JK 98,
Rockbox has a great interface for speed control. Hold down the play button and the speed interface comes up. Then it’s right for faster, left for slower, up for increase the pitch, and down for decrease the pitch. Increasing the speed doesn’t increase the pitch, so you’d need to both increase the speed and the pitch seperately in order to go chipmunk, although I suppose increasing the pitch without the speed would also make a very nice chipmunk voice. Then tap the power button and you go back to the playback screen.
The player can be configured to start playing where you left off upon powering it on, and you can set it to automatically start some set amount of time before you left off, say 15 seconds, to get you caught up with where you were. This is where it gets annoying though. Once you have created a bookmark in any of the mp3s in a book it will automatically bookmark the book when the power is turned off, but the player doesn’t start playing from the last bookmark, it just starts playing the file, and the speed settings you were using are kept in the bookmark rather than as a setting for the player, so you have to find the bookmark and play it or adjust the speed every time you turn on the player to get back your speed setting.
One other handy feature for audio books is that you can set it up so that hitting the fast forward or reverse buttons will move you forward or back by a fixed amount of time that you set (15 seconds in my case). Unfortunately, it applies to everything, not just audiobooks, so if you use the player for music as well then you have to go into the settings and change them when listening to music, or be really annoyed that you can’t switch between songs without going into the track listing, whereas the stock firmware handles audiobooks differently than music, so when you switch between the two everything works the way you expect it to.
Nothing in it is particularly complicated, and not particularly annoying when sitting around with nothing better to do, but you need to figure some things out and a lot of things are more involved than I like to do while driving a car, out for a jog, or using my table saw, as opposed to the stock interface which just works without any effort, other than the whole not having variable playback speed thing. And the forward/back 15 seconds and no refreshing media things are incredibly nice as well.
