After five and a half years of development, Rockbox 4.0, a project developing alternative firmware for various audio player models, has been released. Compared to the standard firmware, Rockbox provides support for additional formats, features, and plugins. The project is not based on Linux and comes with its own POSIX-compliant kernel. The code is written in C and distributed under the GPL license. Rockbox can be booted from a memory card without deleting the player's main firmware.
Among the functions available in Rockbox: alarm clock, viewing documents, photos and videos, voice interface, Cue support, the ability to display song lyrics and album covers, bookmark system, voice recorder, recording from FM Radio, simple file manager. Among the differences are also noted: energy efficiency (19-21 hours instead of 14-16 hours) and high speed of work with large playlists. Up to 20 thousand tracks in a playlist and up to 10 thousand files in a directory are supported (for comparison, the Archos firmware supports no more than 999 files).
Major changes:
- Added device support:
- 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.
- Ports for the following devices have been moved to the stable category:
- AGPTek Rocker.
- EROS Q, EROS K (+clones AGPTek H3, HifiWalker H2 and Surfans F20).
- FiiO M3K.
- Shanling Q1.
- xDuoo X3, X3ii and X20.
- Core:
- Removed support for SH CPU architecture, as well as HWCODEC-based devices and charcell screens.
- Added support for bitrates up to 192KHz on equipment where this is possible.
- Significantly improved ATA SSD support, including iFlash ATA-SD adapters.
- Added support for ATA drives with logical sector sizes greater than 512 bytes. Added support for arbitrary ratios of logical and physical sector sizes in file systems.
- Added support for GPT partition tables and drives larger than 2 TB.
- Enabled the ability to create multiple partitions on ATA and SD drives. Provided the ability to create Multiboot firmware.
- Many internal APIs have been cleaned and reworked.
- By default, UTF-8 encoding is used for file names and text processing.
- Codecs:
- To improve playback on devices with SID (Sound Interface Device), the crSID library is used.
- The libayumi library provides support for playing video formats used in video games.
- Added support for playback of VTX (ZX Spectrum) format.
- Improved support for FLAC, Speex, Opus, mp4/aac and WMA Pro formats, and improved metadata parsers for various media containers.
- Added support for album covers embedded in media files.
- Added support for 7-channel FLAC files.
- User interface performance has been optimized. The theme engine has been upgraded. Metadata display has been improved and database navigation has been redesigned. Bookmarks and playlists have been expanded. Scrobbling support (tracking what the user is listening to) has been moved from the plugin to the main package.
- Improved Cyrillic support in 14-Rockbox-Mix font. Updated Terminus fonts.
- Added support for mimic, Google Translate (online) and Piper TTS speech synthesis engines. Significantly improved speech synthesis quality for languages other than English. Added pre-generated speech files for various languages, including Russian.
- Suggested plugins include games 'picross', 'amaze' and 'xrick', a plugin for switching keyboard layouts and a Last.FM scrobbler viewer.
- Support for legacy Archos Player/Studio, Archos Recorder / v2, Archos FM Recorder and Archos Ondio FM / SP devices has been discontinued, simplifying the internal kernel architecture. Also removed are unfinished ports for iAudio 7, Sansa C100, M200(v1-3), Logik DAX, ifp-7xx, Samsung YP-Z5 and Tatung TPJ-1102 devices.
General 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
