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Dear Lazyweb, have you succeeded in installing Rockbox on an iPod 5 via macOS 14 or Raspbian 12? **Please note the extreme specificity of this question.**

The changelog says "1.5.1: Fix bootloader installation for Ipods" but the 1.5.1 DMG of RockboxUtility actually has 1.5.0 in it and does not work. Compiling from source on a Pi took nearly 24 hours to build the gcc toolchain and eventually failed with a bunch of undefined OPLL symbols.
jwz.org/b/ykd7

I finally got Rockbox installed on my iPod (don't ask) and it is able to read my Apple database and play music, yay. But none of the ID3v2 album artwork is showing up, and my searches just turn up ancient Reddit posts saying crazy shit about parallel directory trees full of BMP files. That can't be for real, right? Right?

Also what's the most Apple iPod 5-like theme?

I'm trying to get my music into Rockbox by using rsync instead of iTunes, and the iPod can only transfer about 20 files before it crashes. And when it does that, it somehow makes my USB hub reset as well, which I have never seen before. So that's going great.

Also it takes 3 1/2 minutes between plugging it in to USB and the mount point showing up on the desktop.

@jwz I’ve found that USB works better if you boot it into the Apple firmware for transfers, and reboot it into Rockbox after.

@acb Yes this seems to be the case. And it's like.... how did you break that? Isn't that free?

@jwz AFAIK, it isn’t. The firmware has to implement the USB stack in its entirety, and Rockbox seems to be flaky, at least on the iPod.

@acb Well, that is ridiculous, but you'd think that in this Year of our Dystopia 2024 you could just cut and paste that shit by now. Even Spicy Autocomplete should know it.

acb

@jwz My guess is that it’s an iPod-specific thing, coming from them not having the actual specs of the environment they’re running in, and tripping over some edge case. The fact that you can dual-boot to a rock-solid USB stack has probably justified the volunteer working on it to not prioritise it as a dealbreaker.

@acb Fair, but when the first thing on their About page is "we have been doing this since 2001" my autocomplete is "and USB to a Mac is still a mystery to us."

@jwz I had Rockbox in 2001. It ran only on the Archos Jukebox Recorder. Making it cross-platform took a few years more, and IIRC, the iPod ports landed fairly late (in the past decade or so, I think).

@acb I mean, Firefox didn't exist in 2001. It's basically the Bronze Age. They've had a little while to figure out how USB block devices work.

@jwz I suspect it’s not just those but working with/against the iPod hardware/firmware.