Rockbox 4.0 Custom Firmware Arrives for MP3 Players, Including Old iPods

Rockbox, the customized firmware for iPods and MP3 players from Archos, Samsung, Creative, and different companies, conscionable released a caller large version. Rockbox 4.0 is packed with caller features and usability improvements, and it present supports a fewer much media players.

Rockbox is simply a fashionable alternate firmware for integer euphony players, with customizable themes and fonts and enactment for galore audio codecs. The nonstop features depend connected which instrumentality you’re using, but astir Rockbox ports enactment precocious crossfading, medium art, and adjacent a playable mentation of Doom. It tin beryllium a important usability betterment implicit the banal firmware, particularly for media players that necessitate proprietary desktop bundle for synchronization (like Apple iPods)—Rockbox tin usage a elemental FAT32 disk partition for storing euphony and different files.

Rockbox’s merchandise announcement explains, “Rockbox is simply a implicit replacement for the bundle that drives your integer audio players. It was written from the crushed up to supply a amended acquisition than the existing software, giving you much features, options, and putting you successful complaint of the player. In astir areas, Rockbox acold surpasses the manufacturers firmware, genuinely unleashing the afloat imaginable of your hardware. It's written by users, for users.”

What’s New successful Rockbox 4.0

This is the archetypal Rockbox merchandise since November 2019, with “over 660,000 lines of codification changed by implicit 80 authors. There are six much devices present supported: the AIGO EROS Q and EROS K (and clones specified arsenic AGPTek H3, HifiWlaker H2, and Surfans F20), FiiO M3K, Shanling Q1, xDuoo X3ii and X20. A fewer much ports are present considered stable, including the AGPTek Rocker and xDuoo X3. Rockbox 4.0 besides removes enactment for respective Archos players, which “greatly reduced the interior complexities of Rockbox's core, and helped spur a improvement renaissance.”

The database of supported iPod models hasn’t changed. Rockbox has unchangeable ports for each iPod Classic/Video models, arsenic good arsenic the iPod Mini and the archetypal 2 generations of the iPod Nano. Even though determination has been work connected hacking newer iPod Nano models by the freemyipod team, the Rockbox leafage for the third-gen Nano mentions nary 1 has started connected a Rockbox port.

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There are immoderate caller features to get excited about. Rockbox present supports precocious bitrate euphony up to 192KHz (but is inactive constricted to 16-bit playback), perceptual measurement adjustment, updated codecs for FLAC and WMA Pro, and improved media parsing and medium creation support. Multi-partition enactment and GPT partitioning is besides present available, allowing drives larger than 2TB to enactment if each idiosyncratic partition is 2TB with 512B sectors oregon smaller. Some features lone enactment connected prime hardware, though, truthful cheque the wiki leafage for your player.

Rockbox has besides made galore infrastructure and codification cleanup changes to support the task going. The website and different services are present hosted by Rockbox assemblage members, since the Haxx squad (including Daniel Stenberg, champion known arsenic the creator of cURL) stopped doing that. The manuals for idiosyncratic players are present automatically generated from caller changes, and Rockbox present uses the GCC 4.9.4 compiling toolchain, some of which are speeding up improvement and testing. The desktop Rockbox Utility has been ported to QT5, too.

Download Rockbox

You tin visit the Rockbox Wiki to spot a database of supported devices, galore of which tin beryllium acceptable up with the authoritative Rockbox Utility. The installation process connected astir devices isn’t difficult, and immoderate players tin dual-boot Rockbox and the archetypal firmware.

The official downloads page has the Rockbox Utility for automatic installation, arsenic good arsenic physique files for manual installation if needed.

Source: Rockbox via Hackaday