Waiting for Rockbox 3.0 - again

It is probably safe to bet that few Rockbox users are running 2.5, which only had support for a handful of Archos players. Grabbing a daily build is a fact of life in the Rockbox community. Meanwhile, Rockbox has performed a valuable service for Debian developers who would otherwise have to struggle to find a project with longer release cycles than their own.

Perhaps that state of affairs is about to change. Back in July, the project announced that, once again, an attempt was to be made for a 3.0 release. On August 15, Rockbox went into feature freeze, with the 3.0 release planned for "within a couple (as in two) weeks." That, of course, was a few (as in three) weeks ago, but this release is clearly getting closer.

Now would seem like the time for the project to begin its hype campaign with lots of screenshot-heavy articles on all of the features this major release will bring. Evidently the Rockbox developers have some strange ideas about actually working on the code, though; they haven't gotten around to the promotional side of things yet. So, while the Rockbox manual is reasonably comprehensive and current, it's hard to come up with a list of changes for the 3.0 release.

At the top of any list would have to be the list of supported players, which has expanded considerably since the 2.5 release. The Rockbox buyer's guide gives a good summary of the currently-supported players. Alas, none of these players are currently in production, though some can still be found on auction sites and elsewhere. There is progress toward support for some more contemporary players; early successes have been announced for the Cowon iAudio D2 and iAudio i7 devices. Those players will not be supported in the 3.0 release, of course, and the Rockbox developers have reserved the right to withhold support for other players as well if it is not stable enough.

Beyond that, changes to Rockbox in recent times include the ever-growing list of codecs (including some video formats on suitable players), a five-band parametric equalizer, an increasingly powerful theme capability with many user-contributed themes, album art display, a highly capable tag database, Speex codec support for the voice-based interface, and a whole host of new plugins including the much-anticipated Lamp plugin which displays a blank screen at full intensity, turning your player into an expensive, short-lived flashlight. Rockbox 3.0, it seems, will have something for almost everybody.

[PULL QUOTE: Given that installation can be a bit of a sweaty-palms experience overshadowed by the fear of turning that nice, new player into a brick, any help which can be given is more than welcome. END QUOTE] It also appears that 3.0 may include the hard-to-find RBUtil program - a Qt-based tool which automates the process of installing Rockbox. Given that installation can be a bit of a sweaty-palms experience overshadowed by the fear of turning that nice, new player into a brick, any help which can be given is more than welcome. Bricks, after all, are not known for high-fidelity sound.

Another recent event in the Rockbox community is the creation of the Rockbox Steering Board, currently consisting of Daniel Stenberg, Linus Nielsen Feltzing, Dave Chapman, Paul Louden, and Jens Arnold. The mandate for this board is not particularly clear; it seems to be intended to help break deadlocks in technical discussions. There have been some concerns raised that the creation of this board is a sign that Rockbox is moving into a more bureaucratic, slow-moving mode, but those worries are probably premature.

Rockbox developers also recently decided that all of the project's code would be licensed as "GPLv2 or later." While there is no plan for Rockbox to switch to GPLv3, the developers wanted their code to be available to other projects which are using that license. Since Rockbox does not require copyright assignments, this change will require an audit to find any GPLv2-only code and either relicense it or remove it. There have been no public announcements on how that process is going.

The Rockbox project faces a number of challenges. Cooperation from vendors is essentially zero, so all ports require a reverse engineering effort. Target platforms go through their market lifecycle quickly, making it difficult to get a port stable before the target device disappears. Its programming environment is highly specialized and resource-constrained, limiting the pool of developers who can work on the project. And, someday, the whole effort may lose its relevance as platforms become more capable and it gets easier to just run Linux on them. For now, though, there is nothing better for those who want a dynamic and user-oriented operating system for their digital audio player, and it continues to improve.