More than 2 years ago, I wrote about Rockbox: the open source firmware for mp3 players, written from scratch.
I wanted to try it out with my iPod Nano but before I did it, it stopped working (exactly like my older iPod shuffle, around 1 year after having purchased, they “gracefully” expired) so, for this and for other reasons: no more apple products craps.
One Operating System after (of course GNU/Linux, what else?) I bought the Sansa Fuse player and I could not be any happier.
The other day I recalled about Rockbox and I wondered: “why not?” so I downloaded the installer and it worked like a charm!
Now I have a firmware with lots and lots of features and improvements over the old one, like:
- Support for over 20 Sound Codecs, including Ogg Vorbis and FLAC
- Gapless playback
- 5-band fully-parametric equalizer, and crossfeed
- High-resolution volume control, 64-100 levels
- Ability to create your own themes or use user-uploaded ones
- Advanced crossfading
- ReplayGain support (volume normalization)
- Cuesheet support
- Album Art Support
- JPEG image and text-file viewing
- Doom!*
- MPEG video support
- Real Time Clock (RTC)
- Customizable Tag Database
- Unicode support
- Advanced On-The-Go playlist creation
- Multilingual Interface – 30 supported languages and counting
- Optional spoken interface
- Many plugins – games, apps, and demos
- Open Source, so Rockbox is constantly improved
* Yes, you read well, Doom! 