Category Archives: Rockbox

http://www.rockbox.org/ is a portable music player software/firmware

Rockbox

Rockbox on the vision:m

4 Comments

Creative Zen Vision:MMaurus Cuelenaere has been doing some great progress recently and is now capable of running custom code on the Creative Zen Vision:M target.

The work is now in full progress to make the Rockbox bootloader actually run on it. The LCD seems to work and buttons are in the works…

If you haven’t joined before, now’s a perfect opportunity to dig up that old Creative’s of yours and join the Rockbox bandwagon as it starts to roll on yet another target!

It is a TMS320DM320 target, and all the hw info you need is here.

Rockbox

Two good ones is better than one half-baked

Rockbox tinyGiven the debate going on about where we should possibly have the “universal devcon 2008”, where lots of euro people have expressed their not wanting to go to the US for economy reasons and/or for privacy reasons, and a fair amount of US people have expressed concerns about the air fares for flying to Europe, I think I’m currently favoring this approach:

Separate devcons this year again

We arrange a European devcon somewhere in central Europe, quite possibly Berlin Germany or Brussels Belgium since it seems we have a few volunteers in those areas and they seem to be good enough “hubs” for Europeans in general.

If the US devcon is setup a suitable period (like two months or so) after the Euro one, it will be good for two reasons:

  1. it has a greater chance to build and work on things already discussed in the Euro devcon
  2. it may give some people the chance to attend to both, or either one that fits the best

Of course we could also do it vice versa with the US one before the Euro one.

Personally, I’m hoping I can get a chance to go to both but it’s really just my hope for now and nothing is sure by far yet. Oh, and of course I’ll then prefer a US devcon on the east coast but quite possibly that doesn’t make sense when it is setup to cater for the US Rockbox hackers primarily.

Rockbox

Rockbox International Devcon 2008

Rockbox devcon logo

(I dug up the old “devcon 2006” logo and I like it so much I thought I could use it again!)

I’d like to suggest that we set a date and place for the Rockbox International Devcon 2008 soon so that we all can start planning for it properly.

Personally, I would claim that having it near an international flight hub is a good idea (why Stockholm Sweden is ruled out this time), and since the dollar is dirt cheap now it is probably a good idea for both US-citizens and non-US citizens to have it in the US.

Within the US, I would suggest that the east coast and New York is among the best choices due to it being a frequent and often cheap destination from several places in Europe.

But of course, this requires that we have a volunteering person or preferably more than one person in that region who can hunt a suitable place and do some basic arranging for this kind of event. Any takers?

And if not New York, is there any other friends near an international flight hub that think they could work as “host” for devcon2008?

I would also suggest that we pick a date in the latter half of June. Around the weekends 21-22 or 28-29.

What do you think?

Please take answers/responses to the Rockbox forums.

Linux, Rockbox

File Based Music Players Going Extinct?

3 Comments

Ok, I have a range of various hardware players that run Rockbox that can play all the music I have in my stored collection. But when I’m in front of my Linux box I prefer using the computer to play the music,my 4 rockbox targets not only because then I can select from all my music (that don’t fit on most of my players) and I have quick and easy access to changing the volume or skipping to the next song etc.

Here’s the thing: I use xmms for this (and I want to mention explictly that I don’t mean xmms2). I know this will make most of you reading this go what? and then suggest a billion other players. I know xmms is pretty much abandoned developer-wise and it doesn’t do gapless playback and has all sort of other drawbacks (including the silly winamp-mimicing GUI). I’ve seen that it’s even been discussed to get dumped from the debian packages (although people similar-minded to me spoke up and prevented this).

xmms screenshotI want a simple player with a GUI that can play songs from a mere directory. I want to point out a root dir and it could play all songs in there recursively. I’ve tried several different players over time, but I always go back to this simple xmms one simply for the reason that all the new and fancy players seem to be so focused on getting the music into a database and then arranging and viewing it all based on their tags and what not. I really really don’t want no database or anything, I just want my player to play everything in the dir I ask it to. And I want it to be available in a debian package preferably.

Any recommendations?

Rockbox

Rockbox Downloads Jan 2008

It’s time again for a check and analysis of the download trends of the build.rockbox.org web site, with comparisons with how things were at my previous count from October 2007.

Rockbox!

During this month, 112034 downloads were counted, which is almost a 10% increase since october’s 102127 – and as you’ll see below almost the entire increase was basically due to a boosted interest in the Sansa E200. There’s been no new port offered for download during this time, there are still 26 packages. The downloads were distributed as follows (the position changes are within () and the previous period’s download counts are within []):

  1. (+1) sansae200 27325 [18788]
  2. (-1) ipodvideo 21453 [20721]
  3. (+1) ipodvideo64mb 13904 [12780]
  4. (-1) ipodnano 13419 [13228]
  5. (+7) sansac200 3490 [2841]
  6. (-) gigabeatf 3410 [3522]
  7. (+1) ipodcolor 3316 [3287]
  8. (-3) h300 3306 [3614]
  9. (+2) ipod4gray 3249 [2896]
  10. (-1) ipodmini2g 3087 [3083]
  11. (-4) iaudiox5 2933 [3340]
  12. (-2) h120 2521 [2924]
  13. (+1) ipod3g 1993 [1624]
  14. (-1) ipodmini1g 1713 [1647]
  15. (+1) h10_5gb 1458 [1524]
  16. (-1) h10 1413 [1624]
  17. (-) ipod1g2g 1246 [1384]
  18. (-) player 730 [834]
  19. (-) recorder 558 [692]
  20. (-) iaudiom5 380 [422]
  21. (+1) h100 328 [345]
  22. (-1) recorder8mb 292 [354]
  23. (+1) fmrecorder 189 [222]
  24. (-1) recorderv2 175 [222]
  25. (-) ondiofm 96 [113]
  26. (-) ondiosp 50 [96]

Of course, if we count the two different ipod video builds combined, it alone is 35357 downloads (31.6%)! Apart from the E200 climb, I think the only significant change in the table above is the other SanDisk player in the selection, the Sansa C200 series which climed 7 positions due to its 23% download increase.

The top-5 downloads are all portalplayer based, and here’s a more complete look at how the builds are split up on main architectures (october’s shares within parentheses):

  1. portalplayer 97066 downloads 86.6% (83.6%)
  2. coldfire 9468 downloads 8.45% (10.4%)
  3. samsung 3410 downloads 3.0% (3.4%)
  4. sh1 2533 downloads 1.9% (2.5%)

The harddrive based builds are still more popular, but the flash ones are gaining:

  1. HDD models 67654 downloads 60.4% (65.7%)
  2. flash models 44380 downloads 39.6% (34.5%)

The top-8 downloads are for targets featuring color LCDs, and thy certainly are popular when checking download spread on target LCD types:

  1. Color 92494 downloads (82.6%)
  2. Greyscale 17450 downloads (15.6%)
  3. Monocrome 1360 downloads (1.2%)
  4. Charcell 730 downloads (0.7%)

Like last time, this doesn’t include any custom builds, builds from download.rockbox.org nor release builds from www.rockbox.org. Take all this as indications, not absolute facts.

cURL and libcurl, Rockbox

When Worlds Collide

SanDisk Sansa ConnectReaders of my blog or my site or almost whatever on the internet where my name would appear should know that two of my primary open source involvements are in the curl and the Rockbox projects.

Therefore I felt great pleasure yesterday when both of these worlds collided!

While investigating the internals of the SanDisk Sansa Connect mp3 player for the Rockbox project, fellow Robert Keevil discovered that it actually includes… libcurl! (actually, he discovered this before but I only realized it yesterday)

Of course I updated the companies that use curl page with this news…

Rockbox

What Can I do for Rockbox when not Programming?

1 Comment

As in every open source project, people who don’t program but who use and like Rockbox a lot tend to think and sometimes utter the words “I can’t code so I can’t help” when talking about what they can do for the project. But there are of course still endless amount of things we need help with. For example

Rockbox tinyFile good bug reports for bugs. Make an effort to really double-check the details, write up repeat recipes, try to repeat others’ reported bugs, fill in more details on the sparsely reported ones. Tell us when you can’t repeat already reported ones. We have so many bug reports and new ones come at a very high pace, that we need all the help we can get with sorting them out. Killing the bad ones as early as possible and getting the rest as detailed and accurate as possible.

Rockbox tinyHelp out with the manual. The manual covers a lot of functionality for a wide range of targets, and we constantly find bugs and missing stuff in the manual that you can help us out to both find and correct. The manual is what we constantly point newbies to and it needs to remain accurate and well phrased.

Rockbox tinyHelp out with the “support”. People pop in on the IRC channel all the time, we have >14,000 registered users in the forums, we have almost 1,000 subscribers on the mailing lists. You can help out by responding to questions, offer advice etc.

Rockbox tinyDonate money. As blunt as it sounds, we need money at times. The money we receive by donations are primarily used for buying new and more hardware to developers, but we’ve also used it for developer-related activities such as pizza at devcon!

Rockbox tinyDonate server resources and bandwidth. Our sophisticated build-on-commit system requires a fair amount of speedy and available (Linux) servers that can rebuild Rockbox on demand from the build master server. We can always use a few more of these, and we only need 2GHz+ machines with a few gigabyte of storage to spare and a reasonable bandwidth.

Rockbox tinyHelp test patches. We get a lot of patches, and learning how to build your own build and apply your own set of patches is quite easily done and really takes just a little effort. In fact, very often people also post binaries and make pre-built patched Rockbox packages available so many patches can even be tested without having to build anything on your own!

So as you see there’s no reason to be shy any more. Step forward and help us improve!

Rockbox

The Agony of Release

2 Comments

In the Rockbox project we haven’t had an official release in several years. We have >400K lines of code, some 60 committers. Some 300 patch contributors. At least 10,000 users, but probably up to 10-20 times that number.

We produce binary downloads after every single commit. We provide daily builds with a 30 day backlog. We provide a UI-based installer that can install the latest package for you.

So, we have a fair setup that provides releases in a fine way to everone interested. What we don’t have is a stable offer. Nobody can get a recent “stable” release (with a set of known bugs) or similar. We only have this endless series of “beta”-releases. We don’t have any particular push for doing a “real” release and among the developers there aren’t that many who think making releases is any fun, so we’re not really striving towards that.

The last time we tried to put together a release (to be called “3.0”) we decided to have a feature freeze period in which we’d only commit bug fixes and not do any new features. This lead to that most people simply stopped committing and developed their new stuff on the side, waiting for the freeze to go over. Only a few people did any actual bugfixing while we had some pretty serious flaws still in the code, so even with extended freezes we just couldn’t get the bug count down to a satisfiable level… we ended up just dumping the idea of a release 3.0 at that time, and it left some scars in the community that has so far prevented us from returning to this topic.

Rockbox

This said, today we’re more than 18 months further down the road, Rockbox runs on many more platforms, lots of code has changed and been improved since the previous 3.0 effort. Maybe it is time to once again make a release-attempt?

I think there are a few preconditions we need for this to succeed, including:

  • We need a single release manager person who single-handedly can decide when the release is finished. This person would also have the final say on the outstanding-issues list etc. We can’t manage to get consensus among this large amount of people for this black-and-white style of questions.
  • We need to accept that fact that some bugs just have to be in the release and we can live with them – after all most of these sorts of bugs have been with us for a very long time already and all of us have managed to live and use Rockbox fine for years in spite of their presence.
  • We need to accept and realize that most of “us” – the devs, the closest team of followers, will not use the release anyway as the day after the release we will provide a new set of spanking fresh binaries to download and use… We don’t do the release for us. We do the release to the huge audience out there who look for “stable” and “known to work” stuff.
  • Less people need to worry and have strong opinions about exactly what goes into the release or not. If we just get one release out, there will follow more further on that will get the stuff that is left out in this!

I am officially not volunteering to be a release manager! 😉

Rockbox

Sansa View Info

So we know a bit more about the Sansa View’s internals now!Sansa View

It is based on a PP-derivate, possibly called PP61x0 something.

It has a “disk” (NAND flash) layout quite similar to the Sansa E200 in that it has a “hidden” second partition in which the bootloader, firmware image and more are stored – in just about the same format as the Sansa E200 has its images. See my separate Sansa View page for more details.

And announced on CES going on right now, and also now mentioned on their official site, it is also available in a 32GB version.