Rockbox on the iPod Nano!
9:59 pm July 24th, 2007In my never-ending quest to free myself from the fetters of non-free software and to amuse myself by putting new operating systems on things I find in my house, I installed Rockbox on my iPod nano recently.
It was essentially pretty easy. The hardest part was actually figuring out the difference between Rockbox and iPod Linux. It turns out that Rockbox is a music player, like the original Apple firmware, and iPod Linux is a Linux that runs Linux programs. I toyed around with iPod Linux (played some Tetris!), but since my goal was to have a music player, I moved on.
First step: converting my MacPod (HFS+, which Linux hates) to a WinPod (FAT32, a more widely supported filesystem). Interestingly, Mac OS, Windows, and Linux all recognize the WinPod, while only Mac OS and some subset of Linuxes recognize the MacPod. To convert a MacPod to a WinPod, just plug it into a computer that’s running Windows (if you can find such a thing!); you’ll automatically be prompted to reformat. You lose all the data on the iPod when you do this, so back up first if it’s anything important. After that, it’s just a matter of following the instructions here.
So now my iPod dual-boots, just like my laptop — and just like my laptop, it will rarely if ever see the Apple OS boot up again. There’s nothing that Apple’s iPod software did that I preferred to Rockbox, and plenty of things Rockbox does that I like better. To name a few: it’s free as in speech; it plays .ogg files (the .ogg standard is also free as in speech!); it lets me choose to keep my existing filetree organization, or use its ID3-based database, or both; it lets me put (any kind of!) files on it and then retrieve them on any computer under the same name and format; it’s highly skinnable, so I can get it to look more attractive than the original Apple look; and it allows finer tuning of settings (for example, I can choose whether or not it stops playing when headphones are unplugged, set how long it waits before going to sleep, &c). Using it under Linux (or any OS) is simply a matter of mounting it as a drive and then copying files directly to its filetree, rather than using a specific piece of software. Without a doubt, Rockbox has increased my ability to use this piece of hardware the way I want to.
4 Comments to “Rockbox on the iPod Nano!”
Cowperthwait says:
July 25th, 2007 at 2:43 am
What was the turnaround time, start to finish?
I think you’ve just inspired a procrastination project for me, but only if it takes long enough to qualify as true procrastination….
Clara says:
August 7th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Well, I spent most of a day playing with different installations, but that included iPod Linux which I concluded I didn’t want. Probably an hour or so (maybe less) just to get Rockbox?
Mame says:
August 12th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
is there any hope for those of us with 2nd generation nanos?
» Music Downloads // Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, & Web Consulting // Cambridge & Boston, Massachusetts says:
April 23rd, 2009 at 1:24 am
[...] physical artifact. The iTunes store isn’t compatible with my computers’ software or the OS I prefer to run on my iPod — I refuse to by any kind of DRM’d music, anyway, since DRM means you don’t [...]
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