IT Politics, Rockbox, Technology

Rockbox 3.1

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After three months of work since the last release, we manage to keep the schedule and ship Rockbox 3.1. The list of news since 3.0 include the following:

  • A bitmap scaler was added to Rockbox, which means that album art no longer has to be pre-scaled to the correct dimensions on your computer. See AlbumArt for more information.
  • The calendar plugin which has existed for the Archos units for a long time is now available on all devices equipped with a clock.
  • The spacerocks plugin which was removed from version 3.0 due to a major bug has been brought back.
  • Optimised MP3 decoder on dual-core targets, giving several more hours of battery life in most situations.
  • Optimizations for AAC and APE decoding
  • Backlight fading is now available on most targets.
  • When recording in mono, you can now chose between recording the left or right channel, or a mix of both.
  • It is now possible to configure which items are shown in the Quick Screen.
  • Several new features were added to the WPS syntax
  • The build system received a major overhaul. This only matters for people who compile their own builds.

Of course you can find a more detailed list in the MajorChanges wiki page, and the full release notes for 3.1.

My personal contribution has been very tiny this time around and I’ve basically just built the release builds and admined the distributed build system somewhat.

Rockbox

2 thoughts on “Rockbox 3.1”

  1. Is development of ROCKbox for other products/models a matter of knowledge/volunteers or is it resource/compensation? I would be willing to contribute up to a third of my player value if a port was available. I’ve used ROCKbox and have followed for over a year. LOVE IT! With so many diverse fans, I can’t believe a single company hasn’t jumped on board to hire the developers or at least make a product with 100% support and cooperation. Just boggles the mind.

  2. To get Rockbox ported to a new model, it takes a lot of time by a team of dedicated developers that have (own) that model. It then also varies a lot depending on how much reverse engineering, decryption and other research that has to be done to understand the inner workings of the device, as these days complete documentation to the entire thing simply just never happens.

    The question is always a matter how large portion of it that will remain undocumented where reverse engineering is the only way for us to figure how things work.

    So to get a port done to a particular device, the best thing is to get a lot of (hopefully skilled) people interested in the idea of getting Rockbox ported to it.

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