Someone in the arch IRC channel pointed me in the direction of Rockbox back when I was toying around with a borrowed iPod. It's a cool concept, especially if you're like me and are into customizing everything you get your grubby little hands on. Unfortunately I didn't have a compatible mp3 player at the time, so Rockbox sat in my bookmarks bin collecting dust. Luck was in my favor though, as my friend recently offered me his slightly used iRiver H10 at a heavily discounted price. I immediately bought it and installed Rockbox on it.

The install was super simple, especially since the Rockbox devs have created a nice looking GUI for the install process. I went with a full install; if I'm going to use a 20GB music player with a color screen, I'm going to go all out.

What I thought was really cool was that the install didn't disturb the music my friend had on it. Every song was left untouched after the installation. This would probably be a selling point for most mp3 player owners.

The only real problem with the h10 (20GB model) is that when connected via a USB cable, it's placed into MTP mode by default instead of UMS. Basically UMS mode means the player will connect as a USB Mass Storage Device while MTP will not. Click this link for a full explanation. Luckily one can force the player to enter UMS mode just by holding down the select button and then turning on the player. This is annoying, but it's a small price to pay, IMO. With that said, there's probably an option in Rockbox to enable UMS by default. Then again, perhaps Rockbox isn't able to do this. Looks like I have a new mission.

Labels: H10, iRiver, linux, mp3 player, Rockbox