If you love your iPod, set it free.

I’ve had an ipod for about 18 months. Perhaps surprisingly for a gadget fiend, this was my first mp3 player. Of course I’d been aware of them since the “Rio Player” back in ’99 but I suffer from a laughably protracted gadget decision-making & buying cycle.

Pod and I have had a tempestuous time together – although we have just stumbled upon some stability. A potted relationship history:

• Bought in April 2006 before I started spending my working week away from my mp3 collection.
• Almost instantly sent back due to disappointing sound quality. Remedied through some decent replacement headphones.
• iTunes on the PC was such an absolute travesty that it almost went back again, until I discovered Anapod Explorer which allowed me to negotiate directly with my neatly categorised collection of mp3s rather than having to go via the the mangling medium that is iTunes. Worth the $25 at the time, I felt.

But I was frustrated by my inability to update my ipod from anywhere other than my “home” PC. No good if you’re staying in London all week, ripping entire discographies down from bittorrent using your idiot neighbour’s unsecured Wifi connection. (Yes, I’m speaking to you, Mr Netgear of Kentish Town.) Schlepping my ill-gotten gains back home on a memory stick before being able to update my Pod seemed entirely pointless but unfortunately a necessary exercise.

And then something great happened. I discovered Rockbox.

Rockbox is a completely different operating system for your iPod. (Works on quite a few other mp3 players, too.) It’s been a revelation and I wish I’d seen it sooner.

A summary of benefits:

• A smug sense of satisfaction knowing that I’m well and truly out of the clutches of Steve Jobs and the music lobby. My ipod is now mine and I can do with it what the hell I want.
• The ability to update my mp3 collection from any machine I can cram a USB cable into. Heck, I even store my mp3 ripping software on my ipod in case I want to rip on the road. It just functions like a big phat 60gb USB memory stick.
• Nice fade up/down effect when you pause, un-pause, or turn it off.
• Freedom to play lots of different formats (mp3 & 4, audiophile flac, lovely ogg, even vile wma.)
• It uses folders! Just like my mp3 collection! So whilst I have tidied up the tags, it’s considerably quicker to get to stuff.
• Gapless playback. If you listen only to popular young people’s music, this might not be a problem. But when you’re listening to a Bach Magnificat or an opera the micro-stutter between tracks really irks.
• If you’ve got a microphone, you can use it as a capacious dictaphone that creates mp3s. (Apparently with a decent mic you can do good gig recordings, too.)
• Almost infinitely expandable and update-able.

There are a team of lovely geeks working on Rockbox, even as we speak. It gets better over time. I can update the software easily and for free. Or extend it with many weird and wonderful things – such as a ZX Spectrum emulator. (I played Chuckie Egg on the train this week and it put a proper nostalgic grin on my face.)

A few downsides:

• You can’t play any music you bought off iTunes. But that serves you right for being conned into buying a licence to play rather than the real deal – suckerz!
• It can’t cope with album art as of yet, but that doesn’t really bug me so much.
• The default “skin” is rather ugly, but changing it to something more pleasant is easy. And when you get bored, you can change it again.
• You lose the standard contacts and calendar. I’m sure there are open source replacements but I never used them anyway.

So there you have it. Oh, did I mention you can play Doom, too?