Rockbox for the Fuze V1 "Unstable" release

Agreed, there is no chance of me using the OF for anything but USB.  I’m too in love with the options on RB to go back to umm… basically no options.

I use the OF for DRM’ed Audio Books only.

Just made the switch to Rockbox this week.  Holly c$%p!  I knew it was powerful and had a slew of features, but I guess I really had no idea!  A little overwhelming at first, but after just a couple days I can’t really see ever going back to the OF.  Really amazing…

Anyway, I did have a couple questions about functionality in the the OF that I can’t find an analog to in Rockbox:

  1. I frequently used the Shuffle+Play All feature in the OF to randomly play all the music on the player (from both internal and microSDHC).  In the OF you could just select Music, then Play All and playback would start immediately.  Very quick and simple.   The only way I’ve found to do it in Rockbox is to go to the database, select Tracks, then play.  It works, but takes more navigation and takes a while to build the dynamic playlist (currently have about 3000 tracks).  Is there any faster/easier way to do this?
  2. Another thing I liked in the OF was how it would find all the m3u playlists I’ve created, regardless of location, and display them all in a single list.  I’ve got a number of playlists in the Music folder (both internal and on the MicroSDHC).  These are typically big, genre-oriented playlists that are created/managed using Winamp’s sync features (this is how I manage most content on the player).  I also have a special folder tree of entire albums that I manually manage (typically for recently purchased CDs).  I made a script to create a playlist for each of these albums in each album folder.  That way I wouldn’t have to go hunting through the Album list to find these newly added albums, I could just go to the Playlists menu and everything was right there.  Is there anyway to do this in Rockbox?
    Basically, there are three main ways I use the player: Shuffle+Play All, large playlists, and entire albums I’ve recently added.  I found very simple ways to do this in the OF, but haven’t been able to find quite as easy of methods yet on Rockbox.

Thanks for your help.

I do that a lot too Skinjob.

In RB I do this:

MENU > DATABASE > Select ARTIST and do a LONG SELECT (hold center down) > PLAYLIST comes up. > Select > and there are a bunch of random options there. INSERT SHUFFLED, QUEUE SHUFFLED, INSERT LAST SHUFFLED etc etc.

I have 6K tracks and it takes about 10 seconds.

Don’t use Playlists much so I can’t help there.

Message Edited by Peregrine on 12-12-2009 02:35 PM

One thing else, besides the good thing Peregrine listed, is to set the Start page to something closer to your desired location. I have my start page set at “Resume Playback”, but there are a number of pages it can be set to:

Previous Screen

Main Menu

Files

Database

Resume Playback

Settings

FM Radio

Recent Bookmarks

Maybe something there will get you closer to what you desire. To get the the Start Screen option, select Settings > General Settings > System > Start Screen.

I think I saw the future lol…I have had RB in my fuse since it was avaiable…updated to latest RB release like a month ago.

My pc usb ports stay live when the pc is off. So when I want to charge, I just plug and leave it. Of coarse when you plug it in it switches to sansa FW since the usb isnt working for RB…not so today.

I plugged it in just a few minutes ago and instead of the sansa screen, RB loaded and I see a pic of a usb plug. it is froze like this while plugged in and there is a lightning bolt icon in the battery area…all is fine when I unplug and it stays on RB…It’s probably not charging because I dont see any progress bar or anything, just a lightning bolt…

Probably just a glitch of some kind, but I hope soon that I will be able to play music while charging in RB.

@truex wrote:

 

Probably just a glitch of some kind, but I hope soon that I will be able to play music while charging in RB.

See chapter 3.3 “Charging” in the manual.

RB do not support AA embedded in mp3files.

You need to copy 100x100 jpg file with a name folder.jpg or <albumname>.jpg to the folder where music is stored

It is not required to have all files in one folder.

the following wiki answers all your questions.

No, Rockbox will read AA named “folder.jpg” (I imagine the same with .bmp will work, but mine is all .jpg). Works great & shows up in both RB & the OF.

For RB the AA can be the same size as for Original Firmware or even bigger… I use 200x200 or whatever MediaMonkey finds for it, often 300x300…  both OF and RB will rescale… but of course it makes no sense to have it be bigger that the display or there-abouts

Message Edited by timn on 12-15-2009 03:01 PM

I can’t seem to find the answers to these questions on the Rockbox website.


Does the RockboxUtility do everything to install it on my Fuze?

And do I have to have V01.02.26 to install Rockbox?

Message Edited by saxmaster765 on 12-16-2009 07:45 PM

You can install rockbox using rbutil.  If you have further questions, see the install directions on the wiki (click the fuze link on the rockbox.org front page).

Yes it will install it on your Fuze.

Personally I did the manual install. It is very easy.

No you do not have to have version .26. Any version works.

@timn wrote:
For RB the AA can be the same size as for Original Firmware or even bigger… I use 200x200 or whatever MediaMonkey finds for it, often 300x300…  both OF and RB will rescale… but of course it makes no sense to have it be bigger that the display or there-abouts
Message Edited by timn on 12-15-2009 03:01 PM

 

 Resizing (and jpg for that matter) are both relatively recent additions to rockbox.  You can also use .bmp files.

 

 

I have a V1 Fuze but have no interest in Rockboxing it after reading that typical battery life with Rockbox is just 15 hours vs 20 hours for the original firmware. I would prefer an even more basic firmware than the one the player comes with if it will give me longer battery life.

@jk98 wrote:
I have a V1 Fuze but have no interest in Rockboxing it after reading that typical battery life with Rockbox is just 15 hours vs 20 hours for the original firmware. I would prefer an even more basic firmware than the one the player comes with if it will give me longer battery life.

Thats not really how it works.  You typically cannot gain battery life by removing unused features from a firmware, particularly for Rockbox, where new features are only accepted if they can be implemented without negatively impacting battery life (at least when they’re not being used).  Theres really nothing at all you could remove that would improve battery life, short of maybe disabling the screen entirely and navigating blindly.  

Better battery life usually comes about by better optimizing codecs and more aggressively managing CPU and peripheral clocks.  On the e200v1 for instance, when I finally got battery life ahead of the Sandisk firmware (for Mp3), it was by adapting the MP3 decoder to run on both of the devices cores at the same time so that the main clock could be kept at the lowest speed, which also decreased the peripheral clock saving a lot of power.  Sandisk didn’t use this trick so they wasted a fair amount of power.  Similar tricks will be needed on the Fuze to get over 20 hours (for mp3 anyway).

Are any such “tricks” available on the Fuze? Having support for video doesn’t at all impact the Fuze’s battery life? I wonder how large or complex the part of the Fuze’s firmware that deals with videos and photos is. I would love to be able to get rid of these functions if it would help battery life. So there aren’t typically unused functions which have parts running in the background and impacting battery life?

@jk98 wrote:
Are any such “tricks” available on the Fuze? 

Yes there are many potential ones, but the datasheet for the SOC is incomplete, and many of the things it says should work simply do not, so its a lot of work just to get things to work at all for it through trial and error.  But we have many ideas and eventually someone will figure out ways to improve battery life.  

@jk98 wrote:
Having support for video doesn’t at all impact the Fuze’s battery life? I wonder how large or complex the part of the Fuze’s firmware that deals with videos and photos is. 

 Nope.  Its just a 200KB file on the hard disk.  If you don’t load a video its never even loaded into memory, let alone using power.

@jk98 wrote:
I wonder how large or complex the part of the Fuze’s firmware that deals with videos and photos is. I would love to be able to get rid of these functions if it would help battery life. So there aren’t typically unused functions which have parts running in the background and impacting battery life?

I understand so little about how the sandisk firmware works, I really couldn’t say for sure.  But unless they’re quite foolish, none of those things should be using any power.  They’re probably just modules on the flash memory until you atually go to use them.  

Battery life is basically just determined by how many different hardware units are clocked at any given time, and how many MHz you set each clock to.  Having a picture menu that never gets used doesn’t power up any hardware.  It most it may waste some RAM, but thats not really a big deal for a flash based player (although for a hard disk player it can be an issue).  Its decoding files that uses up power, since that forces clocks to be turned up high.  

Looking at the sandisk OS, it seems most of their power wasted is in the codecs.  Things like FLAC halve their battery life simply because their decoder is no good and forces the cpu clock way too high.   But their MP3 decoder is much, much better, which is probably what 99% of people care about.

Great news,  the latest RB build fixes the mpeg (video) playback glitches, or so it seems…

Since RB supports mpeg video of various sizes and the like this is very good news.

Once usb support is available using RB  there will be little need for the original firmware.

Tim

Let me correct myself, first RB mpeg playback IS fixed, but optimum size is 220x176 (the screen size). RB doesn’t resize down, so anything larger results in part of the video being off the screen.

I converted several videos using FormatFactory to mpeg1 at 220x176, 30 fps, 450kbps rate and it looks very good and converts quickly. Being able to see a full 30fps is also great!!  But of course you can set it to anything you wish durring conversion, so 18-24fps might work for most movies, saving space (size) at a slight cost of quality.

I realize mpeg1 might not be compressed as much as avi, but it’s certainly easier and faster…  and storage is cheap these days

Message Edited by timn on 01-06-2010 07:30 PM