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Rockbox

note: if you don't care about audio quality, it may be more ideal to just use iTunes + the normal iPod OS.

So everyone who is into iPod Modifications swears by Rockbox, a custom firmware for digital music players. What sets it apart from the stock iPod OS, is that it allows support for lossless audio files like FLAC. Some of the custom themes are very cool but can be heavy and buggy since it's all open source. Here are some of my favorites:

I am currently using SnartyGray as my theme. It's lightweight and seems to have had the least amount of issues thus far.

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Part 1: Getting Music.

There are a few ways you can go about this. The first one is obvious: go out and buy CDs at Goodwill, Wal-Mart, Local Music Stores, Barnes and Noble, etc. However, most of my physical media is my record collection...so how do I go about that?

The Worst Method

So digitally backing up your record collection is pretty straightforward, but expensive and time consuming depending on the size of your record collection. If you are interested in doing this you are going to need a few things:

• A Turntable
• A Preamp
• J&D 1/4 to RCA Cable
• An Audio Interface
• A DAW, such as Audacity

The worst part about all of this is that it is painfully time consuming since you need to record the music in real time, clip the tracks, and label them. Do not recommend.

The Underrated Methods

If you want to support the artists, I'd highly recommend Bandcamp. Lots of labels like Daze, Numero Group, Triple-B, and many others have their own bandcamp page that lets you download lossless albums. If you really wanna be like me and get in the weeds, lots of smaller/local bands have a pay what you want or free option for their music.

But I totally get it if that's not ideal for you. Chances are Sabrina Carpenter are not going to be on bandcamp. This is where I HIGHLY recommend getting a library card. Not only does it allow you to check out CDs, but you can also check out movies, get streaming services, and obviously check out books. Your taxes pay for it, so use it!

It's super easy to rip music from CD's. All you need is a disc drive and iTunes, MusicBee, or Free:AC.

Those Methods

You know the ones I'm talking about. Good luck, sailor.

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Part 2: Life With Rock Box

A lot of the time, people outright cancel their streaming services in favor of an iPod or at least they pretend to. Truthfully speaking, I can't do that. I love making playlists way too much and I like the accessability. Oh yeah, I haven't even confirmed if it works in my car...

Since most cars made post like 2020 have USB in favor of an AUX-in, we already kind of have a problem. It seems like my iPod connects when it wants to and on top of that. I cant shuffle and have 0 control of my iPod when it's plugged in.

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Part 3: Now it's getting expensive

Okay, so at this point it's become apparent that if I want to listen to music in my car, I will need to listen to the songs in order, every. Single. Time. On top of that it takes about 5 minutes to load music and by that time I'm already pissed because I'm participating in traffic.

After some extensive research (I googled: "how to listen to iPod in car reddit -ai"), I decided to shell out the $60 + shipping for the AirFly Pro 2. This thing should be worth the cost since it will allow me to connect my airpods and listen in my car due to it's ability to receive and transmit a bluetooth signal

So... if anyone is keeping track: it's about $60 for the airply pro 2, $200 for the iPod, $28 for the wired headphones, $100 for the 512GB SD car, and I'm about to drop $30 on a new screen because mine has this annoying line running through it.