Marc Guay has been doing great progress on the SanDisk Sansa C100 port of Rockbox lately, and today he showed-off some recent proofs of the state of affairs with this early and crude screen shot:
Category Archives: Rockbox
http://www.rockbox.org/ is a portable music player software/firmware
Countdown to Rockbox Euro Devcon 2008
Here’s a very useful page I hacked up for all you people going to the Rockbox Euro Devcon 2008. It should help you keep control of the time and the excitement!
Rockbox on lugradio e19s5
In the most recent Lugradio podcast Episode 19 Season 5 at roughly 1h30 into the show, we got to hear a user’s write-in explain to the hosts about the benefits of using Rockbox on your ipods. Although the hosts aren’t very impressed… They also later on mention that they did get “a lot of mail about Rockbox” so obviously it is getting quite known out there.
Rockbox on Sansa m200 v1
Robert Menes uploaded some photos of an early Rockbox port running on his SanDisk Sansa m240 (v1), and this much thanks to Dave Chapman’s early work. This port still lacks NAND driver and various important things so you still need tcctool to get code onto the target, but at least there’s evidence of progress now!
Rockbox downloads April 2008
I counted the Rockbox downloads from build.rockbox.org during April 2008, and while the results weren’t very different from the past results, I thought I’d still show them. This month, 99874 downloads were counted and we had 30 different packages downloaded. Back in January, we still only had 26 versions. The top-5 are identical to the last list.
The most popular newcomer since my last count is the Olympus Mrobe 100 which has more than twice the number of downloads compared to the second newcomer iAudio m3.
The list shows model and number of downloads. The newcomers since the last count are shown bold.
- sansae200 22038
- ipodvideo 18289
- ipodvideo64mb 12392
- ipodnano 12261
- sansac200 4176
- h300 3071
- ipodcolor 2932
- ipodmini2g 2875
- gigabeatf 2848
- ipod4gray 2651
- h120 2506
- iaudiox5 2498
- ipod3g 1717
- ipodmini1g 1496
- ipod1g2g 1411
- h10 1361
- h10_5gb 1268
- mrobe100 1116
- player 564
- iaudiom3 528
- recorder 500
- iaudiom5 284
- h100 275
- recorder8mb 233
- recorderv2 157
- cowond2 138
- fmrecorder 116
- ondiofm 108
- ondiosp 58
- mrobe500 7
Sansa v2 baby steps taken
Dave Chapman just told us that he’s managed to upgrade his SanDisk Sansa Clip to run a customized firmware, which proves that we know the file format good enough. His proof of concept simply did a 5 second delay, but now we should be a pretty big step forwards on the way towards getting Rockbox to the Sansa v2 models.
More fresh Rockbox targets
I’ve not mentioned anything about developments on new Rockbox targets lately, so I thought I’d do a little run-down of the targets that seem to have momentum right now:
Toshiba Gigabeat S – quite similar to the Zune hw-wise but not entirely. This already runs Rockbox pretty good and even has music playback. Still not offered for download and treated as “supported” since there’s currently no user-friendly installer method, especially on Windows. Freescale i.MX31L equipped.
Philips GoGear SA9200 – PortalPlayer based thing with the same SoC as the Sansa e200 v1 series and uses mi4 like many other PP targets.
Creative Zen Vision:M – Still a rough install method that requires you to rip out the harddrive, insert it into another computer, wipe the FS and replace it with FAT and then it still has no music playback… but there’s a video showing how it looks!
SanDisk Sansa “v2 series” – The recent architectural upgrade by SanDisk is quite similar over a range of models (e200 v2, c200 v2, m200 v2, Clip, Fuze etc) and recently there have been lots of new info creeping up in the forum thread, offering hope we might soon see a proper “first shot” at flashing a modified firmware.
SanDisk Sansa C100 – one of them TCC based ports that use tcctool to download code and execute in RAM only during a trial period, and that’s indeed a convenient way!
SanDisk Sansa M200 (v1) – very similar to the C100 model hw-wise, tcctool etc. There’s a working LCD driver but no NAND one…
Cowon D2 – I mentioned it before, but it is worth repeating since there is still work going on. Touch screen code has been committed and it seems quite useful at this point. No music playback yet and there’s something shaky with the NAND driver I believe.
I probably missed some model(s) (like I didn’t repeat the Meizu M6 work), but I think the picture is clear anyway: there have been some frantic action in the Rockbox camp lately and it shows that we have a large number of people who enjoy bringing Rockbox to even more targets…
My phone does not replace my Rockbox
I have one of them mp3 capable mobile phones and I have a 4GB NAND flash inserted in it that is packed with music I like. Yet I never end up using it as a music player.
I see people everywhere use their phones for music and I repeatedly read and hear the soon coming death of the portable music player being predicted not far away by opinion-expressing know-it-allers.
My phone plays mp3 files just fine, but there are several reasons why I don’t use it for that. The primary one being that it gets a lousy battery run-time if I do that, and if I’d run down the battery all the way when listening to music then how would I be able to use the phone for regular voice? With a separate (Rockbox) device I can listen to music until the last drop of power goes out without hampering my communication abilities.
In my particular case, my phone’s lack of a proper standard USB port and it’s lack of anything but “full speed” (and yes full speed is less than high speed and is a lot slower than it sounds) when connecting it using the custom cable to my Linux box are two more reasons. Not to mention that it has this “database-only” approach to the music which I really don’t like – but yeah, I can learn to live with it.
Besides, it’ll be a while longer until I can hack my phone to run Rockbox and thus work the way I want it. Let’s hope Android or OpenMoko or similar efforts actually make it possible one day.
More Means Less
Less is more it is said, and I can certainly subscribe to the reverse: more means less. The two primary open source projects I spend time in have been growing the last years, in source code contributions, but also in amount of users and in amount of contributors. I see the similar effects on myself and on my own role in both Rockbox and curl: I do more and more coordination, planning, admin work, talk (chatting on IRC, responding to mails etc) and “guidance” than actual coding work. My code/non-code work ratio has decreased massively.
This is not complaint, just an observation!
It makes sense to me that early on in a project, and until there’s enough momentum to get the project to more or less drive itself, it is important with a driving core that pushes the project forward. That makes sure every little peace fits together and gets the proper attention to make it a good product and project. As time goes by, more and more people get that knowledge, that ability and the amount of people that drive the project forward increases.
So being an “elderly” in both these projects, I’m more of an advisor, talker, tinker, admin, than a lead programmer now. This is at least most notable in Rockbox, since we have 80 committers now and I think at least 50 of them are active.
I probably spend roughly the same amount of time: somewhere around 2-3 hours/day on my open source projects.
Of course, in my particular case exactly now, I’ve also just recently ramped up my working hours and find myself trying to get accustomed to this life with full-time work, a two-kids-and-wife family and several time-consuming spare time projects. It takes a great deal of juggling and less sleeping.
Nothing is forever so I’m certain my situation will change over time. I’m determined to continue hacking in both projects. And my juggling skills will improve…
playogg without Rockbox?
I find it noteworthy that the FSF runs a campaign they call playogg in which they detail the importance and stuff why people should avoid non-free formats and instead use Ogg Vorbis in preference to mp3 for example.
Yet, they document a number of alternatives for Mac users, for Windows users etc on the front page, but there’s not a single word of advice for people with portable music players. Then again, it is very hard for people to find free software alternatives to their portable music players and FSF being so very anti-closed source this makes me wonder why there’s no mention of Rockbox, ipodlinux or even sansalinux to be found?
The only place with this info that I could find when following links from their site, was about three clicks away on xiph.org’s PortablePlayers wiki page but the majority of the stuff mentioned there is non-free…!