A Revival of Sorts: Where I Wound up With my iPod Classic 7th Gen

I’ve been using my iPod classic as my sole music player all summer now. The replaced screen, battery, storage, and front shell are all steady. I’ve found myself on an alternate build of Rockbox called Rockpod; the main thing I like about it is very superficial: it changes the theme colors based on the playing track’s album art. It also claims other features that probably matter like being flash-aware so it treats flash storage like flash and not like spinning metal. However, the firmware also chokes on MP3s that are not 44kbps. So I have to re-encode everything that isn’t that bitrate. So now I have a system that works: Reboot the iPod in stock firmware for disk use (it randomly trips on its feet and stops working when you copy lots of files) Treat the music library not as a synced copy of my core music library but a transformed copy – the Rhythmbox library is the point of truth and the iPod data is an adaptation of it that plays on the iPod. I’m not a huge fan of LLMs, but they can…