Rock-a-droid

Why can't the H340 be replaced? Flash storage is one of the reasons. A solid state disk makes obvious sense in a portable music player, but an immediate result of their adoption was a reduction in the storage capacity of the players. Your editor, who has had a lot of time to accumulate a music collection, does not want to select the music he will hear prior to leaving the house. Some time recently spent in Akihabara shows that capacities are slowly growing, but there was only one non-iPod device on offer which matches the H340: a pretty Sony player which does not support useful formats (e.g. Ogg) and which is certainly difficult to put new firmware onto. Needless to say, there is no Rockbox port for that Sony player. In conclusion: there is still nothing out there as good as the H340, at least for your editor's strange value of "good."

There are a couple of conclusions to be drawn here: (1) the market for personal music players may well be in decline, so newer, better players are not coming as quickly as one might like, and (2) the players which continue to exist are increasingly closed and unlikely to run Rockbox. This discouraging trend has been evident for a while, but there is hope. One of the reasons for the apparent decline of standalone media players must certainly be the growth of smartphones. A decent phone is able to run a music player; why carry two devices when one will suffice? Unfortunately, the music players available on most of these devices leave something to be desired. Even if they handle a wider variety of formats (as Android-based players tend to), they lack other important functionality: gapless playback and bookmarks being at the top of your editor's list. Using a phone-based music player after becoming accustomed to Rockbox feels like going several steps backward.

Enter the Rockbox Android port, which is actually a subset of the "Rockbox as an application" port. The core idea behind this port is that the days of standalone media players might just be coming to an end, while the days of much more powerful mobile computers are just beginning. Contemporary mobile systems can run a real operating system; they are thus open to the installation of specialized applications. The ability of Rockbox to run on a variety of hardware platforms is valuable, but what really distinguishes Rockbox is the intensive attention that has been put into making it be the best media player available. So it makes sense to think about dropping the hardware support and hosting Rockbox as an application on top of another operating system.

Let it be said from the outset: Rockbox on Android is far from being ready for general use, and its developers know it. For those who want to try it out, there are prebuilt Android packages for a few screen sizes, but users are cautioned against expecting too much, and the developers don't even want to hear about bugs encountered with the prebuilt versions. Anybody who seriously wants to try Rockbox on Android needs to build it from source; if nothing else, the target's display size must be selected at build time. The build process is not trivial - one must install the Android SDK and native application development kit - but it is not particularly painful either. The end result is a rockbox.apk file which can be installed on a convenient handset.

Running the application is likely to be most confusing for the unprepared user, though. The traditional top-level Rockbox menu appears on-screen, but the result of tapping a menu entry is not what one would expect; indeed, the application's response to touch events seems to be nearly random. After digging in the forums, your editor stumbled across this bit of helpful advice:

In short: the Rockbox user interface was not designed with touch screens in mind, so the developers have partitioned up the screen and mapped the pieces onto the arrows and buttons found on a typical old-school media player. Without putting any indication on the screen that it has been so divided. To say that this decision violates the principle of least surprise is a bit of understatement, but, once the nature of the interface has been understood, Rockbox can be made to work as expected. Your editor is listening to music from the Android Rockbox client as this is being typed.

As it turns out, deep in the settings menu there is an option to switch the touchscreen interface to "absolute mode." That causes taps on menu entries to do the expected thing. There is still a lot of work needed to make the interface truly touch-friendly, though - or even to make basic things like the "back" button function properly. It is sometimes possible to get stuck in screens where exit seems to be impossible. The "while playing" screen operates in strange and mysterious ways. Fixing all of this will require a bit of time by a determined user-interface developer, but there should not be any fundamental challenges involved.

Unsurprisingly for a port in such an early state, there are a number of other glitches and shortcomings waiting to be discovered. Some functionality has not yet been implemented - support for the FM radio (if present) and audio recording top that list. Attempts to use the database feature lead to "panic" messages and/or locked screens. The plugin feature does not appear to work at all - but it is also far from clear that plugins make any sense in the Android environment. Rockbox has its own idea of the playback volume which is separate from the Android system's. And so on.

That said, the Rockbox-on-Android developers have made it clear that this idea can work. The hard part appears to be done; now it's just a matter of tying up a fair number of loose ends. OK, it's a matter of tying up a lot of loose ends.

So, one might ask, is the H340 going into a well-earned retirement? Not quite yet. You editor must still wait until he has a handset with sufficient storage to hold at least a significant part of the music/podcast collection; the Nexus One does not qualify - though an SD card upgrade would make some real progress in that direction. There is another important requirement, though: a media player must have sufficient battery life to get through a long transoceanic flight without leaving the traveler phoneless at the other end. An overnight test showed that a fully-charged Nexus One in airplane mode can run Rockbox continuously for about 18 hours - not bad, but not quite enough for a long trip where the phone will be used for purposes other than just playing audio.

So the H340 will likely have to rock on for a little longer. But the writing is on the wall: there will probably not be a standalone replacement for that faithful piece of hardware. Regardless of whether your editor's next phone runs Android, MeeGo, or something else entirely, it appears that there will be a highly capable, GPL-licensed music player application available for it. It's hard to complain about that.