After five and a half years of development, the release of Rockbox 4.0 has taken place, which advances an alternative firmware for various models of audio players. Compared to stock firmware, Rockbox offers support for additional formats, features, and plugins. The project is not based on Linux and comes with its own POSIX-compatible kernel. The code is written in C and is distributed under the GPL license. Rockbox can be loaded from a memory card, without removing the player’s main firmware.
Among the features available in Rockbox are: alarm clock, document viewing, photo and video playback, voice interface, Cue support, ability to display song lyrics and album covers, bookmarking system, voice recorder, FM radio recording, simple file manager. Differences also include: energy efficiency (19-21 hours instead of 14-16 hours) and high speed when working with large playlists. It supports up to 20,000 tracks in the playlist and up to 10,000 files in the directory (for comparison, the Archos firmware supports no more than 999 files).
Key Changes:
- Added support for devices:
- AIGO EROS Q, EROS K, and clones of these models such as AGPTek H3, HifiWalker H2, and Surfans F20.
- FiiO M3K.
- Shanling Q1.
- xDuoo X3ii and X20.
- The stable ports for devices include:
- AGPTek Rocker.
- EROS Q, EROS K (+ clones AGPTek H3, HifiWalker H2, and Surfans F20).
- FiiO M3K.
- Shanling Q1.
- xDuoo X3, X3ii, and X20.
- Kernel:
- Support for CPU architecture SH has been removed, as well as support for devices based on HWCODEC and charcell screens.
- Support for bitrates up to 192KHz has been added on hardware where possible.
- Support for ATA SSD has been significantly improved, including iFlash ATA-SD adapters.
- Support has been added for ATA drives with logical sector sizes exceeding 512 bytes. Filesystems now support arbitrary ratios of logical and physical sector sizes.
- Support for GPT partition tables and drives larger than 2 TB has been added.
- The ability to create multiple partitions on ATA and SD drives has been included. Multiboot firmware creation is ensured.
- Many internal APIs have been cleaned up and reworked.
- UTF-8 encoding is used by default for file names and text processing.
- Codecs:
- To improve playback on devices with SID (Sound Interface Device), the crSID library is utilized.
- Video format playback used in video games has been implemented via the libayumi library.
- Support for VTX format playback (ZX Spectrum) has been added.
- Improved support for FLAC, Speex, Opus, mp4/aac, and WMA Pro formats, as well as enhanced metadata parsers for various multimedia containers.
- Support for album covers embedded in multimedia files has been added.
- Support for 7-channel FLAC files has been added.
- User interface performance has been optimized. The theme engine has been upgraded. Metadata display has been improved and database navigation has been revamped. Bookmark and playlist functionality has been enhanced. Support for scrobbling (tracking what the user is listening to) has been moved from the plugin to the main software.
- Cyrillic support in the 14-Rockbox-Mix font has been improved. Terminus fonts have been updated.
- Support for speech synthesis engines mimic, Google Translate (online), and Piper TTS has been added. Speech synthesis quality has been significantly improved for languages other than English. Pre-generated speech files for various languages, including Russian, have been added.
- Plugins for the games 'picross,' 'amaze,' and 'xrick,' a keyboard layout switcher, and a Last.FM scrobbler viewer have been proposed.
- Support has been discontinued for obsolete devices such as Archos Player/Studio, Archos Recorder/v2, Archos FM Recorder, and Archos Ondio FM/SP, simplifying the internal architecture of the core. Unfinished ports for devices like iAudio 7, Sansa C100, M200(v1-3), Logik DAX, ifp-7xx, Samsung YP-Z5, and Tatung TPJ-1102 have also been removed.
The overall list of devices with stable status:
- Aigo: Eros Q, Eros K (+ clones AGPTek H3, HifiWalker H2, and Surfans F20)
- Apple: iPod 1g-6g (Classic), iPod Mini 1g and 2g, iPod Nano 1g and 2g
- AGPTek Rocker
- Archos: Jukebox 5000, 6000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2, and Ondio
- Cowon: iAudio M3, iAudio M5, iAudio X5 series
- Creative: Zen Mozaic, Zen X-Fi, Zen X-Fi Style, Zen X-Fi3
- FiiO: M3K
- iriver: H10, H100, H300 series
- MPIO: HD300
- Olympus: M-Robe 100
- Packard Bell: Vibe 500
- Philips: GoGear HDD1630, GoGear HDD6330, GoGear SA9200
- Samsung: YH-820, YH-920, YH-925
- Sandisk: Sansa c200, e200, Clip, Clip Zip, Clip+, Fuze, Fuze+
- Shanling: Q1
- Sony: NWZ-E360, NWZ-E370, NWZ-E380 series
- Toshiba: Gigabeat F/X
- xDuoo : X3, X3ii, and X20
Source: opennet.ru
