ciaran
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Monday 18 February 2008
Because Apple encrypted the pre-installed firmware,
the Rockbox
and iPod Linux projects have been
unable to port their after-market firmware to the iPod nano 2nd generation
or 3rd generation.
I'm a very happy user of Rockbox on my iRiver H10, so after receiving one of
these as a gift, I was very disappointed that I couldn't use Rockbox on it. Next, I found that
Apple had decided to only support their own formats plus the mp3 format. I
use a different format, so my 4Gb of audio files are unreadable to the iPod.
How needlessly frustrating.
I strongly advise avoiding these devices. In general, to avoid frustration,
avoid any consumer device when free software after-market firmware exists
for that category of device but doesn't work on that particular device. For
digital audio players, you can check support at:
For details about the attempts to port Rockbox and iPod Linux to the iPod
nano, you can find info on
the "Nano
2G" thread on the Rockbox forum, and for datasheets,
see iPod Linux's Generations
page. Porting efforts started in the 2nd half of 2006 and no one has
yet gotten firmware to boot on these devices, so it looks unlikely that
the problem will be solved soon.
One postive tangential discovery was
the Songbird software which,
although still in Beta, does a good job of organising music files.
--
Ciarán O'Riordan,
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