Back in July of last year, I wrote about the open-source replacement firmware project called Rockbox. For a year now, I’ve had it running on my trusty iRiver iHP140 and, in that time, have seen the code grow to maturity.
For a while, though, the iHP140 has been feeling cramped. I really needed a 60 Gb player, but no suitable player existed. Most of my music collection is encoded using the Ogg Vorbis codec, so any player that can’t handle that immediately falls out of consideration.
For the last few months, I’ve had my eye on the 60 Gb Cowon iAudio X5, but was put off by reports of its suffering from poor firmware. I consequently decided to hold off until Rockbox was ported to the device.
Well, Rockbox played an MP3 file for the first time two months ago and development has been forging ahead since then. There’s actually less work to do than one might imagine, because the X5 uses the same Coldfire CPU as some of the iRiver players, amongst which the ever-faithful iHP140. Most of the work, therefore, is in the bootloader, making the remote-control work, etc.
Once I saw that Rockbox was coming along in leaps and bounds, I decided the time was right to complement my iHP140 with the purchase of a 60 Gb X5, so I ordered one from MP3shop.nl, along with a remote control, a case and a desk cradle. They turned up on Friday, as did our friend Geoff, so there wasn’t any time to play with them. I plugged it in, flashed the firmware to version 2.10, started an rsync of my music repository and then went to bed.
On Saturday, I found some time to compile Rockbox and its X5 bootloader. I applied the dual boot and album art patches, merged the official Cowon firmware with the bootloader and then reflashed the device. Finally, I unzipped the Rockbox files onto the hard drive. Sure enough, after holding down the REC button whilst turning on the device, the familiar boot screen of Rockbox scrolled by. I tried a couple of the plug-in games, satisfied myself that everything was working, then went to bed again.
Rockbox is still at quite an early stage on the X5. For one thing, the power management work has scarcely started, so a battery charge lasts only a fraction of the time that it does when running the official firmware. That’s a major problem, so I’ll be booting into the official firmware until the Rockbox team gets the power management under control.
Still, it’s great to see it already running and know that great things are just around the corner. Rockbox is so good, that it’s hard to imagine considering any DAP for purchase that would remain unsupported; especially one that didn’t support the Ogg Vorbis codec by default.
I think the Rockbox project is destined for great things. The goal of the project is of great widespread interest: to create high-quality open-source firmware that supports all of the major codecs and fully utilises the power of the hardware of each platform on which it runs. It’s made the iHP140 a much better player than it ever was with the official iRiver firmware, for example; and it was a great player to begin with.
With the iPod port firmly underway, I predict that the project will soon explode and achieve widespread recognition and acclaim. An iPod with decent battery life and the ability to play Ogg Vorbis files would be a player worthy of consideration, perhaps. Of the people who already own one, I suspect that enough people will try Rockbox and like it for the necessary word-of-mouth advertising to rapidly ensue.
I think one of the main attractions of the iPod is iTunes itself. The sync is so seemless; rate a song on you iPod and iTunes will update also, it knows which podcasts you actually listen to, playlists editted on iTunes are automagically transfered (including all required file) to the player.
There certainly still is a lot wrong with both the iPod, it’s interface and iTunes, but unless Rockbox – however good the firmware may be, and I believe you when you say it – has a software component like iTunes it will not be adopted by the masses.
What it needs is a simple interface that asks when you plug it in “would you like to update the firmware on your X5 to Rockbox” and then just do it. No compiling, merging and installing.
Is there such a project underway? One that obviously must run on all 3 major platforms, not just Linux!
It’s funny that you list iTunes as one of the main attractions of the iPod, because I’ve been reading lately that some iPod users consider themselves prisoners to that application. It’s precisely iTunes that makes some people want to see alternative firmware emerge for their chosen music platform.
I guess it’s another case of the old adage, One man’s meat is another man’s poison.