When I first dove into Ubuntu about 10 months ago, I was making a leap of faith. I made this leap for a variety of reasons. I wanted greater control over my computing experience. I wanted greater reliability, stability and performance than I had experienced with Windows. And maybe as big a driver as anything, I simply wanted to see what this whole linux thing was about. I thought it would be fun. Lucky for me, all those things panned out just as I’d hoped. I love Ubuntu! 
But to be fair, there were implications or ramifications to that decision that I hadn’t fully considered. How I listen to my music was one of them.
Prior to making the jump to Ubuntu, there were a lot of issues that I had been ignorant about, or just didn’t care about because they didn’t appear to be relevant personally. While I had been a long time fan and reader of boingboing.net, I had never paid much attention to Cory Doctorow’s postings about the evils of DRM. If you are someone who has literally bought into the whole iPod / iTunes way of purchasing and listening to music, as I had, DRM doesn’t seem evil. It is just a reality. However, when I jumped into the world of Ubuntu, all of a sudden DRM became much more relevant. I became exposed to the many practical problems DRM creates.
A big problem for me was figuring out what the heck I was going to do about all those DRM’d files I had purchased from iTunes. Well, I wound up spending some significant time burning those as regular CDs and then ripping them to ogg. I chose ogg because it is an open format and pound for pound the quality is better than mp3. Problem solved; right? Wrong.
What about my iPod? How was I going to continue to use it given that it doesn’t play ogg formatted files? I hadn’t fully considered that important point before I spent all that time converting everything to ogg. So what did I do? I did what any self-respecting person would, I deluded myself into thinking I really didn’t want my iPod after all. I mean the battery life was just abysmal; right? And, how on earth could I hold my head up with a clear conscience, knowing I was carrying around a device made by THE company that single-handedly foisted DRM upon mainstream America. Sure Steve’s open letter talks about how he hates DRM. But, come on! He’s built an infrastructure that all but ensures that consumers are forced to buy HIS products to play the music they bought. Can he really hate it that much?
So, I started investigating what mp3 players on the market also play ogg formats. Long story short, I found the pickings slim. As I wrote about my desire to find an ogg friendly player and posted questions on certain forums, I received a lot of feedback telling me to look into Rockbox. With Rockbox, I wouldn’t have to throw out the iPod, I could transform it into an open source, customizable bad boy of a music player with all that oggy goodness.
Well, a couple of months ago, I took another leap and installed Rockbox on my iPod. This was a decision that frankly has had no downsides for me, whatsoever. Funny thing is that not only does it play ogg files, but the music actually sounds better on it (through cross-feeding). The battery life is better than it was running the iPod firmware. It plays nicely with Amarok. In all it’s great.For those of you who want to check it out, don’t be intimidated. The install instructions are found in the player model specific manuals. I had a 2nd gen iPod mini, so I used that one of course. Also, in each of the manuals, the first installation steps referenced are for Windows users. Never fear, just keep reading until you get to the linux users section. Note: when you write the various Rockbox installation files over to your iPod, make sure you go through the proper steps to unmount or “safely remove” your iPod instead of just unplugging it from your pc. If you don’t, the files you thought you had moved over to your iPod might not actually be written to the device.
A quick note about the cross-feeding feature making for better sound - in layman’s terms. The theory with cross-feeding is that many studio recordings were optimized for playback on stereos with standard speaker setups, not playback on headphones. That said, when you are listening to a normal stereo, the music coming from the left speaker, while primarily heard by the left ear, is also heard a bit by the right…and vice versa. Cross-feeding replicates this experience by allowing a small amount of bleed from one side to the other. Instead of the music sounding like it is coming from in between your ears, it sounds fuller and it surrounds you. For the record, real audiophiles come in on both sides of the cross-feeding debate. The great thing about Rockbox is that it is totally up to you. You can use cross-feeding, or not, just choose your preference in settings. Cross-feeding aside, many audiophiles don’t like mp3, aac or ogg files anyway, because they are lossy compression formats. Instead, they listen to lossless compression formats like FLAC. Does Rockbox play flac files? You betcha!
If there is anything I don’t like about Rockbox, it is that I don’t particularly like its playlist creation/management. I prefer to plan and create my playlists on the desktop, not on the player itself. While there may be some desktop solutions to manage Rockbox playlists, I haven’t come across them. However, with some command line magic (thanks Ubuntuforums for the education) I was able to work things out. Specifically, I use Amarok to move all the songs I want on my player. This is nice b/c Amarok allows you to define the directory structure / organization of the copied files. For example, I like to organize them by /artist/album_name/songs(1..n).ogg Then from terminal, I change directory over to the iPod (cd /media/ipod), and run the following command
find -type f -print > allsongsplaylist.m3u
That creates a playlist ‘allsongsplaylist.m3u’ which I can then edit with any text editor, and simply delete the lines of songs I don’t want in my playlist. I save the file to the iPod with a new file name (e.g. workoutmix.m3u). Now I’ve got two playlists on the iPod. One with all songs, and one with just my workout mix songs. I find this easy enough especially since the files are all sorted by artist and album.
I hope this post encourages at least a few people out there to try Rockbox. I am by no means a Rockbox expert. If you get stuck, try visiting their IRC channel for some help.
In all, Rockbox has helped to improve by overall Ubuntu experience by allowing me to enjoy my non-DRM’ed music, and ogg formated music in particular, anywhere I go and without having to invest in a new music player.
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