CD Freaks interviews open source Rockbox custom PMP firmware team

June 8, 2006

News Editor
Rui Marinho, known also as nOBeLium on our forums, has taken time from his busy student schedule to speak with the crew behind Rockbox. In case you don't know, this is a very dedicated group that are striving to add increased functionality to a variety of popular personal multimedia players, by creating custom firmwares for certain devices.

Just like Liggy & Dee make custom firmwares for NEC optical disc writers, in order to add more functionality to these drives, the crew at Rockbox (who enjoy a large and enthusiastic community as well) are attempting the same thing, with some very commendable successes! Below, we can read a listing of some of the players that are supported by the Rockbox team.

Rockbox is an open source replacement firmware for MP3 players and it runs on a variety of models:

Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2, Ondio FM and Ondio SP
iRiver: H100 and H300 series
Apple: iPod 4th gen (grayscale and color), 5th gen (Video), Nano and Mini 1st/2nd gen
iAudio: X5 (including X5V and X5L).
Additional models are in development.

The Rockbox community
considers these points as the key-features of Rockbox:

Support for MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AC3, AAC, Musepack, Midi , AIFF, ALAC, FLAC, Shorten, WAV, and Wavpack Sound Codecs (On Archos, only MP2/MP3 playback is possible because they do the decoding in hardware. One exception is WAV, which is already supported via a plugin and will hopefully be integrated into the playback engine before Rockbox v3.1).
Gapless Playback.
5 Band Parametric Equalizer (except on Archos - however, Rockbox offers all the advanced audio settings provided by the chip, unlike Archos).
High Resolution Volume Control, 82 levels (Note: The number of volume levels varies with target).
Abilty to create your own theme or use one of these.
Crossfade, Crossfeed, and Replay Gain (except on Archos).
Picture and text viewing
Calendar
Doom
Real Time Clock on the player's that have the necessary hardware
Tag Database
Unicode Support
On The Fly Playlists
Voice Interface, and Multilingual Interface
Many Plugins and Games to enhance Rockbox even further.
Open Source, so Rockbox is constantly improved.

If you have one of these players and you would like to learn more about Rockbox, then follow this link to the article. In addition, within the article you will find an interview with one of the Rockbox project founders '“ Daniel Stenberg (Bagder on Rockbox community), that gives us some good insight into the team, such as what brought them together, plus what they have achieved thus far and what they expect to accomplish in the future.

As always, feel free to leave any comments or questions either here or at the conclusion of the article. Thanks Rui, for giving us a chance to learn more about this open source project and the people that are supporting it. Also, a big thanks to Rockbox for helping us learn more about the project!

Source: CD Freaks