From: Mark <discardedswimwear_at_googlemail.com>
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 22:54:48 +0100

For the technical reasons outlined, I can see that it's probably just not
worth the effort required. My original thought was more or less based on
the (incorrect) assumption that there was a degree of commonality between
the Shuffle and one or two of the other iPods which are supported.

And the reason I was interested in the first place is that I have used my
Shuffle as part of my ski guiding equipment. I'm blind, and have designed
and built an audio-enabled backpack that the guide wears while he's skiing
in front of me. If I hear the sound go left, I go left, and if it goes
right, I go right. (There's a bit more to it than that, but not much!).
One of the inputs takes a line from an audio source, in my case the Shuffle.
I've mixed up some music tracks with other audio signals so that the sound
is pretty constant without being mind-numbingly dull and repetitive.
Only problem has been that with the Apple software, the iPod puts a gap of
around half a second of silence between tracks. It's not the fade-out
silence of a recording, it is simply a gap that the iPod puts there.
Half a second might not seem like a long time... until you're skiing down
black runs and relying on that sound. Half a second can feel like a minute!
I have found a variety of solutions to this problem, but I was just
wondering whether it'd have been possible to use RB with its gapless playing
and cross fading capabilities. It would seem not.
Whilst those capabilities are available on a Nano, it was the very idea of
the simplicity that actually was the reason I was looking at a solution for
the Shuffle.

Mark

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rocker" <rocker_at_shaw.ca>
To: "Rockbox" <rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se>
Sent: Saturday, April 22, 2006 12:06 AM
Subject: Re: RB on an iPod Shuffle?


> Why would you want rocbox on the shuffle? the whole concept of the
> shuffle
> is based on simplicity. On/off/shuffle. Pause/play. Volume up/volume
> down. next track/previous track.
>
> No screen. It serves it's own purpose...rocker
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Manuel Dejonghe" <manuel_at_dejonghe.de>
> To: "Rockbox" <rockbox_at_cool.haxx.se>
> Sent: Friday, April 21, 2006 4:48 PM
> Subject: Re: RB on an iPod Shuffle?
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I would assume that porting the software to it is very hard, as there
> is no display that will show progress and debug-information and stuff.
>
> While I agree that having voice on it would be cool, I don't think
> especially that feature will bring it to more non-sighted people :-)
>
> At the moment, the wiki does not even mention this device. No
> developer has one, noone yet scanned the pcb, nothing.
> As a lot of information has been taken from iPodLinux, I could imagine
> either they have to "support" it first, or the hardware must be very
> similar to already ported iPods.
> iPodLinux sais, they are not (never) supporting this device for
> "obvious" reasons. Furthermore, it seems to be build on a processor
> that has no open source compiler yet. An absolute must for
> development.
>
> ~lImbus
>
> On 4/21/06, Mark <discardedswimwear_at_googlemail.com> wrote:
>> OK, I know that porting Rockbox to a player that doesn't have a screen
>> might
>> seem like a rather strange thing to want to do, but given the advantages
>> of
>> RB over the installed software (gapless / fading / cross feed / etc.), is
>> anyone doing or planning a port to the iPod Shuffle?
>>
>> Given the fact that there are only a few buttons on the Shuffle, I can
>> see
>> how it might be difficult to navigate any sort of menu, but hey, there
>> are
>> some clever folks out there...
>
>
Received on 2006-04-24