Goodbye iTunes, Hello Rockbox

I am almost done reencoding all my music CDs into flac format. I was previously using the AAC format, using iTunes via a VMWare guest to perform the encoding. I had tried some of the open source AAC encoders, but found their quality to be not nearly as good as the iTunes encoder. The huge downside to that was that I needed to keep iTunes around. I have never used iTunes as the music library manager for my music (either on or off of the iPod), preferring amarok, but it was a bit of a pain in the rear to have to fire up a Windows VMWare guest everytime I wanted to encode another CD. The problem was I didn't want to use mp3. I find the mp3 format to be too lossy for my taste (yeah, hints of audiophileness there), and if crank up the bitrate enough to eliminate the muddiness, then it quickly becomes pointless to use mp3 at all. The filesizes aren't significantly smaller, and bits are still being thrown away. To my mind, that's a lose-lose situation. I think AAC is a good compromise. I found that I could kick up the bitrate a little bit with iTunes encoded AAC and achive decent compression with a relatively small degredation of quality. But that required me to use iTunes. *ugh*

Enter Rockbox. My iPod version seems to be well supported, and I had no trouble at all installing the software. Basically it only involves patching the boot loader, and then extracting the software into a .rockbox directory on the partition of the iPod where the music resides. And now I can listen to my flac encoded audio!

Since the filesizes are much larger with the flac encoded files, I could no longer pack around my entire music collection on the iPod. This really isn't a bad thing. There are many tracks (and even entire albums) that I routinely skip when they come around on the random playlist. Since I just use rsync to update the iPod now (no need to write that pesky iTunes database anymore), I have started building an rsync_excludes file that contains all the stuff that I don't need on my iPod anymore. When I run across those tracks now, I put them into a playlist on the iPod, and when I am next connected to the computer, those entries get added to the rsync_exludes file, a new sync is run, and *poof* those tracks vanish and anything new that I've encoded on the computer is added.

So far I haven't run into any troubles, and even find the Rockbox interface to be much easier to use, especially when it comes to creating and managing playlists. I am also completely hooked on the "bookmark" function. Since I usually have a good number of audio books on the iPod, it's extremely handly to be able to bookmark where I am in those audio books. That way I can pick up right where I had left off with any of them.

I think that's enough rambling for this afternoon. Cheers.