Close-up of Rockbox running on Cowon X5.
Above, you can see Rockbox running on my iAudio X5 player. The code was taken directly from today’s CVS and cross-compiled on my laptop for the Coldfire CPU. The album art patch by Nicolas Pennequin was also applied. This allows one to configure the WPS (While Playing Screen) to display a bitmap image related to the track currently being played. The main purpose of this, obviously, is to allow one to display an image of the album from which the track is taken.
I needed a quick way to get album covers onto my X5, so I wrote some Ruby code that uses my very own Ruby/Amazon to pull album images from Amazon. Basically, the approach is to take one track from each album directory and inspect the Ogg Vorbis tag of that track. From this, artist and album title data is derived. Then, an Amazon search is performed to find the album in question.
Some albums are available exclusively on either Amazon UK or Amazon US, so I first try to pull the album cover from Amazon UK and resort to the American site only if I can’t find it there.
The album cover images arrive from Amazon in JPEG format, but Rockbox needs BMP files, so I use ImageMagick to convert from one to the other and then save the image as cover.bmp in the same directory as the album.
The Ogg Vorbis tag data isn’t accurate or specific enough in some cases to locate the album on Amazon. Occassionally, the album isn’t even available from Amazon, which obviously also results in a failure to locate its cover art. In the end, approximately 75% of my albums end up having a cover image retrieved. It remains to be seen how many were mismatched with the wrong album!
I’ve had no time to hack together my own WPS file for the X5, so I’m currently using Markus Haselboeck’s boeselhack_v1 theme. It’s pretty nice, I think you’ll agree. Having a small image of the album cover on the screen really is a nice touch and gives the software a very professional edge.
Here’s a full photo of the X5 running Rockbox, just to place the above in context.
Rockbox running on Cowon X5.