Batteries Included

I posted my first simple patch for Rockbox to their mailing lists yesterday. It's a pretty simple one but I'm a big believer in trying to make the build system as flexible as possible. Also as I'm thinking of various experiments on my one and only iPod it would be nice not to nuke the stable software.

I've been a little concerned that my iPod has dud batteries. There have been a number of times it hasn't woken up to key presses until given some USB juice. However I'm currently running the battery benchmark tool and it's been happily playing away since I left the house this morning. It could be that spending a lot of the time playing with the setup the last few days is draining the batteries faster as the back-light is on. The other option is the boot firmware is getting itself into a funny state going through various USB connections (connecting to USB switches over to Apple's "Disk Mode" firmware on the flash).

There is a lot to like about Rockbox, not least the ability to play my music collection. However I think the area I'm going to focus on is it's handling of playlists. It's currently a little clunky and seems to have bugs in adding stuff to existing playlists. One nice thing about the setup though is they have a simulator which will run on your desktop. This means I can be a lot faster in tweaking the logic and testing things out. It even plays the music through SDL so you don't have to work in silence ;-)