Quote:
Originally Posted by noise
ipod flashing is very safe. all the original firmware remains intact you can boot into it at any time. as far as i understand, the only thing actually flashed is a sort of boot loader that directs things towards the custom firmware. and of course it's all completely reversible  |
I'm reading about Rockbox now and the manual makes it sound like nothing is flashed at all as the Rockbox bootloader & firmware are stored on disk rather than in flash memory. The Rockbox bootloader apparently replaces the iPod firmware on a boot partition (and presumably the original iPod firmware is copied elsewhere) so the boot sequence would be iPod bootloader (flash) --> Rockbox bootloader (disk) --> Rockbox firmware (disk), and the original iPod firmware could still be loaded from another location if need be.
This not only makes it even safer than I would have imagined but would also allow me to erase any evidence of using Rockbox should I need to make a warranty claim on my iPod. Up until now, I'd avoided looking into Rockbox because I assumed it manipulated flash memory and would thus make it harder to discreetly revert but that doesn't seem to be the case and so it's easily reversible as you say.
Well I guess I'll install Rockbox when I have the time - the project sounds quite mature now so I'm sure it's relatively free from threading, performance and power consumption issues. The coder/hacker in me really wants to play around with this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tore
Sounds good, but I'm not so sure about using the genre tag for information like soundtrack and compilations! If you use foobar, why not just store that information in a new tag (f.ex "album type"?).
I didn't like sorting by genres back in the days, but now I've got a python script part written by myself which I can run from inside foobar that fetches genre and style tags from the discogs database for releases. It's fast too! It's nice because discogs have a reasonably strict set of allowed genres and styles and any album can have more than one in each field which is fine since foobar has no problems with multiple values.
Style Guide - The Unofficial Discogs Wiki
Example album on discogs, Over-nite sensation (note genre and style information)
If I didn't use this, I'd probably have over a thousand different genres still on my computer ..  |
Yeah it is a bit of a hacky solution to set the genre tag as Compilation or Soundtrack but on the other hand, it is iPod friendly (iPods don't natively support custom ID3 tags afaik).
I didn't mind applying the genre tags to my entire collection because by that point I'd already had each artist in a genre folder so writing that structure to a tag was a simple batch operation using Tag & Rename. This does mean however that all of my artists each belong only to one genre but iPods don't allow songs to have multiple genres anyway... if a song has a genre tag which is a comma/semicolon delimited list of genres then iTunes/iPods simply see the song as belonging to a custom genre defined by that string rather than belonging to each of the genres. A common hacky solution is to use delimited genre tags and create smart playlists which include music on the basis of some rule (i.e. genre tag contains 'Jazz'). I can't see iTunes properly supporting multiple genres any time soon (people have been after it for ages) and even when it does, iPods would still require firmware updates to support this.
Nice work on the Python script; I might use it one day when I get around to using the smart playlist hack or if I decide to flash my iPod.