouldn't it be kinda dope to make a drop-in replacement mainboard for the ipod classic? i have a 6g running rockbox which i love dearly, but my headphones are bluetooth.... i've been working up the energy to build a proper bluetooth mod, i've seen various attempts which are either external (sucks balls), and/or have other weird issues and limitations

to me the obvious way to do it was to wire up an esp32 to the i2s pins on the DAC, run the antenna to the inside of the usb connector or headphone jack (maybe??) to avoid having to modify the metal chassis and wire it up to the accessory port UART and talk to it from rockbox to add a bluetooth menu. it would totally be possible to add wifi too and have it sync to last.fm or something when you're at home

someone did a very similar thing to the ipod nano 3g but just hacked a bluetooth menu into the rockbox bootloader which is extremely neat fwiw

but like, the esp is not that far off the ipods main CPU right? i mean the tangara does a lot of awesome stuff with it

so the appeal mostly comes down to the joy of rockbox in particular (for me it just has a certain whimsy that only exists in FOSS projects that have been around for 20+ years (see also: U-Boot))

so then it's like what if i just got a batch of the same DAC that's already used in the ipod (and hey it can support multiple DACs why not) and designed a drop-in replacement... people already make replacement parts for everything else so you can build an ipod from scratch, only the mainboards are a limited resource i thiiiink (could be wrong tho lol)

aaaanyway, with the success of the tangara (extremely dope project!), idk if the nostalgia pull of the ipod is enough to fund a project like this

but gosh it would be cool to have a drop-in replacement that could run rockbox or even the tangara OS and give you the same feel as an OG iPod with custom firmware

or uh, if you were feeling suitably (in)sane about it write an emulator to let you run the original ipod firmware, that would be honestly fucking dope

#ipod #rockbox #tangara

So I'm working on a video project, it's a bit hard to describe, a bit of a variety show I guess, but free/libre software gets mentioned a lot and I think some people here might be interested https://youtu.be/xMzlSQcYCyk

#physicalmedia #linux #rockbox #phosh #mobian #libre

A modern Music Player Daemon based on Rockbox firmware

https://github.com/tsirysndr/rockbox-zig

#HackerNews #musicplayer #rockbox #firmware #open-source #technews #github

Wedi gwefru'r hen #iRiver #h320 - batri ddim fel oedd e, ond yn chwarae trysorfa gerddorol o 2009 o hyd.

#mp3 #mp3players #rockbox