Rockbox
I was looking around for news, revised firmwares, or anything I could
find on Tanya’s new
T8 (which is really great) when I ran across news that the good
folks working on rockbox have
made progress toward getting it to run on an iRiver. Sweet! If
you’re not familiar with rockbox, it’s an open project to build a new
firmware for the Archos line of - uh, whatever they make (digital
audio players? maybe they do some video?). I tried their iRiver port on my H120 and it’s awesome. The upgrade is really simple:
- Get a copy of the iRiver firmware and the rockbox firmware
- Get the Rockbox firmware patcher and patch your iRiver firmware.
- Copy the patched iRiver firmware to the iRiver and the rockbox stuff
- Upgrade the firmware on the iRiver like normal
Now when you turn on the iRiver, the patched firmware loads the
rockbox firmware and you’re in. If you want to get back to the iRiver
firmware, you can hold the record button while you turn the device on.
If you want to switch back to the iRiver firmware completely, you’d
just copy an unpatched iRiver firmware over and upgrade back to that.
For legal reasons they are unable to distribute patched copies of the
firmware, so step 2 is required.
Once the alternate firmware is available and you get to use the new
Rockbox features you’ll see why it’s worth your time in the first
place. The Rockbox boot is way faster and its resume behavior
is better - it’s about 8 seconds from pressing the “on” button to
resuming playback where I left it (iRiver firmware was 20+
seconds). On-the-fly playlist editing - creation and management
- is finally available. Playback is almost gapless - people
cry for this feature all the time and I didn’t realize how nice it
would be until I went jogging for the first time with rockbox and
listened to the transition from “We’re that Spic Band” to “Poco a
Poco” from Los Crudos classic “Canciones Para Liberar Nuestra
Frontieras”. With the iRiver firmware there is almost a 1 second gap
between tracks but with rockbox the transition is barely noticeable
and the feedback sustain between tracks lasts. Oh sweet, sweet
Crudos… The resume behavior is better, too, and rockbox comes
with convenient features like an image viewer (which would have been
great when I was using my iRiver as backup from my digital camera in
Morocco) and some silly games like Snake.
Rockbox isn’t quite for everybody but if you’re a sucker for
customization and more features, it beats the pants off the iRiver
firmware. If you aren’t a DIY whore, it’s solidly worth checking out
anyway. The interface isn’t terribly hard to learn and being able to
perform operations on a track like “enqueue” and “queue next” in your
playlist are really, really nice (as any iPod owner will tell you).