Rockbox, the custom firmware for iPods and MP3 players from Archos, Samsung, Creative, and other companies, just released a new major version. Rockbox 4.0 is packed with new features and usability improvements, and it now supports a few more media players.
Rockbox is a popular alternative firmware for digital music players, with customizable themes and fonts and support for many audio codecs. The exact features depend on which device you’re using, but most Rockbox ports support advanced crossfading, album art, and even a playable version of Doom. It can be a substantial usability improvement over the stock firmware, especially for media players that require proprietary desktop software for synchronization (like Apple iPods)—Rockbox can use a simple FAT32 disk partition for storing music and other files.
Rockbox’s release announcement explains, “Rockbox is a complete replacement for the software that drives your digital audio players. It was written from the ground up to provide a better experience than the existing software, giving you more features, options, and putting you in charge of the player. In most areas, Rockbox far surpasses the manufacturers firmware, truly unleashing the full potential of your hardware. It’s written by users, for users.”
What’s New in Rockbox 4.0
This is the first Rockbox release since November 2019, with “over 660,000 lines of code changed by over 80 authors. There are six more devices now supported: the AIGO EROS Q and EROS K (and clones such as AGPTek H3, HifiWlaker H2, and Surfans F20), FiiO M3K, Shanling Q1, xDuoo X3ii and X20. A few more ports are now considered stable, including the AGPTek Rocker and xDuoo X3. Rockbox 4.0 also removes support for several Archos players, which “greatly reduced the internal complexities of Rockbox’s core, and helped spur a development renaissance.”
The list of supported iPod models hasn’t changed. Rockbox has stable ports for all iPod Classic/Video models, as well as the iPod Mini and the first two generations of the iPod Nano. Even though there has been work on hacking newer iPod Nano models by the freemyipod team, the Rockbox page for the third-gen Nano mentions no one has started on a Rockbox port.
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There are some new features to get excited about. Rockbox now supports high bitrate music up to 192KHz (but is still limited to 16-bit playback), perceptual volume adjustment, updated codecs for FLAC and WMA Pro, and improved media parsing and album art support. Multi-partition support and GPT partitioning is also now available, allowing drives larger than 2TB to work if each individual partition is 2TB with 512B sectors or smaller. Some features only work on select hardware, though, so check the wiki page for your player.
Rockbox has also made many infrastructure and code cleanup changes to keep the project going. The website and other services are now hosted by Rockbox community members, since the Haxx team (including Daniel Stenberg, best known as the creator of cURL) stopped doing that. The manuals for individual players are now automatically generated from recent changes, and Rockbox now uses the GCC 4.9.4 compiling toolchain, both of which are speeding up development and testing. The desktop Rockbox Utility has been ported to QT5, too.
Download Rockbox
You can visit the Rockbox Wiki to see a list of supported devices, many of which can be set up with the official Rockbox Utility. The installation process on most devices isn’t difficult, and some players can dual-boot Rockbox and the original firmware.
The official downloads page has the Rockbox Utility for automatic installation, as well as build files for manual installation if needed.
