Rockbox
Encyclopedia
Rockbox is a replacement for the standard firmware
in various forms of digital audio players (DAPs). It offers an alternative to the player's operating system
, in many cases without removing the original firmware, which provides a plug-in architecture for adding various enhancements and functions. Enhancements include personal digital assistant
(PDA) functions, applications, utilities, and games. Rockbox can also retrofit
video playback functions on players first released in mid-2000. Rockbox includes a voice-driven user-interface suitable for operation by blind
and visually impaired
users.
Rockbox runs on a wide variety of devices with very different hardware abilities: from early Archos
players with 1-bit character cell
-based displays, to modern players with high resolution color displays, digital optical audio hardware and advanced recording abilities.
Rockbox is free software
released under the GNU General Public License
.
series of hard-disk based MP3 players/recorders (including the flash-only model Ondio), because of owner frustration with severe limitations in the manufacturer-supplied user interface and device operations. These devices have relatively weak main central processing unit
s (CPU), and instead offload music playback to dedicated hardware MP3 decoding chips (MAS). Rockbox was unable to significantly alter playback abilities. Instead, it offered a greatly improved user interface and added plug-in functions absent in the factory firmware. Rockbox can be permanently flashed into flash memory on the Archos devices, making it a firmware replacement.
Versions of Rockbox have since been produced for more sophisticated devices. These perform audio decoding in software
, allowing Rockbox to potentially support many more music formats than the original firmware, and adding the extensibility and increased functions already present in the Archos ports. Rockbox is run from the hard drive after being started with a custom boot loader, so to upgrade Rockbox, users need only copy the files onto the player's drive and restart the device. Reflashing is only needed when changing the boot loader, and on some platforms is not needed at all.
The first of these ports, beginning in late 2004, was for the ColdFire
-powered devices manufactured by iriver
, focusing on the H1xx series
of hard drive players (H110/H120/H140). About one year later, a port for the H3xx series
became functional, offering similar functions.
In late 2005, work began on a port of Rockbox to Apple's iPod portable players. Throughout 2006, Rockbox ports were made available for a variety of iPod models (iPod Photo
, iPod Nano
, iPod 4g, iPod Mini
, and iPod Video), and the Cowon
iAUDIO X5 series. As of February 2007, usable ports are also available for the iriver H10 and Toshiba
Gigabeat
F & X series. As of March 5, 2007, a new port for the Cowon iAUDIO M5 became functional. On March 11, 2007, the SanDisk Sansa
e200 series became the next addition to the Rockbox lineup. On May 23, 2007, support for the iPod video 80 GB model was added, completing the iPod video lineup. On July 27, 2007, initial support was added for the iPod 1G and 2G. On September 23, 2007, the Sansa c200 series was welcomed into the lineup. On March 18, 2008, the Olympus m:robe 100 became the first new port of 2008, and the iAUDIO M3 joined the lineup days later. Rockbox includes video-support for MPEG playback through the included work-in-progress mpegplayer plug-in.
To date, all Rockbox ports have been accomplished by reverse engineering with little or no manufacturer assistance. As free software, many Rockbox developers and supporters hope to eventually see official manufacturer support for new ports, or at least unofficial assistance in porting Rockbox to new devices. Only a few companies have expressed interest in Rockbox, and none have officially contributed code to the project or included it with their hardware. The Sansa e200v1 port is the first to be started at the request of the hardware manufacturer, who gave the Rockbox team samples of their devices.
Rockbox is continuously developed, with new SVN builds being released after every source change, and stable releases every 4 months for targets deemed sufficiently mature. Additionally builds are often available to developers of unsupported targets, which, while somewhat functional, are typically not ready for general users due to incomplete features or poor stability.
s and tablet computer
s), which have been increasing in popularity since 2010. Some authorities expect the former class of devices to become obsolete in the next few years.
Daniel Stenberg, a founder of the Rockbox project, envisions the project evolving away from a standalone Rockbox operating system to Rockbox as a media player application that runs under mobile operating system
s, such as Android, iOS, or MeeGo
:
A project to port Rockbox to run as an application under a full-fledged operating system was accepted for Google
's 2010 Summer of Code and completed. Currently, Rockbox runs on Android based players, but integration into Android and conversion to work with touch based devices is ongoing. Subsequently, an anonymous Chinese developer unofficially ported Rockbox to Palm's WebOS.
can be used to create themes for the menu and playback screens. These themes can include backgrounds and other images (such as icons), plus various formats for file names, ID3 tags
, album art, file progress, and time and system information.
Rockbox has essentially been a file-tree based player, to which folders could be dragged and dropped and then navigated by folder structure. However, more recent versions have included a complementary database feature which allows the player to compile information from the files' ID3 tags. The user can then navigate the files regardless of file structure.
, two uncompressed and twelve miscellaneous formats. This makes a conservative total of 30 supported audio formats, although a few of them do not operate in realtime on all platforms. Extensive work has gone into optimizing each codec, with FLAC, Ogg, WMA, APE, TTA, MPC, Wavpack and WMA Pro among the fastest known implementations for those formats.
Together they include over a dozen different PCM
and ADPCM
formats.
, SID
, NSF
, SAP
, SPC
, AY, GBS
, HES, KSS, SGC, VGM, and VGZ. The MOD
tracker format, and the Yamaha SMAF
are also now supported.
Some profiles in Monkey's Audio are not real time on all targets due to very high CPU needs. Also, Rockbox will not play files with a digital rights management
(DRM) scheme.
modules.
Available plug-ins include:
, letting it run on platforms without a memory management unit
) and single process
. Thin threads
run cooperatively
, returning control to a scheduler
that prioritizes the audio thread; the only form of preemption
is through interrupt
s. The operating system and plug-ins are written in C
, with assembly
used for code that is device- and platform-specific, and performance sensitive. The simple and lightweight architecture allows Rockbox to run on a variety of targets, with memory ranging from 1 to 64 MB, and CPU speeds ranging 12 to 532 MHz. Rockbox also provides support for multicore and asymmetric multiprocessor
systems based on ARM
, ColdFire
, MIPS
and SH
. Several codecs can be parallelized across 2 CPU cores for increased power efficiency, and the HWCODEC interface allows for dedicated audio decoder DSPs.
, Mac OS X
, and Microsoft Windows
, built using Nokia
Qt platform, that is used to install and manage Rockbox on DAPs. Rockbox Utility allows downloading and installing Rockbox, and many of plug-ins and extras, directly onto a DAP automatically, unlike the traditional method of installing which requires downloading the correct files and installing them onto the DAP manually. The automated method of installing that Rockbox Utility uses is less flexible than manual methods of installing; it does not allow installing custom themes and plug-ins. The most recent version of Rockbox Utility is version 1.2.11, released November 6, 2011.
The following should be considered to be a list of devices that at least substantially work (listed as "Supported" or "Usable" on the Rockbox wiki Device Chart). See the Rockbox Target Status for details.
High density micro SDHC memory cards can be read by Rockbox in the c200, e200 series, Sansa Fuze (v1 & v2) and Clip+.
Firmware
In electronic systems and computing, firmware is a term often used to denote the fixed, usually rather small, programs and/or data structures that internally control various electronic devices...
in various forms of digital audio players (DAPs). It offers an alternative to the player's operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, in many cases without removing the original firmware, which provides a plug-in architecture for adding various enhancements and functions. Enhancements include personal digital assistant
Personal digital assistant
A personal digital assistant , also known as a palmtop computer, or personal data assistant, is a mobile device that functions as a personal information manager. Current PDAs often have the ability to connect to the Internet...
(PDA) functions, applications, utilities, and games. Rockbox can also retrofit
Retrofit
Retrofitting refers to the addition of new technology or features to older systems.* power plant retrofit, improving power plant efficiency / increasing output / reducing emissions...
video playback functions on players first released in mid-2000. Rockbox includes a voice-driven user-interface suitable for operation by blind
Blindness
Blindness is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or neurological factors.Various scales have been developed to describe the extent of vision loss and define blindness...
and visually impaired
Visual impairment
Visual impairment is vision loss to such a degree as to qualify as an additional support need through a significant limitation of visual capability resulting from either disease, trauma, or congenital or degenerative conditions that cannot be corrected by conventional means, such as refractive...
users.
Rockbox runs on a wide variety of devices with very different hardware abilities: from early Archos
Archos
Archos is a French consumer electronics company that was established in 1988 by Henri Crohas. Archos manufactures portable media players and portable data storage devices. The name is an anagram of Crohas' last name, and it is also Greek for 'master'...
players with 1-bit character cell
Text mode
Text mode is a kind of computer display mode in which the content of the screen is internally represented in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. Typically, the screen consists of a uniform rectangular grid of character cells, each of which contains one of the characters of a...
-based displays, to modern players with high resolution color displays, digital optical audio hardware and advanced recording abilities.
Rockbox is free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
released under the GNU General Public License
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License is the most widely used free software license, originally written by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project....
.
History
The Rockbox project began in late 2001 and was first implemented on the early ArchosArchos
Archos is a French consumer electronics company that was established in 1988 by Henri Crohas. Archos manufactures portable media players and portable data storage devices. The name is an anagram of Crohas' last name, and it is also Greek for 'master'...
series of hard-disk based MP3 players/recorders (including the flash-only model Ondio), because of owner frustration with severe limitations in the manufacturer-supplied user interface and device operations. These devices have relatively weak main central processing unit
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
s (CPU), and instead offload music playback to dedicated hardware MP3 decoding chips (MAS). Rockbox was unable to significantly alter playback abilities. Instead, it offered a greatly improved user interface and added plug-in functions absent in the factory firmware. Rockbox can be permanently flashed into flash memory on the Archos devices, making it a firmware replacement.
Versions of Rockbox have since been produced for more sophisticated devices. These perform audio decoding in software
Computer software
Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....
, allowing Rockbox to potentially support many more music formats than the original firmware, and adding the extensibility and increased functions already present in the Archos ports. Rockbox is run from the hard drive after being started with a custom boot loader, so to upgrade Rockbox, users need only copy the files onto the player's drive and restart the device. Reflashing is only needed when changing the boot loader, and on some platforms is not needed at all.
The first of these ports, beginning in late 2004, was for the ColdFire
Freescale ColdFire
The Freescale ColdFire is a microprocessor that derives from the Motorola 68000 family architecture, manufactured for embedded systems development by Freescale Semiconductor .-Instruction set:...
-powered devices manufactured by iriver
Iriver
iriver is a consumer electronics company headquartered in South Korea and widely known for its digital audio players and other portable media devices....
, focusing on the H1xx series
Iriver H100 series
The iriver H100 series is a series of discontinued portable digital audio players made by iriver company and originally released in October 2003. The models in the H100 series differ mainly in hard drive storage capacity...
of hard drive players (H110/H120/H140). About one year later, a port for the H3xx series
Iriver H300 series
The iriver H300 series includes two hard-disk-based, multi-codec music jukebox players, the iriver H320 and the iriver H340. Each can play music, transfer pictures directly from digital cameras and UMS-compatible devices, such as flash drives , and display digital images on a colour screen...
became functional, offering similar functions.
In late 2005, work began on a port of Rockbox to Apple's iPod portable players. Throughout 2006, Rockbox ports were made available for a variety of iPod models (iPod Photo
IPod photo
The iPod Photo was a portable media player designed and marketed by Apple Inc. It was the top-of-the-line model in Apple's iPod family. It was positioned as a premium higher-end spin-off of the fourth-generation iPod on October 26, 2004...
, iPod Nano
IPod nano
iPod Nano is a digital media player designed and marketed by Apple Inc.. The first generation of iPod Nano was introduced on September 7, 2005 as a replacement for iPod Mini. It uses flash memory for storage. iPod Nano has gone through six models, or generations, since its introduction...
, iPod 4g, iPod Mini
IPod mini
The iPod Mini is a digital audio player designed and marketed by Apple Inc. It was the midrange model in Apple's iPod product line. It was announced on January 6, 2004 and released on February 20 of the same year. A second-generation version was announced on February 23, 2005 and released later...
, and iPod Video), and the Cowon
Cowon
Cowon Systems, Inc. is a South Korean electronics company. Established in 1995, the company's initial focus was software development. In 2000, with the introduction of the CW100, Cowon expanded their business to the portable digital audio player industry....
iAUDIO X5 series. As of February 2007, usable ports are also available for the iriver H10 and Toshiba
Toshiba
is a multinational electronics and electrical equipment corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is a diversified manufacturer and marketer of electrical products, spanning information & communications equipment and systems, Internet-based solutions and services, electronic components and...
Gigabeat
Gigabeat
The Gigabeat is a line of digital audio players by Toshiba.-Gigabeat:The Gigabeat was first called the MobilPhile and later renamed to Gigabeat. It contained a monochrome LCD with blue backlighting, and a 5 GB removable PCMCIA hard drive. Its case was made of aluminum, and battery life is...
F & X series. As of March 5, 2007, a new port for the Cowon iAUDIO M5 became functional. On March 11, 2007, the SanDisk Sansa
SanDisk Sansa
The SanDisk Sansa is a line of 2 to 16 gigabyte flash memory-based digital audio players and portable media players produced by SanDisk.- Sansa Fuze+:...
e200 series became the next addition to the Rockbox lineup. On May 23, 2007, support for the iPod video 80 GB model was added, completing the iPod video lineup. On July 27, 2007, initial support was added for the iPod 1G and 2G. On September 23, 2007, the Sansa c200 series was welcomed into the lineup. On March 18, 2008, the Olympus m:robe 100 became the first new port of 2008, and the iAUDIO M3 joined the lineup days later. Rockbox includes video-support for MPEG playback through the included work-in-progress mpegplayer plug-in.
To date, all Rockbox ports have been accomplished by reverse engineering with little or no manufacturer assistance. As free software, many Rockbox developers and supporters hope to eventually see official manufacturer support for new ports, or at least unofficial assistance in porting Rockbox to new devices. Only a few companies have expressed interest in Rockbox, and none have officially contributed code to the project or included it with their hardware. The Sansa e200v1 port is the first to be started at the request of the hardware manufacturer, who gave the Rockbox team samples of their devices.
Rockbox is continuously developed, with new SVN builds being released after every source change, and stable releases every 4 months for targets deemed sufficiently mature. Additionally builds are often available to developers of unsupported targets, which, while somewhat functional, are typically not ready for general users due to incomplete features or poor stability.
Future
Rockbox is targeted primarily at digital audio players, rather than more powerful general-purpose devices (such as smartphoneSmartphone
A smartphone is a high-end mobile phone built on a mobile computing platform, with more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary feature phone. The first smartphones were devices that mainly combined the functions of a personal digital assistant and a mobile phone or camera...
s and tablet computer
Tablet computer
A tablet computer, or simply tablet, is a complete mobile computer, larger than a mobile phone or personal digital assistant, integrated into a flat touch screen and primarily operated by touching the screen...
s), which have been increasing in popularity since 2010. Some authorities expect the former class of devices to become obsolete in the next few years.
Daniel Stenberg, a founder of the Rockbox project, envisions the project evolving away from a standalone Rockbox operating system to Rockbox as a media player application that runs under mobile operating system
Mobile operating system
A mobile operating system, also known as a mobile OS, mobile software platform or a handheld operating system, is the operating system that controls a mobile device or information appliance—similar in principle to an operating system such as Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux distributions that controls a...
s, such as Android, iOS, or MeeGo
MeeGo
MeeGo is a Linux-based open source mobile operating system project. Primarily targeted at mobile devices and information appliances in the consumer electronics market, MeeGo is designed to act as an operating system for hardware platforms such as netbooks, entry-level desktops, nettops, tablet...
:
A project to port Rockbox to run as an application under a full-fledged operating system was accepted for Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
's 2010 Summer of Code and completed. Currently, Rockbox runs on Android based players, but integration into Android and conversion to work with touch based devices is ongoing. Subsequently, an anonymous Chinese developer unofficially ported Rockbox to Palm's WebOS.
Customization
Subject to the limitations of each particular platform, the appearance of Rockbox can be customised in various ways. Fonts and foreground and background colours can be added and selected, while a simple markup languageMarkup language
A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts...
can be used to create themes for the menu and playback screens. These themes can include backgrounds and other images (such as icons), plus various formats for file names, ID3 tags
ID3
ID3 is a metadata container most often used in conjunction with the MP3 audio file format. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the file to be stored in the file itself....
, album art, file progress, and time and system information.
Rockbox has essentially been a file-tree based player, to which folders could be dragged and dropped and then navigated by folder structure. However, more recent versions have included a complementary database feature which allows the player to compile information from the files' ID3 tags. The user can then navigate the files regardless of file structure.
Codecs
Rockbox on software decoding platforms (non-Archos) supports playback of eleven lossy codecs (depending on how one counts), five losslessLossless data compression
Lossless data compression is a class of data compression algorithms that allows the exact original data to be reconstructed from the compressed data. The term lossless is in contrast to lossy data compression, which only allows an approximation of the original data to be reconstructed, in exchange...
, two uncompressed and twelve miscellaneous formats. This makes a conservative total of 30 supported audio formats, although a few of them do not operate in realtime on all platforms. Extensive work has gone into optimizing each codec, with FLAC, Ogg, WMA, APE, TTA, MPC, Wavpack and WMA Pro among the fastest known implementations for those formats.
Lossy formats
- MPEG audio layers I-III (MP3/MP2MPEG-1 Audio Layer IIMPEG-1 Audio Layer II or MPEG-2 Audio Layer II is a lossy audio compression format defined by ISO/IEC 11172-3 alongside MPEG-1 Audio Layer I and MPEG-1 Audio Layer III...
/MP1MPEG-1 Audio Layer IMPEG-1 Audio Layer I, commonly abbreviated to MP1, is one of three audio formats included in the MPEG-1 standard. While supported by most media players, the codec is considered largely outdated, and replaced by MP2 or MP3....
) - Ogg VorbisVorbisVorbis is a free software / open source project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation . The project produces an audio format specification and software implementation for lossy audio compression...
- MPEG-4 AACAdvanced Audio CodingAdvanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates....
(-LC/HE/HEv2 profiles) (in MP4MPEG-4 Part 14MPEG-4 Part 14 or MP4 is a multimedia container format standard specified as a part of MPEG-4. It is most commonly used to store digital video and digital audio streams, especially those defined by MPEG, but can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images...
or RMRealMediaRealMedia is a proprietary multimedia container format created by RealNetworks. Its extension is ".rm". It is typically used in conjunction with RealVideo and RealAudio and is used for streaming content over the Internet....
containers) - MusepackMusepackMusepack or MPC is an open source lossy audio codec, specifically optimized for transparent compression of stereo audio at bitrates of 160–180 kbit/s...
- AC3Dolby DigitalDolby Digital is the name for audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. It was originally called Dolby Stereo Digital until 1994. Except for Dolby TrueHD, the audio compression is lossy. The first use of Dolby Digital was to provide digital sound in cinemas from 35mm film prints...
(raw or RMRealMediaRealMedia is a proprietary multimedia container format created by RealNetworks. Its extension is ".rm". It is typically used in conjunction with RealVideo and RealAudio and is used for streaming content over the Internet....
container) - WMA StandardWindows Media AudioWindows Media Audio is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. The name can be used to refer to its audio file format or its audio codecs. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs...
- WMA ProfessionalWindows Media AudioWindows Media Audio is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. The name can be used to refer to its audio file format or its audio codecs. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs...
- SpeexSpeexSpeex is a patent-free audio compression format designed for speech and also a free software speech codec that may be used on VoIP applications and podcasts. It is based on the CELP speech coding algorithm. Speex claims to be free of any patent restrictions and is licensed under the revised BSD...
- CookCook CodecThe cook codec is a lossy audio compression codec developed by RealNetworks. It is also known as Cooker, Gecko, RealAudio G2, and RealAudio 8 low bitrate ....
- ATRAC3
- The lossy portion of WavPackWavPackWavPack is a free, open source lossless audio compression format developed by David Bryant.-Features:WavPack compression can compress 8-, 16-, 24-, and 32-bit fixed-point, and 32-bit floating point audio files in the .WAV file format. It also supports surround sound streams and high frequency...
hybrid files
Lossless formats
- FLAC
- WavPackWavPackWavPack is a free, open source lossless audio compression format developed by David Bryant.-Features:WavPack compression can compress 8-, 16-, 24-, and 32-bit fixed-point, and 32-bit floating point audio files in the .WAV file format. It also supports surround sound streams and high frequency...
- ShortenShortenShorten is a file format used for compressing audio data. It is a form of data compression of files and is used to losslessly compress CD-quality audio files . Shorten is no longer developed and more recent lossless audio codecs such as FLAC, Monkey's Audio , TTA, and WavPack have become more...
- Apple LosslessApple LosslessApple Lossless Apple Lossless Apple Lossless (also known as ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec), or ALE (Apple Lossless Encoder) is an audio codec developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music. After initially being proprietary for many years, in late 2011 Apple open sourced...
- Monkey's AudioMonkey's AudioMonkey's Audio is a file format for audio data compression. Being a lossless format, Monkey's Audio does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as AAC, MP3, Vorbis and Musepack....
- TTATTA (codec)True Audio is a free software, real-time lossless audio codec, based on adaptive prognostic filters.Also, .tta is the generic extension to filenames of audio files created by True Audio codec.- Codec overview :...
Uncompressed formats
- Intel-style WAVWAVWaveform Audio File Format , is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs...
- Apple AIFF
Together they include over a dozen different PCM
Pulse-code modulation
Pulse-code modulation is a method used to digitally represent sampled analog signals. It is the standard form for digital audio in computers and various Blu-ray, Compact Disc and DVD formats, as well as other uses such as digital telephone systems...
and ADPCM
Adaptive DPCM
Adaptive differential pulse-code modulation is a variant of differential pulse-code modulation that varies the size of the quantization step, to allow further reduction of the required bandwidth for a given signal-to-noise ratio....
formats.
Miscellaneous formats
In addition, there are playback of game audio types ADXADX (file format)
ADX is a lossy proprietary audio storage and compression format developed by CRI Middleware specifically for use in video games, it is derived from ADPCM. Its most notable feature is a looping function that has proved useful for background music in various games that have adopted the format,...
, SID
MOS Technology SID
The MOS Technology 6581/8580 SID is the built-in Programmable Sound Generator chip of Commodore's CBM-II, Commodore 64, Commodore 128 and Commodore MAX Machine home computers...
, NSF
NES Sound Format
NSF is the DOS 8.3 filename Filename extension of the audio file format originally designated as NESM by the inventor Kevin Horton. This format was originally designed for playback in a custom hardware device named HardNES by the inventor...
, SAP
Atari SAP music format
Atari SAP music format is a format that stores music data from Atari 8-bit computers that uses the famous Atari POKEY sound chip.Most popular tunes for Atari 8 bits were written between 1981-1987....
, SPC
SPC700 sound format
An SPC700 sound file is a video game music file consisting of scores and music data from RAM used by the SPC700 sound chip on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System or Super Famicom...
, AY, GBS
Game Boy Sound System
The Game Boy Sound System for the Game Boy is akin to the sound system of the Nintendo Entertainment System , the difference being that GBS has a higher pitch than NES sound format...
, HES, KSS, SGC, VGM, and VGZ. The MOD
MOD (file format)
MOD is a computer file format used primarily to represent music, and was the first module file format. MOD files use the “.MOD” file extension, except on the Amiga where the original trackers instead use a “mod.” prefix scheme, e.g. “mod.echoing”...
tracker format, and the Yamaha SMAF
Synthetic Music Mobile Application Format
Synthetic-music mobile application format, abbreviated SMAF, is a music data format specified by Yamaha for portable electronic devices, such as cell phones and PDAs. The file extension for SMAF is .MMF and is common as ringtones for mobile phones with one of five sound chips.SMAF resembles MIDI,...
are also now supported.
Some profiles in Monkey's Audio are not real time on all targets due to very high CPU needs. Also, Rockbox will not play files with a digital rights management
Digital rights management
Digital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...
(DRM) scheme.
Rockbox features
Beside the ability of playing and recording audio files, Rockbox offers many playback enhancements that other firmware packages may not have implemented yet. Listed below are a handful of these features.- Gapless playbackGapless playbackGapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks without intervening silence or clicks at the point of the track change. Gapless playback is common with compact discs, gramophone records, or tapes, but is not always available with other formats that employ compressed...
- Crossfading
- ReplayGain
- 5 band fully parametric equalizerEqualization (audio)Equalization is the process commonly used in sound recording and reproduction to alter the frequency response of an audio system using linear filters. Most hi-fi equipment uses relatively simple filters to make bass and treble adjustments. Graphic and parametric equalizers have much more...
- Variable speed decoding with pitch correction
- CrossfeedCrossfeedCrossfeed is the process of blending the left and right channels of a stereo audio recording. It is generally used to reduce the extreme channel separation often featured in early stereo recordings , or to make audio played through headphones sound more natural, as when listening to a pair of...
- OTF ("on the fly") playlists
- True random shuffle (fresh randomly shuffled list every time)
- Custom UI themesTheme (computing)In computing, a theme is a preset package containing graphical appearance details, used to customize the look and feel of an operating system, widget set or window manager....
- Dynamic Playlists (queue files to play next, or in other parts of a dynamic playlist)
- Stereo voice/MIC & FM radio recording to WAV/AIFF/WavPack (lossless) and MP3 (limited model/device/target support)
- FM radioFM broadcastingFM broadcasting is a broadcasting technology pioneered by Edwin Howard Armstrong which uses frequency modulation to provide high-fidelity sound over broadcast radio. The term "FM band" describes the "frequency band in which FM is used for broadcasting"...
, including FM recording (limited model/device/target support) - Remote control (supporting devices)
- Digital S/PDIFS/PDIFS/PDIF is a digital audio interconnect used in consumer audio equipment over relatively short distances. The signal is transmitted over either a coaxial cable with RCA connectors or a fiber optic cable with TOSLINK connectors. S/PDIF interconnects components in home theaters and other digital high...
input/output (supporting devices) - Last.fmLast.fmLast.fm is a music website, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It has claimed 30 million active users in March 2009. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for UK£140m ....
support (even on players lacking RTCReal-time clockA real-time clock is a computer clock that keeps track of the current time. Although the term often refers to the devices in personal computers, servers and embedded systems, RTCs are present in almost any electronic device which needs to keep accurate time.-Terminology:The term is used to avoid...
) - Cue sheet support
- Changeable selector bar
- Album art
- Sleep timer
Plug-ins
Rockbox developers can create plug-ins, which provide the user with other enhancements that may not be available on various firmwareFirmware
In electronic systems and computing, firmware is a term often used to denote the fixed, usually rather small, programs and/or data structures that internally control various electronic devices...
modules.
Available plug-ins include:
- JPEGJPEGIn computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....
viewer (16 bit color/129 shade greyscale) - Rockboy Game BoyGame BoyThe , is an 8-bit handheld video game device developed and manufactured by Nintendo. It was released in Japan on , in North America in , and in Europe on...
emulator (port of Gnuboy) - ZXBox ZX SpectrumZX SpectrumThe ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd...
emulator (port of Spectemu) - Doom (port of the PrBoom engine)
- WAV to MP3 encoder
- WAV to WavPack encoder
- MPEG video player
- PictureFlow, an album art viewer similar to Apple's Cover Flow
- Various games including sudokuSudokuis a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 sub-grids that compose the grid contains all of the digits from 1 to 9...
, solitaireSolitaireSolitaire is any tabletop game which one can play by oneself or with other people. The solitaire card game Klondike is often known as simply Solitaire....
, chess, minesweeper, pong and many others (see http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/PluginIndex for an official list of plug-ins) - Musical Instrument Digital InterfaceMusical Instrument Digital InterfaceMIDI is an industry-standard protocol, first defined in 1982 by Gordon Hall, that enables electronic musical instruments , computers and other electronic equipment to communicate and synchronize with each other...
(MIDI) player, real-time on some targets. Needs external instrument set, available on Rockbox page.
Architecture
Rockbox uses a simple kernel, with a flat memory modelFlat memory model
Flat memory model or linear memory model refers to a memory addressing paradigm in low-level software design such that the CPU can directly address all of the available memory locations without having to resort to any sort of memory segmentation or paging schemes.Memory management and...
, letting it run on platforms without a memory management unit
Memory management unit
A memory management unit , sometimes called paged memory management unit , is a computer hardware component responsible for handling accesses to memory requested by the CPU...
) and single process
Process (computing)
In computing, a process is an instance of a computer program that is being executed. It contains the program code and its current activity. Depending on the operating system , a process may be made up of multiple threads of execution that execute instructions concurrently.A computer program is a...
. Thin threads
Thread (computer science)
In computer science, a thread of execution is the smallest unit of processing that can be scheduled by an operating system. The implementation of threads and processes differs from one operating system to another, but in most cases, a thread is contained inside a process...
run cooperatively
Computer multitasking
In computing, multitasking is a method where multiple tasks, also known as processes, share common processing resources such as a CPU. In the case of a computer with a single CPU, only one task is said to be running at any point in time, meaning that the CPU is actively executing instructions for...
, returning control to a scheduler
Scheduling (computing)
In computer science, a scheduling is the method by which threads, processes or data flows are given access to system resources . This is usually done to load balance a system effectively or achieve a target quality of service...
that prioritizes the audio thread; the only form of preemption
Preemption (computing)
In computing, preemption is the act of temporarily interrupting a task being carried out by a computer system, without requiring its cooperation, and with the intention of resuming the task at a later time. Such a change is known as a context switch...
is through interrupt
Interrupt
In computing, an interrupt is an asynchronous signal indicating the need for attention or a synchronous event in software indicating the need for a change in execution....
s. The operating system and plug-ins are written in C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
, with assembly
Assembly language
An assembly language is a low-level programming language for computers, microprocessors, microcontrollers, and other programmable devices. It implements a symbolic representation of the machine codes and other constants needed to program a given CPU architecture...
used for code that is device- and platform-specific, and performance sensitive. The simple and lightweight architecture allows Rockbox to run on a variety of targets, with memory ranging from 1 to 64 MB, and CPU speeds ranging 12 to 532 MHz. Rockbox also provides support for multicore and asymmetric multiprocessor
Asymmetric multiprocessing
Asymmetric multiprocessing, or AMP, was a software stopgap for handling multiple CPUs before symmetric multiprocessing, or SMP, was available.Multiprocessing is the use of more than one CPU in a computer system...
systems based on ARM
ARM architecture
ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by ARM Holdings. It was named the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that, the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in numbers produced...
, ColdFire
Freescale ColdFire
The Freescale ColdFire is a microprocessor that derives from the Motorola 68000 family architecture, manufactured for embedded systems development by Freescale Semiconductor .-Instruction set:...
, MIPS
MIPS architecture
MIPS is a reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by MIPS Technologies . The early MIPS architectures were 32-bit, and later versions were 64-bit...
and SH
SuperH
SuperH is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by Hitachi. It is implemented by microcontrollers and microprocessors for embedded systems....
. Several codecs can be parallelized across 2 CPU cores for increased power efficiency, and the HWCODEC interface allows for dedicated audio decoder DSPs.
Rockbox utility
The Rockbox Utility is a free computer application, available for LinuxLinux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
, Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
, and Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
, built using Nokia
Nokia
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational communications corporation that is headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Finland's capital Helsinki...
Qt platform, that is used to install and manage Rockbox on DAPs. Rockbox Utility allows downloading and installing Rockbox, and many of plug-ins and extras, directly onto a DAP automatically, unlike the traditional method of installing which requires downloading the correct files and installing them onto the DAP manually. The automated method of installing that Rockbox Utility uses is less flexible than manual methods of installing; it does not allow installing custom themes and plug-ins. The most recent version of Rockbox Utility is version 1.2.11, released November 6, 2011.
Supported devices
Apple
- iPod 1st generation
- iPod 2nd generation
- iPod 3rd generation, FireWire only
- iPod 4th generation, grayscale
- iPod 4th generation, color/photo
- iPod 5th and 5.5 generation, video
- iPod Mini 1st generation
- iPod Mini 2nd generation
- iPod Nano 1st generation
- iPod Nano 2nd generation
Archos
- Archos Jukebox seriesArchos Jukebox seriesA series of Archos portable audio players from 2000 through 2002.-Jukebox Multimedia:The Jukebox Multimedia is Archos's first multimedia player and considered the first ever portable media player . It enabled users to record straight from a camera attachment...
:- Jukebox 6000
- Jukebox Player/Studio
- Jukebox Recorder
- FM Recorder
- Recorder v2
- Ondio FM
- Ondio SP
Cowon
- X5 and X5L
- X5V
- M5, M5L
- M3, M3L
- D2
iRiver
- H10 seriesIriver H10 seriesThe iriver H10 is a series of portable digital audio players made by iriver, coming in multiple capacities and sizes. The series uses the PortalPlayer 5020 CPU. Every version of the series has a color screen....
: H10 5, 6, 20 GB - H100 seriesIriver H100 seriesThe iriver H100 series is a series of discontinued portable digital audio players made by iriver company and originally released in October 2003. The models in the H100 series differ mainly in hard drive storage capacity...
: H100/H110/H115/H120/H140, aka iHP-100/110/115/120/140 - H300 seriesIriver H300 seriesThe iriver H300 series includes two hard-disk-based, multi-codec music jukebox players, the iriver H320 and the iriver H340. Each can play music, transfer pictures directly from digital cameras and UMS-compatible devices, such as flash drives , and display digital images on a colour screen...
: H320/H340
SanDisk
- Sansa e200 seriesSansa e200 seriesThe Sansa e200 series is a portable media player developed by SanDisk, and released on January 5, 2006. The device is available in four capacities of Flash memory: 2 GB , 4 GB , 6 GB , and 8 GB . All players have a 1.8-inch, TFT LCD display with a resolution of 176 by 220 pixels...
– v1 and v2/AMS - Sansa e200r series
- Sansa c200 SeriesSansa c200 SeriesThe Sansa c200 series is a line of portable media players developed by Sandisk. The line consists of two models: the c240, 1 GB, the c250, 2 GB. Both models feature a micro SD card slot, a 1.4 inch LCD display, a built-in microphone, and an FM radio...
– v1 is stable, v2/AMS is unstable - Sansa FuzeSansa FuzeThe Sansa Fuze is a portable media player developed by SanDisk, and released on March 8, 2008. The Fuze is available in three different Flash memory capacities: 2 GB, 4 GB, and 8 GB. It comes in five different colors, black, silver, red, pink, and blue. Storage is expandable via a...
– v1 and v2 - Sansa Clip/Clip+
High density micro SDHC memory cards can be read by Rockbox in the c200, e200 series, Sansa Fuze (v1 & v2) and Clip+.
Toshiba
- Gigabeat F series: F10/F11/F20/F21/F30/F31/F40/F41/F60
- Gigabeat X series
- Gigabeat S series, standard build works, needs a few external steps
External links
- FLOSS WeeklyFLOSS WeeklyFLOSS Weekly is a free software / open source themed podcast from the TWiT Network. The show premiered on April 7, 2006, and features prominent guests from the free software/open source community. It was originally hosted by Leo Laporte; his cohost for the first seventeen episodes was Chris DiBona...
– 43: Rockbox TWiT.tv (network)TWiT.tv (network)The TWiT Netcast Network, which is the operating trade name of TWiT LLC, is a podcast network run by technology broadcaster and author Leo Laporte. The network began operation in April 2005 with the launch of This Week in Tech. Security Now was the second podcast on the network, debuting in...
podcast with Paul Louden of Rockbox