Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Firmware

Near as I can tell the rocbox uses the PortalPlayer PP5020 chipset, it's like an "all-in-one" chip. The iPods use this chip too. I've tried to decode the database for this thing so we can all stop using WMP and move to a much better winamp plugin or similar, but no luck. I have also tried to get into the firmware, there are many features that I would like to improve. I have emailed support to find out if the firmware is open source, so we can start improving on it. I'll post a comment when they email me back.

"The server threw an exception"

So I had not done a sync in a few weeks and I thought it was time to delete some of the music I did not want on my rocbox anymore. When I tried to sync with Windows Media Player 10 or try to delete music under the Sync tab, my PC would peg for about 15 minutes and then WMP came back and said "The server threw an exception".

Battery Life

I've been using my rocbox for about a month and a half and it doesn't seem like the battery life is 15 hours long like the company says. So one day I set down my fully charged rocbox and hit play with no headphones plugged in, and I timed the battery life. I was disappointed to find out that it only lasted 5 hours and 23 minutes! Has anyone else timed their battery life?

Welcome

I started this blog about the rocbox because I can't find much user support on the web about these mp3 players. I own the 20 GB player, which I bought on sale at CompUSA.