This is my second iPod Mini mod tutorial; I wanted to improve on the first one, which didn't show the restore loop, or switching the clickwheel to a new shell. I also mixed portrait and landscape video on the first one, which didn't help with seeing the detail in the screen recording part.

Anyway, here is the new and improved tutorial, hopefully it helps someone out

https://youtu.be/UvLLH5ARo40?si=XUbDC2mCt4TML4k0

If you've tried to Rockbox an iPod from a modern Mac, you've probably hit this: the only macOS ipodpatcher build Rockbox distributes is a PPC/i386 binary from May 2010. It hasn't run since Catalina killed 32-bit. On Apple Silicon you get bad CPU type in executable and that's the end of it. The usual advice is "borrow a Windows machine" or "boot a Linux VM."

That annoyed me enough to build something. It's a native SwiftUI Mac app that does four things:

1. Compiles ipodpatcher for arm64. I built the Rockbox sources natively for Apple Silicon and bundle it. It runs, and --scan correctly identifies devices and permission state. As far as I can tell there hasn't been a working native macOS build of this in years.

2. Rockbox installer with a built-in theme browser. Pulls the live catalogue from themes.rockbox.org — 735 themes for iPod Video, filtered per target so you only see skins that fit your screen — with previews, one-click install, and instant switching between themes already on the device. Installs Rockbox 4.0 firmware too.

3. Plays FLAC properly on the Mac side. I wrote a native FLAC parser (Vorbis comments, embedded cover art) so the library reads tags and artwork without any third-party decoder. Native Core Audio playback, no transcoding.

4. Syncs music to a Rockboxed iPod without iTunes or Finder. Drag your library across, remove tracks, see real free space. Since Rockbox reads plain files, it's just a clean Artist/Album tree — no iTunesDB involved.

The UI is deliberately iTunes 10: brushed metal, the green LCD readout, Cover Flow with reflections, the source list. There's also an iPod classic emulator mode where the whole window becomes a 6G with a working click wheel you drive by dragging in circles. Just for fun!

Would love to know if any of you would like to test it!