Get the most Out of Your Ipod

Not many people are aware of this but your Ipod has ALOT of unused potential…you can make your Ipod play MP3,OGG,WAV, and a host of others and your Ipod becomes Drag n’ Drop you don’t need itunes. You can also add many FREE GAMES like tetris, A Gameboy Color Emulator (software that allows you to play GBA games on Ipod), sudoku, asteroids and many more. What’s more? it dosen’t damage your original Ipod’s firmware (firmware is the software the ipod uses to do what it does i.e. play music) and is completely safe to use. It can be removed at any time…read on to find out how.

There are two main Ipod firmware hacks that allow you to have the funtionallity I stated above Ipodlinux and Rockbox

Rockbox

If I had to reccomend one over the other I would have to say Rockbox is better then Ipodlinux. Why you ask? Because Rockbox is alot more stable. Ipodlinux tends to release their “latest and greatest” versions too quickly and have alot of bugs.

One thing I should mention is that all the music you added by using iTunes is unreadable by Rockbox (you can switch back and forth between the original firmware and Rockbox by holding down the MENU button after you reset (SELECT+MENU BUTTON) or shut down the Ipod (HOLD PLAY BUTTON) You wait to see the apple logo and hold the MENU button down and wait until you see “loading original firmware….”).

Installing rockbox used to be a pain but thanks to a simple installer you can have rockbox up and running on your Ipod in under 60 seconds. The installer is found HERE
All you have to know is what firmware your Ipod is running and what type of Ipod you have you can just keep clicking next in the install and it is that simple. (P.S. turn off your firewall the installer needs to download the latest rockbox)

Rockbox is updated daily to get the latest rockbox all you need to do is visit thier site go to “Daily Builds” and select “latest” for their Ipod. After that you extract the contents of the file into your Ipod. If you did it right it should ask you to overwrite files click “yes to all” and your update is done.

To put music on your Ipod all you need to do is Drag n’ Drop your MP3 files into your Ipod like a USB Memory Stick.

To play games you pause the song that is playing and you press menu and go to “browse plugins” and select a game (note that some games require you to download additional stuff before they will work). I could go on and on about features but if you wanted to read a feature list best place to go Vist is the RockBox Home Page.

Ipodlinux

Ipodlinux has the same Drag n’ Drop and MP3 playback capability as Rockbox. It also has loads of games and an emulator like rockbox. In fact, Rockbox would have not have been possible without Ipodlinux. If you want the full list of features vist the Ipodlinux Home Page.

I have never installed Ipodlinux I use Rockbox but I have used it on other people’s Ipod and I stand by my initial statements that I liked Rockbox best

Can’t seem to choose between the two? You don’t have to….

You can have dual booting (you can see that it was available on the rockbox installer) But that is far more complicated and I urge you to read the documentation before you attempt that,