Linuxphile.org

I am a huge fan of the Toshiba Gigabeat. I first discovered the Gigabeat while searching on Ebay for an MP3 player. I was attracted to the Toshiba Gigabeat because it already ran Linux. I showed the Gigabeat for sale on Ebay to my brother. He immediately bought an F40. After his arrived and I tinkered with it a bit I purchase a unit myself.

I had heard the rumors concerning Rockbox on the Gigabeat but made the assumption that it would take an investment in time to put Rockbox on my Gigabeat and so hesitated to do so because of lack of time. I was not happy with the MTP transfer protocol but again I did not have the time I imagined it would take to put Rockbox on the device.

I recently purchased the 60gb Gigabeat S series. Though this is a Linux centered site, I do have to admit that the Mobile Media Center by Microsoft and running on the Gigabeat is very nice. Transfers are considerably faster using the MTP protocol and Windows Media Player 11. With this new purchase I felt I could now devote the time to putting Rockbox on my older F40.

I browsed to http://rockbox.org, read the install guide and logged on to #gigabeat on irc.freenode.org to talked to the developers. While discussing the features of Rockbox with some of the members on #gigabeat and #rockbox I downloaded the necessary files. In a matter of ten minutes (living in the middle of nowhere I have an extremely slow DSL connection) the F40 was up and running with Rockbox.

At first I was a bit crestfallen, mostly because I did not like the interface, specifically the font, of Rockbox. I had not read the install documentation carefully enough to note that the font package should also have been downloaded. Within the same ten minutes mentioned above I downloaded the fonts package as well as another theme more to my liking from http://www.rockbox-themes.org. With these new downloads I now had a device that could play OGG, M4A, MP3, WAV, and FLAC. I was ecstatic.

With the Rockbox hack I was able to fill the 40gb of space with about 50% of my MP3 collection in just over 30 minutes. With the original Gigabeat firmware and using the MTP protocol this would have taken the entire evening to transfer, or at least several hours. The Rockbox hack allows files to be transferred to the Gigabeat just as if it were normal USB hard drive greatly increasing transfer speeds. I could not have been more happy with the results.

Although my new S series Gigabeat plays videos I find myself still using the F40. In addition to the increased audio format support there are also plugins for games, calculators, screen savers and more. One of the really nice, and I assume battery saving features, is not only does the backlight turn off after a user defined time frame, the LCD itself is shutoff. The S series sports this feature out of the box, but it was very nice to discover this feature in Rockbox.

The number one area of improvement I would like to see in the Rockbox hack for the Gigabeat is preset EQ settings. Having a text based EQ and lack of presets makes it a bit cumbersome when driving down the road using the Belkin Tunecast II and different styles of music ranging from Fugazi, Pigface to the Beastie Boys. Were there a quick graphical way to set the EQ to a specific style of music I do not think I could be more happier with this hack.

Cheers to all the folks who worked on the Rockbox project. Great work!