Rockbox

Rockbox is a GPL-compliant open source operating system for portable digital audio players (DAPs). The Rockbox Project began in 2002 and was first implemented on the Archos Studio DAP because of owner frustration with severe limitations in the manufacturer-supplied user interface and device operations.

Rockbox can completely replace the host device's operating system firmware and has matured to become an extensible, flexible platform that provides a plug-in architecture for adding PDA functionality, applications, utilities, and games, and has also managed to retrofit video playback functionality onto DAPs first released in mid-2000. Recently, Rockbox now includes a voice-driven user-interface suitable for operation by blind and visually impaired users.

Although Rockbox's official title is "Rockbox: Open Source Jukebox Firmware", in many instances it is not actually installed to (or run from) flash memory. Instead a minimal bootloader is installed in the supported device's flash which is capable of either loading Rockbox from the hard disk or, alternately, the original factory firmware.

Codecs

Rockbox on software decoding platforms (non-Archos) supports playback of eleven lossy codecs (depending on how one counts), five lossless, two uncompressed and six miscellaneous formats. This makes a conservative total of 25 supported audio formats, although a few of them do not operate in realtime on all platforms. Extensive work has gone into optimizing each codec, with FLAC, Ogg, WMA, APE and WMA Pro among the fastest known implementations for those formats.

Lossy formats

• MPEG audio layers I-III (MP3/MP2/MP1)
• Ogg Vorbis
• MPEG-4 AAC(-LC/HE/HEv2 profiles) (in MP4 or RM containers)
• Musepack
• AC3 (raw or RM container)
• WMA Standard
• WMA Professional
• Speex
• Cook
• ATRAC3
• The lossy portion of WavPack hybrid files

Lossless formats

• FLAC
• WavPack
• Shorten
• Apple Lossless
• Monkey's Audio
• TTA

Uncompressed formats

• Intel-style WAV
• Apple AIFF

Together they include over a dozen different PCM and ADPCM formats.

External links

• The Rockbox Project

~ Text taken from Wikipedia entry for Rockbox