As the mp3 player I got has user-hating firmware, I really wonder what's wrong with the HW vendors. Rockbox does better on less powered HW. If some cheapo chinese clone would just stick it on some half decent hardware, they'd kill their whole market segment.
All of this points to companies not loving money as much as they love playing power games with end user control. For some reason, they will rather write their own software and lock down everything, than just use good free existing software.
https://www.bol.com/be/nl/p/transnect-hifi-audio-mp3-speler-...
I wanted something that allows my young son in the car to listen to the same 30 songs('kapitein winokio') over and over without driving my wife and me bonkers. As he gets sick when looking too long at a screen in a car, we wanted the minimum number of features outside playing music. Even so, a screen good enough to select the album was required, and it must be cheap enough that I don't care too much if it gets damaged or lost
It claims to support video playback and ebook reading, but both features seem basically useless on the tiny screen, which is great for my use case. Unfortunately, it doesn't believe in alphabetic order when showing a list of files, uses left/right for scrolling up/down, uses 'menu' as OK button and mostly but not always ignores the OK button. Playlists seems too brain damaged to be of any use, so we ignore the mp3 menu and use the file browser as mp3 player. The usb micro connector dropped off the usb cable within 10 minutes of plugging it in, but I drown in replacements so who cares. The player itself and the headphone are actually sturdier than I expected. The firmware identifies itself as v1.1 but has no device or vendor information.
So basically, same rock bottom quality as all other cheap players. We got the price and quality we expected and can't complain, but 15 minutes with the source code and turning the keyboard 90 degrees would solve oh so much tiny frictions.
As I own it for a bit more than a day, there might be some hidden bonuses or traps I haven't seen. Don't ask me if this is a positive or negative review.
Somehow Apple just crushed the hacking and modding community for their hardware.
I also remember photo friends buying them just to break out the 1.8 inch drives to use for cameras because it was cheaper to rip a 20gb drive out an iPod than buy them from a supplier.
Lol, I also remember iTunes on Windows being decent, then at some point absolutely wrecking my music folder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_Classic#U2_Special_Editio...
It's also not practical to upgrade the storage in flash-based iPods, which reduces the utility of something like Rockbox. The stock OS is perfectly serviceable for the size of library one would be carrying around on a Nano.
> Don't put a C implementation of a USB stack in your BootROM, lol.
Meanwhile
Intel: put the entire network stack into intelMe and enable it by default.
All logically explainable ;)
A supercomputer in your pocket, by old enough standards.
It is good that these can find a new life other than becoming landfill.
What's sad is that it needs to be done by third parties through hacking; legislation should be in place so that the vendor has to facilitate the reuse of old such devices.
The N3G/N4G have an old WIP code dump from years ago, and that's in a much better shape to pick up and try to get upstreamed into Rockbox :).
This was at least three years before Apple announced iPad.
One of my “never going to do but will often think about” projects is to try and build an open design music player that doesn’t try to be a universal computational device but is at least not extra wonky like all the random ones you find on Amazon nowadays.
