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Anything can run Doom nowadays, even my MP3 player

Or maybe you meant battery life...in which case your Zune gets you 220 hours of music play one on charge?

Rockbox benchmarks (Fuze v2)

MP3 players are superior in several ways to smart-phones. I just bought a new one. Sansa Clip+, excellent device, almost unchanged in the last 10 years, just larger memory. Can be clipped to T-shirt or jogging-pants, is entirely unimpressed by being dropped even on a hard floor, very light, long battery life, excellent sound quality.

I use the same player -- it works great with Rockbox

I used to play through my phone and/or computer and then would sometimes forget I was tethered by the headphone cord and walk away and either end up pulling my phone off the desk onto the floor, or dragging my laptop across the desk, knocking stuff off on the floor. The Sansa battery only lasts a couple hours now, so I keep it plugged in with a short USB cable, if yank it with the headphone cord, the USB plug slips out.

I used a bluetooth headset for a while, but got tired of keeping it charged (since keeping it plugged in while in-use doesn't work), with regular headphones I know that every time I plug them in, they are ready to go all day long.

Despite having had a phone and tablet, I still use my sandisk sansa e200-series mp3 player daily. I've owned the newer sansa clip, fuse and fuse+, but I just keep going back to an e-series... the perfect device for me, with rockbox installed. It's small, and tactile, and has fantastic battery life, and microSD slot. The design is a sort of clunkier miniature iPod classic. I can operate it completely (rockbox has voice menus) in my pocket without looking, or from a lanyard hanging around my neck. I also use the sleep timer, and variable speed play back (for audio books) a lot.

And there were years when you could get these things pretty cheap on ebay, because in the ipod/ipod touch frenzy, only an enlightened few seemed to want these things. Well, the enlightened few (mostly rockbox users) still cling to this device, but they are getting harder to find... and in recent years the price is going up. Though they are still usually well under $100; sometimes even under $50. I have a couple of them hoarded for myself. I fear the day when they break down (i've gone through a few of them) and I can find no more sources.

Though, also I earnestly have hoped through the years that something better could come along. I hoped my android devices, with suitable software, would take over... but they have not managed it. The ability to operate the thing blind, it's size and battery life, (and the handy lanyard attachment spot!) just keep it in use...

Rockbox also runs on ipod classic, and I've considered many times getting an iPod classic to run rockbox... it seems like they'd work similarly to my sansas, but they (like most apple products) are just too damned expensive. Also bigger and heavier.

Closed source doesn't do much to slow down 'sploit writers. Moreover, opening the source code gives nerds a fighting chance to update abandoned devices. Don't believe me? Look at Cyanogenmod.

Really? There's enough encryption, licensing, hardware, etc., that prevents most users from rooting their Android & iOS devices. I have an Android phone and I am a nerd. But I'm still afraid to put Cyanogenmod (or another distro) on my phone for fear that it'd be an expensive one-way trip. Manufacturers have come a long way since the simple hardware that Rockbox could be used on... (Notice how Rockbox hasn't added any devices lately--and that the project is receiving less submissions...)

And just because something has been open sourced & the code has been dumped onto Sourceforge or GitHub doesn't mean someone's actively working on the project. And most manufacturers would not cede control of the code, even for 5-10 year old devices, lest that code be used by a competitor--or worse, by someone filing a lawsuit for a defective product...

Agreed here - and I hate it. Thankfully, there are workarounds far less expensive than replacing the car stereo.

I actually LIKE when I'm in a vehicle with a cassette player, because those cassette adapters seem to work quite well. Short range FM transmitters are okay as a last resort, too.

" it would cost hundreds of dollars more per year for a dumbphone user to switch to a phone that plays MP3s."

True, but only if you assume that your choice is "smartphone or nothing". You can get a kick-butt media player that you can stick Rockbox onto for $50 or less if you shop around, and end up with something as versatile as any high-end audio player or smartphone. (Heck, the current builds of Rockbox even have Opus support.)

Failing that, Android-based phones, at least, can actually be used for everything but phone calls even without any voice or data plan. I've found even ancient Android phones make decent mapping and media-playing devices. Pick up a discarded one from a friend or Ebay cheaply and away you go.

For the parent post: "Radio" is that thing that you can sometimes use to pick up news and weather reports while in the car when your data connection on your phone isn't working, assuming you can find news or weather between the frequency bands being used to push a handful of entertainment-media audio products.

I have a perfectly usable 2G iPod that is perfectly unusable because it's no longer supported and it doesn't talk to anything except the mothership that disowned it.

Rockbox!

Open Source "RockBox" ought to give folks a clue on
how to access the capabilities of a wide range of MP3-
players - from Apple iPod's to Sandisk Sansa Clip Zip's,
& lots more.

(Some have video functions, too, but I don't know how
much of these would be accessed / used by RockBox.)

Numerous model-specific user manuals & a 1st-class
web site make this Open Source project worthy of
emulation, as well as useful to -both- end-users and
experimenter / developers of innovative replacement
firmware for many models & various applications.

Have a look: http://www.rockbox.org/

Yeah, so to actually address the guy's question, I think most Android music apps are pretty crappy. There I said it.

I think he was hoping to get some recommendation along the lines of "just install rockbox" ( http://www.rockbox.org/ ) or the Android edition of XBMC ( http://xbmc.org/download/ ) ".

My experiences with those:
Rockbox: buy a cheapo Sansa media player. Futz around with the neat but futzy interface. Finally the thin gets bricked after a month of use (not firmware updates or even updating the media library, just occasional use). That was a few years ago, so "it's probably better now"

XBMC : haven't played with it on Android yet, maybe soon. I wasn't impressed with it on the PC, but probably because I'm not a big fan of TV-style menu interfaces.

After playing briefly with the other Android media players (Apollo, Google Play, TwistedPlayer), I ended up shelling out money for Winamp Pro. The lyrics plugin mostly works (a lot of my music is too obscure, I guess?), the album art lookup plugin works, it has nice desktop control widgets, and I found the interface a bit less confusing to navigate. Also it supports internet streaming radio, which is good because I mostly can't be bothered to spend time maintaining my own playlist.

But nowadays I mostly stream internet radio using the SomaFM app (another paid app :/ ), because it's even simpler and more stable at keeping a stream playing than Winamp.

I figure the less time I spend getting background music up and playing, the more time I have for doing stuff I actually enjoy. My personal library of music just needs to be searchable enough for when I want to bring up something specific.

Just because you're buying "hardware" doesn't mean you're getting the privilege of installing whatever the hell you want on the device.

Incorrect.

When I buy a Chevy Volt, I am not forced to fill up with only one vendor's gas. I am not forced to charge up with electricity from a particular utility.

When I buy a Sony TV, I am not forced to watch content only from Sony/Columbia/VEVO.

When I buy a Sansa MP3 player, I am not forced to buy and load only music from Sansa's "content partners." Hell, on many of their players, I can kick out their clunky UI and replace it with an entirely different clunky UI :-)

There is no technological reason that a "Surface" tablet can't run Android or generic Linux. The only obstacle standing in the way is entirely gratuitous, malicious, and childish. To the extent SecureBoot improves platform security (it doesn't) or the integrity of the user's data (it doesn't), there is absolutely no reason that the root keys to such a regime be held by Microsoft, especially given their track record. SecureBoot is there solely as a very deliberate and calculated "Fsck you" to competing operating systems. Therefore, it is entirely correct and proper to call Microsoft out on it.

tl:dr Recipe for recording the audio of multiple individuals in a large crowd.

Ingredients:

Sandisk Sansa Clip+ MP3 Player - http://www.sandisk.co.uk/products/sansa-music-and-video-players/sandisk-sansa-clipplus-mp3-player
Rockbox - http://www.rockbox.org/

Instructions:

Install Rockbox (open source firmware for MP3 players) on the Sansa Clip+. Configure to record on the Sansa Clip+ microphone in .wav format. Give a Sansa Clip+ to every person you want to record the audio for. Have every person start recording at roughly the same time, leave for 5 hours.

Gather all Sansa Clip+s at the end of the session, and extract the .wav file. 10-participants = 10-track equivalent audio recording of the session.

Mix and fade between the tracks to isolate the audio of single conversations between participants.

He basically has created a relatively inexpensive and reliable way to get this audio. Much like using multiple Go Pro cameras to record action of sports events beats out using professional equipment (and in some ways has become professional equipment). He's arguing that the Sansa Clip+ together with the Rockbox open source firmware, is a better solution than using professional radio mic's and then having recording equipment receive those signals and store them on disk for editing later.

I've no idea how "crowdsourced" fits into this though, nor how this is anything more than an advert even though the solution is a little interesting. It's useful enough and potentially cheap that you might imagine giving everyone at a Ted one of these as the conversations caught off-record might be even more valuable than the sessions.

This.

List of Supported Models
I still have an old Toshiba Gigabeat, that has easily over 9 hours of life when just playing music. It also has a cable ( in-line headphone jack ) remote that supports volume, mute, next/prev track, pause, and play. Image of headphone remote. Also, the gigabeat dock has it's own USB host, power, and other things. The dock would be the only thing you need to certify, as it's the only thing mounted. The gigabeats you'd just bring with you and clip in each flight.

Rockbox has open support for handling those remote buttons anyway you like.

See if this works for you: Rockbox (WARNING: it's firmware, so install at your own risk! especially "iPod classic" is listed as "status unstable").
It's supposed to play MP3, other MPEG audio, Ogg, AAC, WMA, Speex, FLAC, AC3, and more. Disclaimer: I haven't got a portable media player besides ancient cassette walkman, so I haven't tried it out myself.

The fact that they're not commonly produced anymore doesn't mean plenty of people don't still own one; if nothing else, I've seen a heck of a lot of people taking about theirs on the AnythingButiPod and Rockbox (firmware) forums.

I virtually never see any players in public these days except at the gym. Even then, only about 10% of the people I see are using one, and it's usually in the size range that makes it impossible to tell if it's HD or flash-based.

With digital EQing and convolution $24 headphones or canalbuds can sound just fine. Frequency response is the most important factor affecting quality of sound for both headphones and speakers, and this is exactly what you can fix with a good equalizer. I love the PortaPros I have that cost 20€ on sale after just a very crude measurement of impulse response with the free and excellent DRC and a convolver audio effect. On my Sansa Clip+ with Rockbox I use the 5 band parametric EQ to fix the sound of my Sony EX50LPs, which are my most used headphones despite me owning full size headphones and canalbuds 5 times the price (which are great, too, and will no doubt last me longer, but are not as tiny, convenient and care free).

Of course there are many factors you cannot fix with EQ - distortion being a big problem with many types of headphones, quickness (as measured by waterfall plots), sensitivity and impedance (you want these to be a good match with your source), noise isolation, repeatability of seal, not to forget the inaudible but important factors such as comfort, build quality and style.

The ideal frequency response of headphones is still open for debate - most headphones shoot for a diffuse field response. Regardless of ideal most headphones have obvious flaws in their frequency response that can be fixed with the tools available for free.

that sounds like something that would have been fixed pretty rapidly. I help off buying a fuse until the port was stable, but that was several years ago.

keep in mind that Rockbox is being actively developed: http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/MajorChanges

Some work was done a few years back, but since then it's stalled. However, some of the components in the Zen are used in other players, so someone sufficiently motivated may be able to get the Zen working. See http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,13462.msg186823.html#msg186823

AMS gave datasheets. http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/AustriaMicrosystems

Sandisk gave dev boards and NO docs.

Nobody else gave squat.

Sansa Clip+ plus with Rockbox is a great combo. Sure, a smartphone also plays music, but it's huge (phones were shrinking nicely before people decided to do things that need big screens on them) and you can't make calls after you listen the battery empty.

What's different here is that Ford is now shipping software to their customers, as opposed to having their customers go back to their favorite garage and have the mechanic plug the car into a magic computer, that often even he has only a faint clue of how it works. This is a significant paradigm shift. It means that Ford will be able to manage more frequent software releases, and maybe start thinking about changing whole features within the lifetime of the car, outside of regular "oh you need to have an inspection after 100 000km" kind of things. So that's cool.

Now the bad part is that your "computer-car" stays proprietary software, and there will probably still be no way in hell that you will be able to modify that software yourself, unless you do some reverse engineering. But it necessarily opens up interesting avenues like running Rockbox on your radio receiver, or flashing some controllers with free software for some of us that are into that kind of crazy thing. I say "necessarily" because the car owners do not have the proprietary interfaces to interoperate with the car, which are a significant barrier of entry for us wannabe car hackers.

In order for Ford to deliver that software to joe users, it means it has to lower this barrier of entry, and that can only be a good thing for everyone.

That's completely the opposite. FLAC is the least CPU intensive audio format in Rockbox (after WAV of course). http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerformanceComparison

No idea if you have the right iPod, or if this counts as modifying the installed os, but you could look at Rockbox.

Though the ALAC decoder in rockbox is probably not perfect, the codec performance comparison at http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerformanceComparison clearly shows that decoding of FLAC is far more efficient in rockbox. Maybe ALAC decoding can close the gap now that ALAC sources are open.

Rockbox to the rescue! Unfortunately, many of the newest ipod models aren't supported (lack of developer time/interest/hardware ownership) but if you have a supported model you get support not only for FLAC but also for a whole host of other useful codecs Apple refuses to support.

Many slashdotters heard of Rockbox back in the Archos days and have forgotten about it since then. Rockbox continues to get better, and it's worth another look. I just flashed a Sansa Clip+ the other day and was surprised at what Rockbox had to offer.

How the hell have the relevant companies managed to screw up producing a Linux-based mobile phone OS/interface so badly?

Smartphones these days are close to general-purpose computers (albeit with mobile telephony hardware), but these companies have spent tens if not hundreds of man-years trying and failing to do little more than port an already-written OS to a new hardware platform and add a few simple apps (phone dialer/receiver, contact database, appointments/reminder app, and port a browser and media player).

Why is it so difficult?

Hell, RockBox is more impressive (OK, it's not for phones, but it IS for mobile audio hardware), and:
a) They had to write their own OS;
b) They're all part-time volunteers;
c) RockBox probably runs on a greater selection of hardware than all of the non-Android Linux mobile phone efforts.

The main challenges I can see with developing an OS+interface for a phone are the small form-factor and the power usage. So this latest attempt is going to run as much as possible in HTML5 in a browser on top of the actual OS, with all the extra CPU power and power-sapping mobile network comms that that implies.

Un-bloody-believable.

Regardless, it doesn't really matter -- my point still stands. FLAC is easier to decode than MP3.

Unless you're running a custom build with a lowered CPU clock speed (or are running other CPU consuming features) the difference is effectively zero.

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/CodecPerformanceComparison#Portal_Player_40ARM7TDMI_41

MP3 and FLAC both take far less cycle than the 30Mhz "idle" clock speed. Both even take less than the 24Mhz idle speed favored by Buschel. Plenty of headroom for your WPS and perhaps a few simple DSPs (ReplayGain, etc) in that budget of 30. In other words the only runtime difference one should expect between the two is HDD usage.

As I attempted to qualify, though, if you're running multiple bands of EQ expect the numbers to start favoring FLAC as that 8Mhz advantage might just be enough to keep ya from boosting the clock speed. But even then file loading is a huge power hit.

Oh how I wish I could have the iPod hardware with an open source program in Linux to put music on it ... unfortunately Apple does not want this.

You can. I know, the software that interfaces with iPods on linux are all something of a kludge, and Apple occasionally breaks compatibility and jerks you around. But you can run open software on your iPod and make it really easy. After screwing around with iPod loaders for years, I switched to rockbox and never looked back.

You should consider installing http://rockbox.org/ on it to give it new life :)

I still see people claiming you can't play MP3s on an iPod.

This is untrue, but the fact that I cannot play my .ogg files on my iPod does not endear me to Apple.

Cue rockbox.

Use Rockbox instead http://www.rockbox.org/ I record (and download) a lot of live music and prefer to keep it lossless, so I convert everything to flac and tag it all in foobar2000 http://www.foobar2000.org/ rather than going the MP3 route. Rockbox will remove your need for iTunes and the unwanted QT install and does a very nice job on most older iPods (I have a 5.5 video 80 gb as well as an older iRiver that it works sweetly on). Unfortunately, they stopped after the mini and 1g Nano so if you have anything newer you're out of luck, but this is easy to use and works a treat for me.

... or maybe even Rockbox Doom.

It is kind of disturbingly cool to play Doom on an audio player, even if the controls are a touch clunky.

Control. Fanboys may defend Apple's control for various reasons, mostly using cognitive dissonance

FYI, when you get called a troll, it's for bullshit like this.

You feel that? Thats called irony. When the biggest Mac troll on slashdot tries to call someone a troll for bullshit. Now the next time you want to call someone a troll you need to take a good, long look in the mirror first.

They want to stop the hackintosh, they want to prevent more clones and they want to control what the end users experiences.

As for "controlling what the end user experiences". That's overstating things quite much. They don't want to control what the user experiences, with the fundamental exception that they want to exclude a set of very rational things. Primarily, buggy software, spyware, and ports which fail to make good use of the platform. They don't want control over my experience other than to help see to it that I don't have to deal with such crap. And when us "fanboys" say (as you said in your post) "it's for your own good and other such excuses", what we're saying is that "it makes the product better". That's why we willingly choose Apple products, so we don't have to deal with a bunch of crap. It's also a huge part of why Apple products do so well even when surrounded by competition whose primary advantage is less "control".

As for Mac and control, it's always been about control. Control over hardware and software. This is why its products like the iPod/iTouch/iPhone are encrypted, for control. People found they could start to alter the software on these devices like either use different software to load music on to these devices (like Amarok could before they encrypted the hardware) or even install their own firmware on the devices these people paid for and are normally under the idea (like anything else they buy) that they can do with it as they can. Apple saw that people were doing what they wanted with something they bought (that just happened to have the Apple logo) and they shit a brick. Now all of these devices are encrypted on the hardware level. It wasn't 'for your protection' as it was only being used by a very small minority.

And as for your claim that by being locked down it 'makes a product better', how? iPhones still crash (done it myself as have my friends), it's lock down nature hasn't help it's security, and all of it's 'attempts to make it a better product' by judging if an app should be allow has resulted in either plain old censorship to all out privacy issues from something 'approved'. This hasn't been able to make 'a better product' even after 3 years, and the issues are just growing. Restrictions like this have been tried before by different peoples of power through out history and every time its shown to be a bad thing for the same reason: when someone has power they are more then interested in using/abusing it. And no, Steve Job's isn't going to be the first person in the entire history of humanity to not succumb to the temptation.

This wont happen overnight, not even the RDF turned to eleven could pull that one off. It will happen over time in baby steps and be hailed by the fanboys.

It (although not the "it" you've been going on about) will be hailed because it will make our lives better. The "it" won't be locking down the Mac, or replacing Mac OS X with iOS, but "it" will be things like abstracting the filesystem

I learned that lesson from having an iPod. It was a generous Christmas gift and I get a lot of use out of it, but managing it in my Linux-only world is a pain.

Dude, Rockbox. I wouldn't even use my iPod (5.5g - 30GB iPod Video) if it wasn't for that.

The same goes for the ipod interface. Thankfully my nano is rock box compatible and I was able to install something that was a bit easier to sync my music with.

When I bought my 30GB click wheel 5th Generation iPod (iPod Video) I was able to figure out how to navigate the menus and use the device within a quick 30 seconds. Pretty much anyone I've given the device to can figure out how to use it quickly and easily, iTunes wasn't any more difficult.

In fact the combination is so incredibly easy the only time I get asked for help with iTunes is from those family and friends who aren't very good with computers in general and they want to burn a CD / DVD. Otherwise how hard is it to insert a disk, click Import and wait a while, eject the disk, click on "Music" in the side menu and see the recently imported disk listed there with all track names, artist, album information, and album art already taken care of automatically. When you plug in the iPod the whole thing auto syncs to the device and when I browse it I can find my music by album title, artist's name, song title, even genre if I so choose. If I had to guess, it was perhaps less than ten minutes from the time I installed the software to when I had my first album imported into iTunes and on the device.

I've taken a look at the Rock Box iPod Video install guide and skimmed through all 224 pages of it. The install instructions would be incomprehensible to pretty much anyone I've given my 30GB iPod Video to. Then there is the needlessly complicated navigation of the device, the ultimate use of it, and the need for a separate piece of software that, hopefully, stores the files in a very specific \Artist\Album\Track file directory structure so you can get some semblance of order when browsing your music on it.

Are you really trying to tell us that you couldn't figure out the simple stock Apple iPod / iTunes interface, even my 80 year old non technical grandmother can use my iPod without any coaching, yet you somehow have the technical ability to successfully flash an iPod with a copy of Rock Box and use its needlessly complicated, at least based on what I read in the virtual novel linked above, user interface?

Could I use Rock Box? Sure, taking computers apart and putting them back together has been a hobby of mine for more than 25 years. Am I going to? Perhaps when I replace my current iPod with a Touch or a much larger Classic, my 30GB is full and I still have better than a third of my CD collection still left to import, I'll consider it just for something new and interesting to do. For now though its nice to have a product that's easy to use and just works, where I don't have to spend hours screwing with it just to get it to do its primary function: playing music.

Don't remember the model number of the little Sony boombox or the two Black discman players which play MP3 discs, but I would guess they're both around 4-5 years old. Neither of my little MP3 cubes plays AAC, either, I don't think the older DVD player I have does (the new one might), and I also don't think my Sony CD changer does on the main stereo.

I didn't say I personally USED those devices anymore, but I'm sure others do. My own preference is my Rockboxed Toshiba Gigabeat MEG-F40S. It rocks. And I'm sure it'll play AAC files:

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SoundCodecs#Current_status :-)

You've made a mistake; RockYou Live is in their "penalty box", not RockBox. The two are totally unrelated; RockBox isn't even a webapp, it's an (excellent) open source firmware for portable music players. They don't ask for your personal information at all.

The only real piece missing from the iPod is the ability to add your own codec of choice (assuming the hardware can support it), beyond the subset of codecs it already handles. You can add vorbis/flac support to iTunes, but not extend it to the iPod/Phone, which is a shame.

Replace your firmware with RockBox. Supports around 20 codecs on all iPods, as well as many other devices.

The only real piece missing from the iPod is the ability to add your own codec of choice (assuming the hardware can support it), beyond the subset of codecs it already handles. You can add vorbis/flac support to iTunes, but not extend it to the iPod/Phone, which is a shame.

Replace your firmware with RockBox. Supports around 20 codecs on all iPods, as well as many other devices.

A few players have something a bit like this: Album shuffle. Where it plays one album from start to finish, then shuffles on to a new random album.

The only places I've seen that, though, is in Foobar (win) and Rockbox (for iPod 5.5 and down, and a few other portable players)

Here's one solution, if you like Apple hardware but can't stand the software lockin - RockBox. Opensource firmware for iPods and other mp3 players, that adds many more features than normal.

Ok, so write your own firmware on the device and do what you want.. No one is stopping you.

Done

Is fun!

Like to hear the special sound of The White Stripes, Icy Thump mixed by the audio engineer legend Steve Hoffman, in high resolution sound.
You could of course go "Meeh, I don't care.." , but then I think you are missing out on something. And I can back that up by my friends reaction listing with my gear. :)

This was my 24th, 25th 26th, year present to myself:

Headphones: AKG K701
PocketAmp: Emmeline "The Hornet"
MusicPlayer: iPod 5G with Rockbox (flac suppport)
SoundCard: Transit 24bit 96kHz, M-audio

If you are interested in music, and have some extra cash to invest. This would be my recommendation.

Cheers!

Tip: Look for Steve Hoffman, and DCC mixes.

Rockbox and iPodLinux both have options to do this. http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/4755 On Rockbox the unofficial plugin requires a modified version of the Wikipedia database dump http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_database

Want to see something really crazy?

You can probably flash your Sansa firmware to Rockbox

Then you can run various apps on it (even DOOM!), in addition to playing more formats.

I agree. I bought a Sansa because it could play ogg and flac files without reverting to a Rockbox excursion. Everything else was gravy, including the cheap price and decent storage size. (Straight link to amazon, not trying to be an advert.) For comparison the apple ipod nano is about twice the cost without good audio codec support. Then again this kind of thing is all about priorities. Mine happen to be open codecs and decent cost - seems reasonable to me as well as the hypothetical average Slashdot user.

Dunno if you're aware of this, but you can make iTunes not copy music into its special folder. Hit Ctrl+, and go to the Advanced tab. Uncheck "Copy files to iTunes Music Folder when adding to library". Then when you drag stuff into iTunes it just adds a reference to it in the library, but leaves your original files alone.

As for wanting an iPod you can just drag music on and off of? Well, you bought the wrong device for that, sparky. iThings are for people that don't want to mess around with folders and files. If you're just in love with the glossy white cover, but want Windows-style awkwardness, there's Rockbox for you.

That's great, but... if only someone could crack the ipod classic hard drive secrets as easily. rockbox needs your help.

Hm, let's fix the URL above - and this time uncheck "post anon" which automatically got checked for no apparent reason.

Just remember that Sandisk made two completely different devices with the Sansa E200 label on them, and only one is fully supported by RockBox. The newer Sansa E200 v2 was completely unsupported until just recently and is still highly experimental. If you're buying for someone who doesn't live for the thrill of living on the bleeding edge then be very careful about exactly what kind of Sansa you buy.

Even something like an iPod will support ogg files with the right firmware. For example, I put rockbox on my iPod and now it can play ogg, FLAC, and whatever other files I've thrown at it. I don't even have to use iTunes to add music to the player; I can just copy the music files to the iPod's hard drive. Rockbox recognizes them and sorts them by their tags. I didn't even have to format the iPod's hard drive. It just installed alongside the original firmware, allowing me to use whichever one I wished. Rockbox also supports a bunch of other players from Archos, Cowon, iriver, Olympus, SanDisk, and Toshiba.

... thanks to http://www.rockbox.org/