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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."
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.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Next up:
* OSS firmware-updater: Brick
* Rails anti-virus plugin: acts_as_used_tissue
* Microsoft patch utility: BrokenWindows
* Apple iPhone widget: iPaid2Much
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Feels like the site is being hosted on one of these devices.
There seem to be big battery life improvements, especially with the 5g ipods.
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.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
I've used it on my iRiver h120 player and it is 100x better than the stock firmware for that player. It boots faster, clean file browser, better power management and it can play OGG and FLAC and all that good stuff. Its awesome.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
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.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Some of us don't like the whole audio library concept in the first place. File hierarchies are great, thanks.
I just checked too, because I have been waiting for someone to crack that hardware and bring out a video player for my little iPod nano. And the short answer: no. Come ON, Apple. Bring out an update to allow us all to play video on our old hardware. /stupid thing to say. They want me to buy another one.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
You don't think "box of rocks" is a good name? LOL.
Other poor names:
Image manipulation software: GIMP. 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.
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.
Testiculos habet et bene pendentes.
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.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
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.
Be careful to make sure that any of the sansa's you pick up this way are version 1.0 of the hardware. There is a v2.0 which replaced all of the internals which (currently) won't run Rockbox. www.froobi.com (if you're in the USA/Canada) certify their sansas as "Rockbox ready" so you *know* you're getting the right hardware version.
Gentlemen, start your penguins
While you can use Rockbox on the 5G ipods to playback video using the MpegPlayer plugin (not based on mplayer as other comments suggest) and MPEG 1/2 format movies, we actually recommend still using the Original Firmware (OF) for movie playback (which is fine, since Rockbox allows you to dual boot back to the old OF whenever you like). This is because the 5Gs include a hardware video processor which no public specs are available for, and which Rockbox is therefore unable to use. It far outperforms our software video rendering sadly.
Gentlemen, start your penguins