Rockbox rocks my box
I love my iRiver 20 Gb H10. It's a superb player and I would argue that with anyone. But when I updated my computer to Windows Vista, it was no longer compatible with the iRiver firmware, and iRiver had no interest in updating the firmware for this "outdated" player. For a while, I thought my once favorite player had become totally useless.
Until I found Rockbox. Rockbox is an open source jukebox firmware for a number of mp3 players, including Archos, iRiver, Apple, Cowon, Toshiba, and SanDisk models. Aside from unlocking my once closed-firmware mp3 player, it added a number of features including:
- Skins
- Video support
- Games
- Music database generation from ID3 tags
The skinds and video support should be obvious; the games are found as "plugins" to the firmware and are mostly simple, classic-style games. The database generation is the coolest feature of all. With all the right ID3 information on my mp3 files, I can just upload them all at once without any regard for folders to my player and have Rockbox generate a database organizing the files by album, artist, and other information. I can then pick the music I want to listen to by going to the database and simple choosing the album title, artist, or genre I want to listen to. It's a very smart way of organizing music.
Another nice feature Rockbox has is that it can still load the original iRiver firmware, which will be useful in case I ever want to access the FM Tuner again (it was very useful in Germany).
Anyway, I'm telling you all this to let you know that you can dust off your old mp3 players and make them fun again with Rockbox. I should also mention, kudos to the Rockbox developers for all their had work and thanks to Foxy for buying me my iRiver (I have to say that last part).
Bonus: Here are some pictures of Rockbox on my iRiver, click through to view in full size on Flickr:
The menu screen.
The "Bubbles" game, one of my favorites.
The "now playing" screen, very simple but good enough for me.
P.S.: I should mention that the skin I have for the menu and "now playing" screen is very simple because there is actually no "stable" release of Rockbox for the iRiver 20 Gb H10… whenever they do have one, I can probably get better skin support.
I've been using Rockbox as a firmware for my 2nd Gen iPod Mini. The big reason is that I don't want to (and can't, at least on my Linux box) use iTunes - with Rockbox you can just move the files over and play them (it's pretty ridiculous that the Apple firmware doesn't allow that, really, - but we kinda got used to Apple proprietary lock-ins…).
But I wouldn't want to live without it - some of the features I love:
- like most open source stuff it supports a ton of formats from WMA to FLAC
- great on-the-go playlist creaton
- Gapless Playback (okay, Apple's got that too nowadays)
- custom font (and customization in general) - doesn't sound important, and the default one is not as pretty as Apple's Chicago (which you can choose to use, anyway), but I get about 10 lines of text on that tiny display, compared to about 5 w/ Apple's firmware
- custom fades and crossovers
- custom while playing screens (WPS) - much better ones than the ugly default
- "plugins": games (including Doom - not kidding) and more
Yer, I have been using Rockbox on my Nano 1st Gen for about 3 months now, its gr8,the themes are excellently designed, the apps are actually useful etc etc.
I discovered it when I was looking at iPodLinux. The main differences between iPod Linux and Rockbox is that Rockbox is much easier to install, is a smaller file, and comes with everything included…
It comes highly recommended ( Especially if you enjoy doom 1 and 2)