It’s traditional to launch new software on April Fool’s Day, which is when we heard that Rockbox 4.0 has been released. But, in this case, the venerable MP3 firmware actually did update after a long absence. It’s great to see that good old Rockbox is still kicking along. We first mentioned Rockbox here at Hackaday approaching 20 years ago. How time flies. There used to be a whole ‘scene’ around hacking Personal Media Players (PMPs), also known as “MP3 Players”.
We tracked down Rockbox contributor [Solomon Peachy] to ask for some simple advice: If someone wants to install Rockbox on a personal media player today, what hardware should they buy? [Solomon] referred us to the AIGO EROS Q / EROS K, which is the only compatible hardware still being manufactured and sold. Beyond that, if you want to buy compatible hardware, you’ll need to find some secondhand somewhere, such as eBay. See the Rockbox Wiki for supported hardware.
Smartphones and streaming services have subsumed the single-purpose personal media player. Will you put the new Rockbox on something? Let us know in the comments.
Nice!
I’ve been using Rockbox since the beginning with an Archos v2 and then a bunch of Sansa players.
Yesss! I would love them hard if they would port it to a clip player (for running) again, but it seems they all have shitty dacs
might upgrade my 5th gen ipod. however its on its last legs, the hard drive gets stuck the battery holds little charge. but with a new rockbox release, il consider some upgrades.
still want to see an open source audio player that uses rockbox. the biggest issue with this great os is the lack of hardware to run it on. an oshw solution would allow both to continue to evolve.
time to switch to a CF drive?
I’ve used an iFlash Quad in my 5th-gen iPod for many years.
https://www.iflash.xyz/store/iflash-quad/
An iFlash adapter will also do the trick, it’ll convert your microSD into a “hard drive” that’s recognizable to the iPod. I’ve never used an iFlash on my 5th gen, I’ve stuck with my old spinning one since it works okay to play Apple Lossless, but it’s been having problems too, so I’m probably going to upgrade it with an iFlash. The iPod modding community generally reccomends iFlash over CF, but if you stick with the right brands, the CF will play nice with the ‘Pod.
Rockbox is fantastic. I used it for years with my two Sansa Clip Zip players that I abused bringing them everywhere including on the beach near saltwater, until their death. Then as finding cheap players was hard (I don’t trust used as they either have defective jack or buttons or the battery is dying) I was forced to move to a cheap Chinese player which turned out to be really well built, sturdy, with great sound quality and battery life, but the firmware is a literal joke. I hope to see Rockbox ported on that player one day.
This is the closest one I could find, but as with many other Chinese products, they could change everything inside while maintaining the case, or the other way around:
https://img.ltwebstatic.com/images3_spmp/2024/03/05/92/1709622339773b5c88f09d8392b26c2290a579d78f_thumbnail_720x.jpg
Good chance it runs on one of those atj microcontrollers. Rockbox requires a proper cpu, a micro won’t cut it.
i think the main requirement is a memory management unit. would love to see a raspberry pi port.
About porting Rockbox on different hardware, if we take out gaming and other unnecessary stuff like audio effects except equalizer and replaygain features, the port to a cheap uC based platform (esp32|stm32|Teensy|…?) plus display and DAC could become feasible and remain cheap enough.
Maybe a Pi Pico?
At what point does it make more sense to just use the Pi Zero and regular ROCKbox?
The player I had this on has long since been blown apart by it’s faulty internal battery. I recall playing DOOM on it in class! So glad to see it’s been resurrected. 🐰
I couldn’t bear any of the UI of RockBox, including it’s (very good looking!)themes, which are an absolute dumpster fire to control. Hopefully they fix those nitpicks! I’ve been sticking with stock firmware, but only because the design is much easier to control. But that’s just me, you guys have fun iPod Doom-ing!
Oh man brings back memories of my first time playing through doom… on my Sansa e200, also had a gameboy emulator, and was able to read ebooks, read the whole unabridged Dracula on there.
This is one of the reasons I read Hackaday: to learn about capabilities that I hadn’t heard of before. Thx!
It is still possible to buy brand new ‘Classic’ iPods on AliExpress etc. Presumably they could be compatible
Somewhere in my house is a Sandisk Sansa e250 (I think?) with a Rockbox install on it. GREAT software and miles better than the stock firmware at the time. Thanks so much to anyone associated with the project. This is a fun and surprising turn of events!
I’ve recently bought a HiFiWalker H2 but wasn’t impressed by the stock firmware and found out about Rockbox when searching for help, installed it, tried lots of themes, and have now settled on one that I liked but have tweaked to make it more legible for my aging eyes.
I need cheap (5-9$) mp3 player for it
Being neck-deep in Happy Hardcore music and DJing, RockBox was my lifeblood when I needed to ditch my bricked Zune HD back in 2010. I went through several Sansa products, with all but the earliest having RockBox on them from the get-go. It was crazy that even early on we were getting pro-level features like FLAC support and gapless playback from our portable players…And yes, I did try the MPEG player, GB emulator and DOOM. lol
Kind of wish someone would pick up the Android port again…Not to modernise it, just to patch it enough for newer devices…
Worked great on my brother’s Zune many many moons ago. Glad it’s still kicking.
I have it on an iPod 5.5 (video?) 80GB. It allowed me to ditch iTunes (& attempts to use it on Linux) and treat it as a hard drive. Then it works on every computer.
It still works, but I should probably do something with the battery before its an issue. And maybe replace the drive with SD.