[ailurux]

So I've been keeping my beloved 4th gen iPod alive for a while, and have been increasingly aware of the fact that the supply of replacement parts is likely to slowly diminish with time. Just recently, the hold switch assembly has died, and I have found myself looking for replacement parts, wondering how long I'll be able to keep doing this. This reminded me of the Tangara, and I decided to check it out once again, only to find more stories than I would like about issues with the software.

For me, the appeal of the Tangara is not the software, but the hardware. I don't want to learn to write script to troubleshoot or customize a digital audio player that should rightly spend the majority of its life in my purse. I want an iPod that more or less works out of the box, with parts that can be easily repaired and replaced more or less indefinitely. An actual iPod serves this purpose just fine right now, but not forever. Eventually, we will run out of replacement parts to keep them running.

This, for me, is the strongest argument for future production runs supporting something like Rockbox, and prioritizing ease of repair: not because I'm some dyed in the wool Rockbox fangirl, but because as far as software goes, I want something that is proven, more or less works out of the box, and requires minimal technical knowledge on my part. "You can write a Lua script for it!" is the opposite of enticing to me - "even your monkey paws can open it and replace busted components with a tutorial video and a little screwdriver" is extremely enticing.

Long story short: I've seen a couple of comments about the fact that there are plenty of devices that support Rockbox, and so Tangara needs to create it's own niche. It's true that there are plenty of devices that support Rockbox, but few new ones with a proper polished iPod style clickwheel interface. The niche that I see Tangara filling is precisely the niche that the iPod classic fills right now. The Tangara doesn't need to carve out some special new niche. As the iPod Classic slowly dies out, the Tangara replaces it.

Putting this out there on the off chance of having just a little bit of an impact on decisions made about the future of Tangara 

FWIW, works out of the box with no need to touch scripting or anything like that is our goal for Tangara's firmware, and aside from a few bugs we're still ironing out, I would say that's mostly where we're at with the firmware. Of course, the device is also designed to be customizable from a software perspective, hence the focus on scriptability, but it's very much not expected that an end user would *need* to interact with it. I hope that clears up a little bit about the intent of the software side now and going forward. 

We're not opposed to someone porting Rockbox to Tangara, but it's a big undertaking, may not be feasible with the hardware as is, and we don't have an interest in doing that ourselves or providing ongoing support for Rockbox firmware on Tangara. We are planning on improving the hardware for future Tangara versions (more memory/cpu, etc) which may make porting something like Rockbox easier, but it's not something we're likely to focus on ourselves. I also don't think porting Rockbox will automatically fix all issues with the firmware, and to me it seems more likely to introduce a new class of issues we have less domain experience and interest in fixing. 

The firmware does have it's issues, and it's not where we want it to be yet, but we're still working on improving it. Large libraries in particular are still an issue, though I've been working for the last few months on some major improvements on that front. For most users though I think an out of the box, no scripting needed experience is where the firmware is at currently. I believe there's a lot of people who just quietly enjoy music on their Tangaras and if you're only looking at the things people are commenting on, it does skew quite negatively. This gets me down a bit sometimes, but it also makes logical sense that the people we mostly hear from are the ones who are encountering problems. 

Thanks for your thoughts. I don't mean to knock down your suggestions at all, just providing some context and thoughts from my side of things. :3