Tech Tips for Catholics

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Many of them I listen to at work and use MediaMonkey as the music player and down loader. I listen at work on a computer and for me that is fine.

I also listen to many running podcasts (I’m a runner) while out on the road and have a Sansa e250 that supports video and audio. One thing it lacked was the ability to easily convert video for veiwing, and navigatioan was a bit clunky.

Rockbox is an open source project designed to support multiple portable media players. They include the iPod Sansa, Iriver and others.  In an offort to get away from being locked into a format for audio or video that was propritary I did some searching and discoverd RockBox.

This application has it all. It is infinatly configurable, easy to use, and open source. I have been using it for almost a year now and the upgrades are based on user input and feedback. You can also grab the source and contribute.

Some of the best features are the ability to dynamically create play lists on the device, rename files and tags, and customize the interface including adding voice menus. This can really come in handy if your on a run or you have difficulty seeing due to light or eye issues. The font size is also changeable so no more squinting to read. Battery use is excellent and by turning off the frills like album art you can really push the limits of you device for listening.
Take a moment and check it out. For runners its great it has a stopwatch plug-in you can record your time and splits with. You can even play doom, how cool is that?

One of the great features also is the ability to acces the original firmware. So if you really need to do something with it you can.

Check out the site and then head over to SQPN.com, RunningPodcasts.org or your other favorite site and grab your music and shows and listen a whole new way.