Today I have special thanks to do – as of last week, my iPod is now running Rockbox and I’m free to transfer all my OGG and Flac files without resorting to live conversion of the whole library. This wouldn’t have been possible without the freemyipod project.
A couple of years ago, a project named “linux4nano” appeared on the Internet. Their goal, as they appear on their old Web site :
[…] discover, collect, synthesize and publish as much information as possible about the iPods protection scheme in order to boot other operating systems on it.
The initial project was aimed at the second generation iPod Nano. However, the device list grew and other iPod lines were added to it. The project was therefore renamed “freemyipod“.
I’ve had an iPod Classic for a couple years now, and I’ve been syncing the device with the gtkpod manager (which works pretty well, by the way). However, since most of my library is comprised of OGG and Flac files, they had to be transcoded into the device, which is a very lengthy procedure. Since then, I was hoping to be able to install Rockbox on my iPod in order to freely drag and drop my music library into it without transcoding.
Two weeks ago, the freemyipod team released a set of instructions to install an experimental version of the Rockbox port… for the iPod classic! I was thrilled and very excited about these news – after watching the progress on their Wiki, the moment finally came for me to free my iPod! A bit later in the week, the port got more usable and I installed Rockbox on the little black device.
My iPod is now free, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the freemyipod project. Thank you for removing the shackles from my little portable media player – may you succeed in liberating all of them!
