Glad I found this site - still scratching head

[jhinty]

I've been using my 120 non-stop for over a year and installed Rockbox a couple days ago. I can see there's going to be a bit of a learning curve but I can see a lot of great people have put in some MAJOR time to make it a great program.

A little tour through the forum quickly answered numerous questions. Struggled much of today with the 120 refusing most of the songs in its belly. The posts I've seen imply that I should be able to play flac, mp3, ogg ... without any trouble.

My question - do I need to install additional plug-ins or will the latest daily build have all the "basics" covered.

Thanks again.

[tab]

A daily buildis a compelete archive including all available codecs, MP3, OGG and Flac should work just fine with it. Never had a problem with any of my MP3 or OGG files onmy ROCKboxed H120. What kind of files does it play and what not?

[itsmeguys]

hello! and welcome to MisticRiver from me!

[Assimalyst]

Rockbox currently plays most common codecs except wma (though this is being worked on )

See this wiki page for their current status.

[NPswimdude500]

The current builds seem pretty stable too. Only the occasional freeze.

[cretin]

i read somewhere on the rockbox site that is unlikely it will ever supoort wma. but thats fine because to re-encode a wma file into mp3 takes me like 20 seconds tops.

[Llorean]

"Unlikely" has changed to "Progress is happening by someone in our forums, so assuming he follows through we'll have it eventually"

[gorcorps]

Originally Posted by Llorean

"Unlikely" has changed to "Progress is happening by someone in our forums, so assuming he follows through we'll have it eventually"

Yeah, he's currently my hero .

[jhinty]

I think the wma thing might be my biggest hangup. Too many programs on my computer trying to take control of my music files. That 20-second recoding thing Cretin mentioned above would be a little nugget I'd like to file away but I think I can figure it out if I could find some quality time to just sit down and do it. The flac files, however, I am a little less certain about. I recently downloaded a concert from dead.net and tried to play the flac's on my recently Rocked 'River. No go. When I navigated to the file and tried to play it the box would indicate "nothing to resume" or something like that and would just sit there. It showed me the file info etc. but wouldn't play. Subsequently, in my quest to get the 'River to shuffle the full 20 gigs I "discovered" that creating a playlist of all the files allows one to shuffle more than just the current directory one is in. Astounding, I know, but please bear with the newbie. So now when I navigate to the flac and try to play the first file it actually jumped to the directory above and started playing that folder (vbr's from a 1980 show). I right clicked the toggle (had a hiccup due to either a buffer issue because of file size or the aforementioned flac's) and it advanced to the folder right after my flac's (Download Series Vol 9, a 1989 show from Pitt. that simply had to be converted into a wav-sized 4-cd-set for the time being.)

Bottom line ... really not sure. Playlist creation option I believe indicated somewhere along the line to ignore unknown file types. Perhaps there's a proverbial monkey on the back of these files so you can't easily transfer the purchased files. Anyway, got a little long winded. Fingers shutting up now.

[jhinty]

Any leading favorites for programs that do batch processing for large number of file conversion? Short version of long-winded post (see above.)

[shadesbass]

I use dBpowerAMP (available here). It's free and easy to use.
You'll need the wma plugin (here) to convert to/from wma.

Note that converting from one lossy format to another (e.g. from wma to mp3) will result in a decrease in audio quality.

[marco]

dont they need some contracts or thing from microsoft to work with wma? i mean the rockbox guys

[cretin]

yerh thats what i thought, im not technologically jiggy, but i thought there was some rights and ownership issues with wma files and thats why it was not possible. not beause it was physically not possible

[Llorean]

There are open source WMA codecs out there.

Actually, there are patents associated with WMA, AAC, and MP3. Any of the patent owners could potentially prevent us from using those formats, but we're using existing open source implementations of each, and nobody has yet tried to prevent these open source implementations. As well, the likely worst that could happen is that we would be required to remove the codecs from our software, as the people who licensed it to us (IE, the people who wrote the previous open source implementation that we adapted) improperly licensed it to us.

At least, that's my general understanding. I am not a lawyer, nor am I even close to being experienced in this sort of stuff even in general, but this is my sorta-understanding of the situation.

The only codecs that are basically 100% safe are the ones designed from scratch as open source and patent free (for example Ogg, FLAC, and wavpack).