Tag Archives: Rockbox

Rockbox

Rockbox on iAudio M3

iAudio M3This player’s been out for quite some time and most certainly won’t be found anywhere to be bought as new. Still, Jens Arnold’s been working hard on this port lately and just minutes ago he mentioned that he got sound working on it – and the build table subsequently has all three kinds of the M3 build added to it.

The M3 is roughly an M5 but without any LCD on the main unit, there’s only that one on the LCD! And of course the M5 was almost an X5 but with a greyscale LCD… So it is another one of them Coldfire 5249 based targets. The LCD on the remote is 128×96 2bit greyscale,

The M3 comes with 20 or 40GB harddisk and there’s an M3L around with a larger capacity battery

How many Rockbox ports are there now? It’s hard to tell as it really depends on what level of maturity and how much functionality you require before you count it as an actual port, but the configure script in our source tree has 38 different ones mentioned. I believe some of them are not more than embryos, but there are also other initial efforts not yet added to this script.

Cowon’s spec page on the M3.

Rockbox

Rockbox on Meizu M6

Meizu M6In the eternal chase for new targets to port Rockbox to, the turn seems to have come to the tiny Meizu M6 player.

This 55 gram thing is slightly smaller than a credit card (width and height at least) and it boasts a 2.4″ LCD, 4GB flash and is powered by a Samsung SA58700 (ARM940T core and a CalmRISC16 DSP thing). It has an FM tuner and built-in mic for recording as well.

There’s of course the standard Rockbox forum thread,and an HW info page in the Rockbox wiki.

Other targets with the exact same SoC include the irivers E10, clix and S10. But none of those have a Rockbox port yet.

IT Politics, Open Source, Rockbox

Open Source Accessibility

SRF (synskadades riksförbund – the Swedish Association of the Visually Impaired) is a Swedish organization that recently expressed concerns about open source (in Swedish), since as they say “open source in itself is no guarantee for accessibility to disabled persons” (my translation).blind person symbol

The argument came up because Mats Odell, a minister in the Swedish government, expressed a positive attitude towards open source within governments (link in Swedish).

I find it disturbing that these visually impaired guys immediately bounce back and seem to imply and think that open source automatically somehow is less useful, less quality, less fitting or less accessible. But sure, open source is not a guarantee for better accessibility, but then nobody claimed it either and I don’t see how any software can be guaranteed to be better. A very weird statement it was I must say.

One perfect example showing how open source adds accessibility is how Rockbox works. By providing innovative functionality, it makes devices suddenly a whole lot more usable to blind or visually impaired persons. There’s simply no commercial alternatives coming close.

Other fine example on how open source makes software more accessible than any closed-source competitor, is in how translations can be done even to very small languages spoken by economically not so wealthy population groups. Like how closed-source programs fail to deliver software translated to the 11 official languages of South Africa and a lot of other ones.

To round off, the orca project makes openoffice, Firefox, gnome apps and Java-based apps accessible. I’m not saying I know all about being visually impaired and how they use open source, but I do know that open source is accessible to a far extent at some places and at others there’s room left for improvement. But open source gives everyone the ability to join in and make it happen.

Rockbox

Rockbox on Olympus m:robe 100!

Olympus M:Robe 100For some reason I haven’t previously properly pushed this fact here:

The Rockbox port for the Olympus M:Robe 100 is soon about to enter the fine room of all the other existing Rockbox ports. It seems most stuff is working in this port now, and with bootloader and daily zips on the download mirrors there’s only a few minor things left before it’ll go in among the other zips on the build page!

The mrobe100 is a mi4-using PortalPlayer-based (PP5020) target with a monochrome LCD. Here’s the proper forum thread.

Most of the magic stuff done on this port seems to have been pulled off by Mark Arigo with Robert Kukla doing a fair share as well. Thanks guys!

cURL and libcurl, Rockbox

Summer of code ideas and mentors!

To get good results from Google’s Summer of Code, we need a fair amount of volunteering mentors and we need a good set of interesting projects to make students get attracted.

Rockbox tinyIf your interest is in the Rockbox project, add your project ideas or add yourself as mentor on this wiki page.

curl tinyIf your interest is in the cURL project, read this page about the existing ideas and provide new ones or submit yourself as mentor on the mailing list!

Organizations can apply for becoming part of this starting tomorrow, March 3 2008.

Rockbox

Rockbox on gsoc 2008?

GoogleRockbox tinyThere is reason to suspect that there’s an upcoming announcement from Google about their Summer of Code 2008, so for the Rockbox project it might be just about time to start thinking about what particular projects we’d like to see done this time!

Of course it is also time to look back on how we performed last year and to consider what we should improve to make sure we do it better this time (should we be accepted again). After all, we got 4 projects assigned, two are now in SVN, one was a complete failure and one was half-done.

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

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.