A stock-looking Rockbox theme for the iPod 5G I built a few years ago

At the start of 2023, I built an iPod: a 5th generation iPod Video with a 1TB SSD, a bigger battery and a transparent front. The hardware's been great, but keeping it in sync with my large music library has not.

My library now stands at around 290GB, in a mix of formats. Apple’s firmware only understands the ones that were popular twenty-ish years ago, so syncing has meant converting files into something the iPod can play. Newer formats such as Opus are much more efficient than the ones Apple’s firmware supports, and I don’t want to convert every album I add just so an iPod from 2005 can cope with it.

So I’ve installed Rockbox, the open source firmware that replaces the one Apple shipped. It plays pretty much everything natively, and the iPod shows up as a normal USB drive, so syncing is just copying files across.

I got my Little Robot Friend (in this case, Claude) to install and configure it for me. That meant reformatting the drive, installing the bootloader, and syncing the whole library straight from my home server rather than via my laptop. The first sync took the best part of 16 hours, as the iPod’s processor can only move data over USB at around 5MB/s. 🙄

Thankfully, subsequent syncs only copy what's changed, so those take minutes.

Rockbox by default is fugly, which is why I haven't replaced the stock firmware with it before now. And while it has hundreds of themes, none of the ones I tried were close enough to stock for my liking. The nearest was iClassic, made by Humberto Santana back in 2011. So I asked Claude to build me a theme based on it, and the result is Classic Revival:

• The split-screen main menu, with album art on the right
• The blue selection bar, with “>” arrows on items that open another list
• Smooth Helvetica-style text instead of jagged pixel fonts
• Now Playing with angled album art and a reflection

It keeps the useful things Rockbox adds, such as ratings, a preview of the next track and FM radio.

If you’ve got an iPod Video (5G or 5.5G) running Rockbox, you can download it from the Rockbox themes site. The source, screenshots and known issues are on Framagit, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.