After 3 Years, Rockbox 3.0 Released

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."

Comments

Creative?

[neokushan]

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:Rockbox is great!

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:Anyone prefer this to the stock firmware?

[Nursie]

Some of us don't like the whole audio library concept in the first place. File hierarchies are great, thanks.

Re:You don't like "box of rocks"?

[rmadmin]

I think GIMP is actually a great name for it. Compared to Photoshop, it certainly is crippled. Kthx.

Better than Stock. Why isn't it more widely used?

[internic]

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.