FLOSS-/hacker-friendly music-players?

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

"Ken D'Ambrosio" <ken at jots.org> writes:
>
> I'm afraid I haven't followed the thread (something about sandbags, sump
> pumps, and river depth managed to put me into full-out thrash mode),

Eek--hope you've got that all under control, now.

> so I don't know if RockBox was mentioned or not; if not, here are
> some links for consideration:
> 
> http://www.rockbox.org/
> http://lwn.net/Articles/169103/

It did get mention, though the coverage was trivial....

I *was* running Rockbox on my iPod, and my wife is still running Rockbox
on her Sansa. I can confirm that (functionally) it is full of win.
But, while I've greatly enjoyed the past few years with Rockbox,
I'm not even considering it an option for new purchases:

The problem with Rockbox--or at least *a* problem--is that the scope
of the project is basically constrained to hardware that's no longer
on the market and has largely been replaced by things that are
*increasingly* hacker-hostile (by companies that are increasingly
hacker-hostile and standards-antagonistic). It's tough for me
to get excited about that. If Rockbox hadn't been ported to the iPod
or Sansa while they were still in production, I probably wouldn't
have ever been excited about it--I probably would have said something like:

    Well, that sounds like a great project for people who bought
    those devices before Rockbox existed, but investing in something
    that I know is already full-dead makes even less sense than
    investing in something merely `unlikely to be viable'.

Recalling maddog's recent anecdote about the college running their payroll
on an ancient PDP-11, it seems sort-of like that: since they already had it,
it may have made sense for them to keep it. But would they have invested
in that system for a *new* rollout *today*? Or even a decade ago?
That'd be madness!

However *unlikely* success may seem for, as an example, Openmoko
or any of their projects, they still seem a safer bet than anything
on the Rockbox compatibility-list. I think I'd rather port Rockbox
to something with at least a potential future than use it on something
with only a past; for the time being, buying a second-hand Rockbox-able
iPod is actually a viable option--but what do I do in *another* 4 years,
the *next* time my iPod dies? Buy a regular iPod, probably--especially
if I let myself buy into `Rockbox on iPod' enough to accumulate
too many of those beautiful iPod-specific accessories in that time.

So I guess I'm saying that Rockbox is effectively a `gateway drug'
to vendor lock-in. Yuck. Maybe someone else can find a way
of regarding the issue such that I'm *not* actually saying that--
I'd really rather not be.

For some reason, I was basically dumb enough to expect better from Apple:
that maybe they actually wouldn't bother locking-up the iPod hardware--
that maybe they'd see *all* of their hardware-sales as a win, regardless
of what software people ran on top of it. Was I ever wrong.

I even bought a *few* iPod-specific accessories; now it's time to back out
before I get sufficiently vendor-locked to make backing-out really hurt.

Also, in reply to Tom:

> On Wed, March 17, 2010 9:01 am, Tom Buskey wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 8:43 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen
> > <rozzin at geekspace.com> wrote:
> > > Joshua Judson Rosen <rozzin at geekspace.com> writes:
> > > >
> > > > I'm looking for a new music-player to replace my iPod Video,
> > > > which died over the weekend.
> > >
> > > Oh--of course I forgot to include in the `candidates' list, below:
> > >
> > > * NanoNote <http://sharism.cc/products/ben-nanonote/>:
> > > Cheap, expressly hacker-friendly; microphone,
> > > but no other undesirables.
> >
> > Archos?
> >
> > How much storage do you want?  I got an iPod 5.5 80GB because there were
> > few other choices.

That also helped feed my original Rockbox-on-iPod choice--it's part of
what I meant when I said "... and the hardware was nice" :)

> > Archos was $50 more and there are fewer 3rd party
> > parts (cheap chargers, stands, etc).

Some of what I wrote above is relevant to this--what I'd *really* love
would be to just have a couple of USB-host or SDIO ports.

As it is, I've wasted something like $400 on vendor-locking
(iPod-specific) accessories. Some of that is money actually spent on
getting the accessories, and some of it is money that I've budgeted
to un-do things like the replacement of my car's perfectly-good
generic audio-input with an iPod dock. Rehab, I guess.

Maybe it's just that it's all still fresh-enough for me to be retaining
a foul taste, but `more ways to become attached to some proprietary interface'
is one of the things that I most want to *avoid* at this point. :\

> > There's lots of choices below 30 GB (even 32 GB all flash!) but not many
> > over that.

32 GB with an expansion-port would be more than sufficient :)

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."