After 3 Years, Rockbox 3.0 Released 248
DarkkOne writes "Rockbox version 3.0 is out. Three years in development, it marks the introduction of many new players since the 2.5 release and offers software-based playback allowing audio of nearly any commonly (or uncommonly) used format on a list of MP3 players by Apple, iRiver, Cowon, Archos, Toshiba and Sandisk. Beyond this it is FLOSS, under the GPL v2 license (or later), and includes a variety of plugins such as games and simple apps. 3.0 is the first official release for any players not made by Archos and more or less marks the beginning of a much more regular release cycle for the software."
Anyone prefer this to the stock firmware? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm a relative newbie when it comes to media players and I kind of like just plugging my ipod in and letting it sync with itunes. Having said that the hacker in me knows I have an old ipod that I'm not really using at the moment.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of this software?
Re:Anyone prefer this to the stock firmware? (Score:5, Informative)
The chief advantage over the iPod OS is that it plays flac and ogg vorbis files, as well as many formats of video if your player's CPU is fast enough.
It also lets you move media to and from your your player by simple drag-and-drop operations; you don't need a special app to load it, build the iTunes database, etc.
Disadvantages? Well, the interface is different. I like it, you might not.
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The chief advantage over the iPod OS is that it plays flac and ogg vorbis files, as well as many formats of video if your player's CPU is fast enough.
Indeed. I was able to play mpeg movies on a 1st Gen iPod Nano. It isn't exactly hi-def but it works.
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Most MP3 players that can double as USB storage devices support Linux OOTB without modification. Very few players support OGG, although I have a Meizu Miniplayer SL [meizu.com] (aka 'M6SL') that does.
I've seen the 4GB model for as low $50 [google.com] recently, though $80 is far more typical. It comes in 2GB, 4GB and 8GB.
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I like Cowons players.
I had an X5 (gave it to a friend), and now have an A3.
X5 is definietly a better portable audio player. EXTREMELY durable, good sound, plays MP3, WMA, OGG and FLAC out of the box, along with some video formats, the control is good for use without having to look at the player.
the A3 is a good multimedia player that can be moved (notice I didn't say a good portable multimedia player, there's a difference!). It's not as durable as the X5, and the case it comes with doesn't give you access
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I have a Samsung YP-U3. It plays ogg but not flac. Since it's a simple little flash based "thumb drive" style player, I wouldn't want to put big flac files on it anyway.
My only complaint is that it's an MTP device instead of a USB mass storage device, but Amarok interfaces with it fine.
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The 8gig Sansa E series (about 70 bucks on woot) works great with Rockbox and Ubuntu Studio.
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I have a sansa e 260 that I bought specifically for the micro sd slot and was very disappointed/pissed off to find that sdhc capacity had been crippled. Once I got rockbox running I could access the card. The only remaining problem with the older rockbox version was that I still couldn't get into the sdhc card from the computer. I have to take it out and use a dedicated card reader, which is a pain in the ass. Still, it works fine once it's loaded so I can't complain.
One annoying thing is that I can't s
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Best Buy used to sell the Insignia Pilot, which had 8 GB of memory, supports OGG (not sure about FLAC), has bluetooth support, built-in FM radio, is expandable via an SDHC slot, etc. It has an actual 24 hour battery life (!). I got mine new for $99, and absolutely love it. It mounts under Ubuntu as a stoage device, and I just drag and drop MP3s, OGGs, divx files, JPGs, text files, etc.
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http://www.cowonglobal.com/ [cowonglobal.com]
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Re:Anyone prefer this to the stock firmware? (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of us don't like the whole audio library concept in the first place. File hierarchies are great, thanks.
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That's great for you, however I'm happy with a music directory on my NAS that's arranged by band and by album, which I can then stream/play to anywhere, and select chunks of to synchronise with my player as and when.
That's good for me, I really don't need all the extra stuff and I don't want it.
On top of that, having mass storage based access to the player means it just shows up as a hard drive to wherever I plug it in, meaning I can use it to transport stuff around, commit minor acts of piracy (here, have
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'cos I've got a Debian Linksys NSLU2 running ushare and samba?
Very low power consumption and noise compared to an old PC. Not much processing power but it works for listening to my music from work or streaming audio/video to the Xbox360
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If it's "just an XML file", why do I need iTunes?
When I have used iTunes in the past, I get a distinct sense that my Qi is being leeched out of me.
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It's not, really. The XML file is (from iTunes' perspective) a write only export of the library. The actual library is a binary blob. If you try to make any changes to the XML file, you will find that iTunes promptly overwrites them. The only time iTunes ever actually reads this XML file is if the main database file is lost or corrupted. It will then rebuild the binary database from the XML file, a process that is inordinately long, and doesn't actually preserve all of the data. This is a useful trick
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I actually don't like or care for the "most often, etc" crap. My MP3 player already has that option, but I find that flat out shuffle tends to hit those random songs sometimes too. Ogg/flac/aac sound like a small difference but it's actually huge. Not only is the audio quality better, but they tend to take up a lot less space for the same bitrates. MP3 is nice up to a certain point, not that I have a problem with ti at all. However, ogg/flac/aac are a definite step above.
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It also lets you move media to and from your your player by simple drag-and-drop operations
Kinda. I was thinking about installing it on my Sansa e280, but as of last week when I looked at the Sansa project page, that port didn't support USB synching. The SOP was to reboot it into the original firmware, sync, then reboot back into Rockbox. I like the idea, but it still seems pretty rough.
Re:Anyone prefer this to the stock firmware? (Score:4, Informative)
I've been using rockbox on that hardware for a year or two and I've been very happy with it. I actually bought this player only for the purpose of using Rockbox (a step of faith considering I'd never used it previously).
Using the original firmware to copy files is fairly transparent. If the device is on and you plug in the USB port, it powers on and automatically boots to the original firmware. Then when you unplug it the system automatically reboots to the Rockbox firmware. I'm sure they'll set it to just boot to Rockbox once it supports USB syncing.
About the only time it would seem to be inconvenient is if you wanted to listen to music while having it plugged into USB. That never happens for me - I can just play music on my PC if I want to.
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Cool - thanks for the information. I may give it a shot if only to see what all the fuss is about. The one thing that really interests me is the idea of truly random playlists. I'm 99% OK with the Sansa's built-in firmware, but every time you start random play mode, it starts with the first song in alphabetical order. Fixing that alone is worth the price of entrance for me.
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Re:Anyone prefer this to the stock firmware? (Score:5, Informative)
Pros:
Lots of games (a few are decent even)
Music can be copies off with no effort (just files on a disk)
Flac, and Ogg support
Really nice playlist builder on the device
Cons:
Harder to get a playlist from a computer
The database option is nice, but not as seamless as from iTunes (you can browse buy database or by filesystem)
I really like it, I think the whats playing screen looks great, and I like being ably to through a quick playlist together. If a friend has a song I want, I just copy it over, and listen on the way home. I want music on my computer at work, plug it in and copy to the computer.
iTunes may be great within the iTunes system, but in a social world at large I find Rockbox to be more useful.
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Does it have any kind of "Smart Playlist" builder? That's the main thing keeping me on iTunes these days - it has about the only sane implementation of a smart playlist that I've found. foobar2k is alright, but I have to rebuild the playlists when I add new music which is a little irritating.
On the other hand, does anyone know of a good way to sync library information between multiple copies of iTunes? The biggest thing that has kept me looking for an iTunes replacement is that I have my music on 3 diffe
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For me, the most important advantage was:
it stores and plays music in plain mp3 format instead of some braindead apple DB format.
This means I can play my music on the iPod, but also plug the iPod in my computer and play it on my stereo.
Also, I don't like the 6th generation firmware on the iPod. For one, it uses half the available screenspace to show the album cover, which I don't have and which you can't turn off.
Disadvantage of Rockbox is that it has to reverse engineer the software to make use of the hard
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This means I can play my music on the iPod, but also plug the iPod in my computer and play it on my stereo.
The hard disk on my iPod (third gen) broke a couple of years ago, so things might have changed since I last used one regularly, but is this really better than just dropping it in the dock? I had my stereo plugged in to the dock, and when I got home I just dropped the iPod in the dock and it continued playing and charged - I only ever plugged it in to the computer after buying more music.
It was possible to play music from the iPod on a computer too - the music was stored in a hidden folder and, although th
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If you have a dock, that's probably your best option.
However, I just like to move my music up AND down using any old tool my OS makes available, not some proprietary piece of software of very poor quality ... iTunes.
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Other cool things you get for it [wikipedia.org] are stuff like Doom, a Gameboy emulator etc. Very cool.
I used my old iRiver i120 to play chess once on a long bus journey and plane flight (not to mention listening to music), whereas previously it didn't have any games, and couldn't even do basic stuff like delete/rename files, check free space and get a more accurate reading of how much battery life is left (percentage rather than just 3 bars or whatever it was).
Re:Anyone prefer this to the stock firmware? (Score:4, Interesting)
First of all, I am by no means an audiophile. I have a 3rd generation iPod and a computer with onboard sound and 2 tinny speakers on either side of my monitor.
I quite like the standard iPod interface. I can find tracks quickly using the database and scrollwheel. I've had some issues transferring files with amarok, but gtkPod works well.
Most of my collection sounds fine on the iPod, but I was never very satisfied with orchestral music with a large dynamic range. I'd ripped some Arvo Part CDs to MP3 at increasingly high bitrates using lame. Despite that, the quiet bits (such as the closing bell harmonic at the end of "Cantus") sounded awful: some sort of bubbling distortion. It seemed fine playing through my PC, but I put that down to my dodgy hardware blotting out the bubbling noise. In the end, I resurrected my old windows partition and ripped to AAC in iTunes. It was a bit better. My conclusion at the time? AAC was a better music format than MP3.
Then I installed Rockbox. I didn't like the interface much, and preferred browsing a database of artists rather than reorganising my whole collection into folders. At the time, browsing on a 3G iPod was painful. It would take about 60 seconds to scroll through a moderate sized list of artists. (I submitted a patch to speed this up but it was rejected. In any case it works much better now.) Battery life was poor, and crashes were frequent. I considered wiping it from the machine, but then I listened to those quiet MP3 tracks again.
The difference was stunning.
Crystal clear and without distortion, they sounded as good as the original CDs (and at least as good as the AACs).
My conclusion now? Apple's MP3 decoder on the 3G iPod is appalling. Being a bit of a cynic, I suspect it has been crippled or underdeveloped to push DRM-leaden formats.
Rockbox has come a long way since I tried it. It now seems as stable as the default firmware and I'd recommend it highly.
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The database has vastly improved since then. You can browse by many tags, including Artist, Album Artist, Album, Genre, Year etc...
And as far as sound goes, when you can adjust crossfeed and seperation parameters yourself... you know you have something just a tad bit better than consumer-level firmware.
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I had huge problems with high-bitrate VBR MP3s on the 3G iPod... never looked into it much after I re-encoded into AAC, but I don't think it had anything to do with DRM as a lower-bitrate MP3 actually sounded much better and the AAC versions don't have DRM anyway.
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I call Rockbox "American Express" because my music and media files don't leave home without it.
I use it on my iPod 5G and on my Sansa E270.
I won't touch iTunes or MS-DRM, so it's the difference between useless and wonderfully useful.
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The stock firmware on the iRiver H10 requires Windows Media Player in order to sync correctly. As a Linux user, this was a major bummer. There are hacks to mount it as Universal Mass Storage, however, and with RockBox (or EasyH10) I can refresh the database without having Windows do it for me.
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It's been a while since I've used it, but if memory serves, this is the OS I put on my old 20G Ipod to turn it into a recording device to capture my band's marathon 6 hour jam sessions. Just put a mic in the headphone port, and away she ran...kept crashing my ipod, though, so it was a short-lived experiment. Hopefully it's more stable now.
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I use Linux and I can sync my iPod with a single rsync command.
The advantages are that when you plug a RockBox into another computer it is a disk drive. You drag your music onto it in whatever folder you want and it is available. Because you can store your files on your iPod the same way you store them on your computer you can use it like a backup device.
There
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As an owner of a Cowon iAudio x5, YES! The stock firmware is absolutely horrible, I really lucked out on the rockbox support. 2 years later, I've filled up my x5's drive and am shopping for a replacement. I bought an older ipod just for the purpose of installing rockbox. Most of my music is in ogg vorbis and I've written a small program to automatically synchronize my music with a rockbox player. I never have to add or delete music again!
Poor name for software (Score:5, Funny)
Next up:
* OSS firmware-updater: Brick
* Rails anti-virus plugin: acts_as_used_tissue
* Microsoft patch utility: BrokenWindows
* Apple iPhone widget: iPaid2Much
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What's wrong with Rockbox? It makes your little music box rock, so it's the perfect name.
If the wife hadn't thrown her old and broken iPod out (I was going to buy a new disk for it) then I'd probably have put Rockbox on it.
You don't like "box of rocks"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Other poor names:
Image manipulation software: GIMP [gimp.org]. A gimp is a cripple.
Beatles: They named their band after a kind of insect? Some unlikely names don't stop success.
I am very impressed with the fact that the Rockbox team lists all the contributors.
Re:You don't like "box of rocks"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The one player missing from that list... (Score:5, Interesting)
That reallly needs the firmware... the Zune.
I wish someone would crack that player. It's great hardware just crippled with really crappy software and DRM. If they could crack that puppy and get their firmware os on it I'd be snapping up all the unloved brown zunes I could find.
Honestly it's only now that the ipod has the screen the zune had when it was released, the Zune could have made a dent in ipod sales if the managers at Microsoft did not have their head so far in their rear you couldn't see their shoulders.
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I'm still trying to make out if they have legs or not. The zune has to be the biggest case of crippled by design ever. Just think of what that hardware *could* do if it was accessible to hackers.
Re:The one player missing from that list... (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly it's only now that the ipod has the screen the zune had when it was released, the Zune could have made a dent in ipod sales if the managers at Microsoft did not have their head so far in their rear you couldn't see their shoulders
Microsoft has a nasty habit of acting like they already have a monopoly in markets they are merely exploring.
I would consider this propensity a godsend, otherwise, you would see it only AFTER they drove everyone else out of the market.
Re:The one player missing from that list... (Score:5, Informative)
That reallly needs the firmware... the Zune.
Great Hardware? This does not surprise me at all.
After all, the Zunes are, hardware-wise, designed and manufactured by Toshiba (afaik).
Then again, the real Toshibas are known for their excellent audio quality *and* (some of them at least) are being supported by Rockbox.
So why bother with an under-cover Toshiba, hampered by mediocre third party firmware? ;-)
Get a real one (Gigabeat).
Been using this for years... (Score:2)
The site being currently very /.'d, does anyone know what's new in this release, other than the 'officially supported' status?
Re:Been using this for years... (Score:5, Informative)
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Battery life of the 3.0 branch is ~80% of Apple stock on MP3. Should be even better with the daily builds, as MP3 decoding was split to run on both cores post feature-freeze.
Rockbox performs (slightly) worse than the stock firmware (battery wise) only on the PP502x iPods. On all other targets Rockbox meets or (sometimes greatly) exceeds OF runtime.
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Basically they did what Debian does, they froze development on new features and just hammered away at bugs.
As far as the difference from the previous "release", there's simply not enough space here to describe. Three years of solid SVN commits to go through...
Does it come with a web server as well? (Score:5, Funny)
Feels like the site is being hosted on one of these devices.
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Some of players they support and "rescue" from Vendor firmware/lock-in costs like $300 and even more.
Dare to ask the amount of donations they get? I don't ;) I can guess, that is why.
Superior (Score:2, Informative)
Pretty cool. I use rockbox on my sansa and it is worlds better than the stock. It fixes stupid problems the sansa has like volume leveling... Plus its pretty.
sansa v2 hardware support - in progress (Score:2)
Just beware, the Sansa v2 family is not supported, the vendor went and implemented a whole new board. The new one is some sort of system-on-a-chip that they are working on, but so far is unusable.
See this forum thread [rockbox.org]. You'll probably agree with me that some of these developers know their stuff.
Note: One of the holdbacks is that the vendor will only give a particular developer documentation, under the condition that he/she can't share it with others. Nice.
Rockbox is great! (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually traded my brand spanking new 6th generation iPod because the idiots at Apple encrypt the firmware so that you can't install alternative firmware anymore. I bought a second hand 5th generation iPod with half the capacity to be able to use Rockbox, just because I severly dislike the Apple firmware.
I can tell you, it was the first and last Apple product I bought and will ever buy. If you think out of the box ( in this case: Apple's straightjacket ) they will do their utmost best to block you from utilizing the product like you would want to.
Re:Rockbox is great! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think out of the box ( in this case: Apple's straightjacket ) they will do their utmost best to block you from utilizing the product like you would want to.
They tried to do this with computers in the '80s, and it cost them most of their market share. Now they're trying to do the same thing with music players and phones.
Apple's success is largely due to the fact that they don't design for focus groups, they design for Steve Jobs, who generally has good taste. If your usage is close to his usage, then you'll be happy. The more your usage diverges from his, the less attractive they are.
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Wow! I did not realize that.
I am glad my coworker is getting a Sansa and not just an ipod as I had suggested given the fact that mine worked fine with Rockbox... Well, of course it helps the Sansa is much cheaper...
Well, I guess I must make sure to tell my wife not to get me anything from Apple the next time around. Too bad, I liked the hardware.
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Beware! See my post above [slashdot.org]. Sansa v2 family support is in progress but currently unusable.
Rockbox rules (Score:5, Informative)
Creative? (Score:5, Insightful)
Any word on compatibility with Creative's players? They're a pretty big part of the PMP market and the next company that comes to mind (for me) after Apple.
Re:Creative? (Score:4, Informative)
Any word on compatibility with Creative's players? They're a pretty big part of the PMP market and the next company that comes to mind (for me) after Apple.
It appears to be in the very early stages.
I'd love to see a Rockbox port to the flash based ZENs if only to fix the pathetic functionality of the SD slot... How Creative got away with calling it memory "expansion" or "upgrades" is beyond me.
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Indeed, I am in the same boat as you. I love the player, it does me perfectly (especially since I'm not a heavy music-listener) but it does have it's shortcomings and I'm sure they're nothing a firmware upgrade can't fix. Except for perhaps the pathetic FM radio they threw in that can barely get a signal anywhere.
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My Sansa e200r (v1) had poor radio reception. Rockbox somehow fixed that. But for me, that fix was being allowed to tune at 0.05mhz increments, instead of the standard 0.10mhz. For some reason, my tuner is offset by 0.05mhz and to hear 97.90mhz clearly, I actually need to tune to 97.95mhz.
Ipod Nano 2nd gen support? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ipod Nano 2nd gen support? (Score:4, Informative)
The best combination (Score:2, Insightful)
Go to buy.com and choose one of their recertified Sandisk Sansa players (I got one of the E series) and slap rockbox on that thing. You now have yourself a $40 player with $200 worth of functionality. No more worrying about losing or dropping it when it's so cheap.
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Remember, in order to run Rockbox, you have to get a rev 1 Sansa (no more available as new stock, just as used items or in refurbished lots).
On a v2 Sansa, Rockbox will not run.
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Progress is being made [slashdot.org] but it is still far from useful.
Blame Sandisk for changing the whole board and using that system-on-a-chip, and for not being completely open with documentation.
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Star ratings and play date-time (Score:2)
Does Rockbox support star ratings and automatic tracking of play count and last played date/time?
My favorite iPod feature is the ability to rate songs on the iPod and the ability of the iPod to update playlists based on star rating, play count, and last played date.
My most frequently used playlists are:
Highest play count
Not played in last week
Not played in the last month
Star rating >= 3, 4, or 5 depending on my mood
How do I get random shuffle? (Score:2)
How do I get random shuffle over random albums?
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Have read the manual...
Better than Stock. Why isn't it more widely used? (Score:5, Insightful)
I got an Archos Ondio flash-based player years ago, but after the newness wore off I found the usability sorely lacking. I was really disappointed. I heard of Rockbox fairly early on, but I figured the last thing I wanted to deal with was troubleshooting problems with firmware on my mp3 player, so I thought "not now, but maybe some day". A year or so later, I was finally so fed up with the Ondio I figured I'd give it a try. Man was I sorry I'd waited so long. The Rockbox firmware made the player much more useful, and it even added features that had not existed at all before (e.g. grouping via ID3 tags). To top it all off, I don't recall ever really running into any bugs in the firmware.
What this really leads me to wonder is, why don't some of these player manufacturers team up with Rockbox to make that the official firmware of their player? It seems like, with people inside the company to help with the hardware interface part of it, Rockbox would be a very solid choice, and the company wouldn't have to pay a license fee or write firmware from scratch. And, of course, they could even make the version on the player branded and incorporates whatever eye candy they please.
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I'm content to see Rockbox stay the way it is as an alternative for those of us who prefer a file hierarchy on our device of choice.
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Bah (Score:2)
Everything this does I can already do with my Sansa Clip (which has easier to manage audiobook and podcast support out of the box, assuming your's ships with current firmware) and with my N800. That said, I considered purchasing an MP3 player to run this on before picking up the Clip and was disappointed by the hardware available. Nearly all of the hardware this runs on is no longer available new in stores and no manufacturers have picked up and run with the software on standardized hardware, from what I've
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Everything this does I can already do with my Sansa Clip
Have you actually used Rockbox? I guarantee Rockbox has more capabilities. If you don't have a v2, I would suggest you try it. You can uninstall Rockbox, or even just boot the original firmware from inside Rockbox.
Does it still suck? (Score:2)
Last time i tried it, you couldn't even charge your player with the firmware running. And forget managing your music files.
It was a nice 'work in progress' but nothing more.
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The previous release wouldn't do that with my e260 which was a shame. I didn't dare risk my ipod however.
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Because it was a pain to get running just to find it didn't do 1/2 the things to make it useable.
it makes more sense to ask here for facts from people who have tried it, then to once gain spend the time just to be disappointed.
And again i did say it was a nice work in progress, i don't think that would qualify as slamming it.
iPod Firmware Hassles (Score:2)
Finding a non-iPod Rockbox compatible DAP (Score:2, Interesting)
Where could I find one of the Rockbox compatible DAP's for a reasonable price? The Cowon iAudio all seem very overpriced, and the SanDisk SANSA's all have too little storage. I need at least 20GB of storage. Am I looking in the wrong pl
Thank you RockBox (Score:3, Interesting)
Rockbox is very well written clean code.
I have been working on an NXP ISP1582 driver, this is for USB2.0 Device interface and Rockbox has been one of the cleanest example code pieces for this, demonstrating how to use this chip.
I hope to eventually release my code in to the Linux kernel although it doesn't look anything like the RockBox code, they help me get past some roadblocks on how to communicate with that chip.
So Thank you Rockbox, I hope it will have a long future ahead.
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I think there is an mplayer plugin
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With the iPod Video it is suggested you boot into Apple firmware to watch videos. Rockbox does not support the Broadcomm video decoder, and thus must attempt to drive the large screen with CPU decoding. You will not get 24FPS in MPEG2 on the 320x240 screen with the iPod's 80Mhz processor.
Most all other targets have a much better processor to screen size ratio and play video better.
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It only really supports MPEG2 (the one DVD uses, specifically). You also have to encode it to particular framerats, aspects etc..
See this page [rockbox.org] for details.
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I should have included more details, sorry. (would have posted anonymously to avoid karma whoring, but for the retarded mandatory-anonymous-post-delay)
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There are four gen1 Nanos in my family, and all of them froze and wouldn't turn off without a forced reboot (and sometimes not even then) since they were a month old. The mini and shuffle also suffer from similar problems. The only iPod I don't have trouble with is my gen...er...2 or 3 iPod, which not only doesn't crash but also has better battery life with my $7 replacement battery than it ever did on the original. I hadn't thought of the Rockbox as a stability fix, but given your post I think I'll swit
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Do you have a five band parametric equalizer?
Replaygain support?
Last.FM logging?
Crossfeed? (I'll assume you have crossfade).
Dithering?
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
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No, Rockbox is ported to devices which somebody with the talent and desire chooses to port it to.
The iPods, with their huge user base, is statistically likely to get a port.
You'll notice the newer iPods, with their encrypted original firmware is unlikely to get a port.
The discussion on work towards your device can be found at:
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=10078.0 [rockbox.org]
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Just bugfixes. There was a feature-freeze for the bughunt prior to 3.0 release.
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