Episode: 305
Title: HPR0305: Hard core Ogg player on the cheap
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0305/hpr0305.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 15:56:32

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Let us start over.
Hello, this is Koobmo, longtime listener, first time contributor.
There's been a lot of talk lately about the use of Og Bourbus and how the few players
support this container.
It got me thinking about a time I was weak.
Drank the Kool-Aid and bought a shiny, sexy new iPod video.
Sweet.
Not only can I take my favorite tunes and casts along with me, I can even watch shows and
movies.
Well, I never have watched an entire video on the pod, and I was so anal with the dang thing,
it spent its life cocooned in an autobox hiding her figure.
Well, it's at that age now.
Time to send the pod on to its next life before the battery goes flat, and I have to play
tongue depressor roulette with it.
What do I get to replace it?
Something expensive?
And I'll have to treat like another child?
Something that will be so locked down or locked up that you feel like you're doing something
wrong, just poking around?
Heck no, I need something I can play with.
And cheap that does what I need and won't complain about having its innards poked at.
Something like the Sansa E250.
TigerDirect has these suckers and abundance at the time of this recording in the refurb
bin for $29.99 for the 2GB model.
Throw in their 8GB microSD card, and you've got plenty of space for your HPR goodness,
and a few choice discographies.
But whoa, you say.
The E250 and family do not support AUG.
I thought that's where the story was going, and you'd be right.
Head on over to rockbox.org, select Rockbox 3.1, and look at the list of players that
Rockbox will turn into an AUG plane tool of grace and power.
Scroll down near the bottom and there you will see our friend the Sansa E250 family of
players.
Now Rockbox is a firmware replacement for the listed players, and in most cases adds a
great number of extra codecs and functionalities to said players.
You can even add a voice function so you can find songs or folders without looking at
the screen or add games and video playback.
Not that that would be used much in my case.
Now the first thing that you'll notice if you check out the site or read the manual
provided for each player, you are going to read the manual aren't you?
That there is a handy dandy easy installer to take care of all the nitty gritty.
Well with myself and good friend Phantom Hawk, all three of the units we purchased needed
the manual install.
This consisted of a bootloader and the Rockbox zip.
I will include the links for both in the show notes.
The bootloader in windows is just an executable so we'll require you have an administrator
count.
In Linux you will have to follow the bootloader link as it is easier to do that than it
is to verbalize the show commands.
Rockbox itself is the same in both platforms, platform, excuse me.
Pull down the zip and unpack into the main folder of the player, reboot and enjoy.
Just a little bit of oddities before I go.
If you find you can charge your new unit but cannot communicate with it through the USB,
go into settings, USB mode and select MSC instead of MTP on the player, and retry.
Also the unit will not let you see a high capacity card through the USB.
So you'll have to use a card reader to load your tunes.
I leave the two gigabytes on the unit open for swapping podcasts in and out.
Well that's it so far, a week's worth a new player and I'm happy as a clam.
I'd like to thank the organizers and presenters of HPR and wish you all a great week.
This episode was recorded on a Sansa E250 loaded with Rockbox.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio, HPR is sponsored by Carol.net, so head
on over to C-A-R-O dot-E-C for all of the team.