rockbox ADX
 

Ever wished you could listen to your infinitely looped ADXs while on the go?
I've just had my ADX decoder patch accepted into Rockbox, an open source (free software, GPL, etc.) firmware for a variety of digital audio players (such as my iPod). The ADX decoder isn't in the daily build yet, though it will be tomorrow (Sep.26th), but if you pick up the Bleeding Edge version you'll have it.

Note to anyone wanting to try out rockbox on a 4th generation iPod (color, photo, or 4g grayscale), you may want to wait until the no frequency scaling build for 20060926 (or later) comes out. Frequency scaling causes crashes way too frequently on this generation, hopefully this bug will be fixed soon. Rockbox is stable on most other platforms (iPod video included).

Double Post:
Just to clarify a UI consideration which won't be immediately obvious:
By default looped ADXs will play through twice, then fade for 10 seconds. To get them to loop forever, set repeat mode to One (i.e. repeat one track).

This is good news for the Rockbox mod community, I guess.. but I just convert ADX files to MP3s for use on my Zen. Filesize is always a consideration ;)

As the owner of a 60 GB iPod space is not much of a problem for me.

The day I start to want ADX files and now you say my iPod can play them? Victory!

*has 3rd gen iPod* :/
<_<

From the site: "Note that the port to the 3G is less developed than the later ipods and currently (July 2006) most of the audio codecs are running too slowly - causes skips (buffer underruns) during playback."
The ADX decoder uses very little CPU power, and might run full speed even on this older platform. Have you tried it?

Does ADX have lossless compression like FLAC?

No, ADX is lossy ADPCM.
The trick is that it's *exactly* what is used in games, so it's like the best possible rip, ever.

hcs - Is the process reversable? I don't feel like ruin the iPod...

Yes, it is very much reversible, provided you are careful and hang onto the backup you make during the installation process.
That said, I've never tried to use it on a 3rd gen ipod, so I don't know how usable it will be, but it will be easy to revert if you don't like it.

In this I am assuming you have a Windows (FAT32) formatted iPod, is that the case? Rockbox wont work with Mac (HFS) formatted ones, and that would require reformatting, which I presume you'd rather not do.

I was wondering mostly for music that is not natively in ADX. I like the seamless looping ability of ADX, but if it's a lossy codec, I don't think I would want to convert anything to it.