Rockbox on Sansa Clipp - Why I removed it

published Jan 31, 2012 03:11   by admin ( last modified Jan 31, 2012 03:11 )

 

Summary: Rockbox could not easily access and present my existing playlists. Plus it made USB not work for a while. I reflashed it with stock Sandisk firmware.

 

I decided to install Rockbox on my Sansa Clipp tonight, but after trying it out went back to the factory firmware. Reasons:

Playlists

From what I could see in the user interface in Rockbox on my Sansa Clipp, it expects all playlists to reside in a playlists folder. I have dozens of playlists, manually made in Rhythmbox and more automatically generated from a python script. None of them reside in a playlists folder, yet all are picked up by the Sansa standard firmware. While Rockbox picked up none. It seems you should be able to navigate with the file browser to each playlist, but that is too  much work.

And if I would make new playlists with Rhythmbox, Rhythmbox on my Ubuntu would probably continue to just store them in different places, so even if I converted my old playlists, the problem would remain with new ones.

Text size

The playlists problem above was the deal breaker, but I also did not care for the miniscule fonts in the user interface. Once it's playing you can get very large fonts indeed, through installable themes, but they do not cover the navigation and settings part of the ui. Update: According to "scorche" in the comments section below, there are themes that also cover the navigation and settings. The theme I selected - "FEP" - did not however.

Did not play my aac files

The main reason for installing Rockbox was to see if it could play a couple of aac files that I originally stripped out of Youtube videos. Rockbox did however not find them. This could very well be a problem with the files. Still, Rhythmbox on my Ubuntu computer plays them without problems

No support for the bpm tag

Ok, here I am really stretching when it comes to putting demands on Rockbox. According to its documentation it does not list the TBPM tag in its database. It would have been nice to sort and group on beats per minute. But I guess there is not an overwhelming demand for that feature,

Getting back to stock firmware

I could not uninstall Rockbox through the Rockbox utility, so I went to Sandisk:

http://forums.sandisk.com/t5/Clip-Clip/Sansa-Clip-Firmware-Update-01-02-16/td-p/150227

and followed the instructions.

Funky USB

After having installed Rockbox, and then uninstalled the extras: Mounting the player with USB failed despite rebooting the Clip many times, and when booting into Windows it reported the Clipp as a faulty USB device. I booted into the stock OS by holding the menu button while booting. Switching the Clipp off for a couple of minuted fixed the problem. After that it was in a state where I could reflash it with the stock firmware.