Features

Target status

Rockbox has many features additional to those supported by the original operating firmware, but in many cases there are limitations. On platforms classified as “stable” and supported, the device can be used as a digital music player, but even on some such platforms Rockbox does not support charging or USB; the player must be dual-booted into the original firmware to be charged or to transfer files. Some platforms are classified as “unstable”, but supported; those deemed “unusable” are not supported, and their use is not recommended. Some porting projects are in a pre-development hunting and gathering stage, with no code written.

Codecs

Rockbox on software decoding platforms (non-Archos) supports playback of twelve lossy codecs (depending on how one counts), five lossless, two uncompressed and twelve miscellaneous formats. This makes a conservative total of 30 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 Vorbis, WMA, APE, TTA, MPC, Wavpack, ATRAC3, Cook and WMA Pro among the fastest known integer 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
• Opus

Lossless formats

• FLAC
• ALAC
• WavPack
• Shorten
• Monkey’s Audio
• TTA

Uncompressed formats

• WAV
• AIFF

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

Miscellaneous formats

In addition, there are playback of game audio types ADX, SID, NSF, SAP, SPC, AY, GBS, HES, KSS, SGC, VGM, and VGZ. The MOD tracker format, and the Yamaha SMAF are also now supported.

Some profiles in Monkey’s Audio are not real time on all targets due to very high CPU needs. Also, Rockbox will not play files with a digital rights management (DRM) scheme.

Rockbox features

Beside the ability of playing and recording audio files, Rockbox offers many playback enhancements that other firmware packages may not have implemented yet. Listed below are a handful of these features.

• Gapless playback
• Crossfading
• ReplayGain
• 10 band fully parametric equalizer
• Variable speed decoding with pitch correction
• Crossfeed
• OTF (“on the fly”) playlists
• True random shuffle (fresh randomly shuffled list every time)
• Custom UI themes
• Dynamic Playlists (queue files to play next, or in other parts of a dynamic playlist)
• Stereo voice/MIC & FM radio recording to WAV/AIFF/WavPack (lossless) and MP3 (limited model/device/target support)
• Remote control (supporting devices)
• Digital S/PDIF input/output (supporting devices)
• Last.fm support (even on players lacking RTC)
• Cue sheet support
• Album art
• Sleep timer

Plug-ins

Rockbox developers can create plug-ins, which provide the user with other enhancements that may not be available on various firmware modules.

Available plug-ins include:

• JPEG viewer (16 bit color/129 shade greyscale)
• Rockboy Game Boy emulator (port of Gnuboy)
• ZXBox ZX Spectrum emulator (port of Spectemu)
• Doom (port of the PrBoom engine)
• Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D running atop a version of the Simple DirectMedia Layer runtime
• XWorld, a clone of Another World
• WAV to MP3 and Wavpack encoder
• MPEG video player
• PictureFlow, an album art viewer similar to Apple’s Cover Flow
• Various games including 2048, Sudoku, Solitaire, Chess, Minesweeper, Pong and many others
• Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) player, real-time on some targets.
• MikMod, used to play multiple module file formats