Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
I've never rockboxed any of my Clip Zips. I heart my banana sheltered world.  |
Since you own more than one Clip Zip, why not experiment, Monk? You can still dual-boot into the standard firmware, but Rockbox's themes, custom settings and sound options are too nice to give up. You can boost individual frequencies using a five-band EQ, add DBs to the treble or bass, use prefab presets if you choose, increase stereo width, mix both channels into mono or even switch them (if, for example, you're wearing headphones with the cord on an inconvenient side). You can also apply a compressor-limitor that normalizes the volume so that you can hear soft passages without going deaf when the loud sections play. You can also time-stretch and pitch-shift recordings. You can play more kinds of files, too. And you can use dithering (which I haven't wanted to do myself).
Rockbox also
corrects the pitch of the recordings, which is slightly off if you use SanDisk's original firmware. It also improves battery life -- particularly if you listen to FLAC files.
The Audiobook options are interesting as well. It's nice to be able to scrub to the back of a book should you ever lose your place.
Rockbox for the Clip Zip is so feature-rich that, if you care to crack it, the manual is 180 pages. This open-sourced firmware has changed my teensy device into a sonic amusement park.
(Have you ever longed to be a giant who owned an original Game Boy Color? Well, now you can experience giantlike scale using the Zip's wee controls and screen to play Pong and Doom. The text looks like this, only jaggy.)