Picture alt text: Two MP3 players side by side running Rockbox. Left MP3 player is a SanDisk Sansa Clip+ playing Divine Apprehension by Power Trip and the right MP3 player is a SanDisk Sansa Clip Zip playing Dopesmoker Pt. 1 by Sleep .

You thought I'd come back with another "Year of Linux on the X" post? Wrong! I'm back with a post about Rockbox .

What's Rockbox?

Rockbox is a free software firmware replacement initially developed for the Archos Recorder out of frustration with the manufacturer supplied firmware, and has now been ported to dozens of MP3 players from various manufactures like SanDisk, Creative, Samsung, and even Apple's own iPod line. While Rockbox mostly supports MP3 players from the early 2000's, a handful of devices from the near end of the MP3 player era and early smartphone era like the iPod Classic and some of the Sansa players, like the Clip+ and Clip Zip which I pictured in this post, are supported.

Despite bits of the project being forked from the iPodLinux project , Rockbox is not Linux based! It's it's own firmware and kernel, with a custom userspace developed around it.

Development has been going on for nearly 20 years, with the most recent release, 3.15, being released in November 2019. Features are still being added, and development hasn't ceased, despite the sometimes multiple year delay between releases. While it may seem archaic now when everyone has MP3 players built into their smartphones and streaming of music is pretty ubiquitous, I still think the project is interesting to at least be familiar with. Like in my previous post where I brought up OpenInkpot, the replacement firmware for some eReaders, it's a snapshot of a certain era of free software development that we won't likely see again, simply due to the fact that we have consolidated a lot of our digital lives onto one device that does everything pretty well, rather than multiple single purpose devices.

What's it do?

Rockbox was usually the only way you'd get updates to improve usability of your MP3 player, as most companies that weren't Apple would release horrible UIs that were clunky or confusing, and would rarely update them after being sold. Some MP3 players like the two Sansa players I showed above were held back by firmware that took forever to scan music libraries, but when given the upgraded Rockbox firmware it would be a night and day difference. Rockbox also added additional audio format support (and in some cases video). Some of the additional formats include freely licensed formats like Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, which despite them being unencumbered by patents like MP3 was up until relatively recently when the patents expired, was not supported by first party firmware on many players including the market leader the iPod.

Other fun features are the extra games that can be added to the player, and not just games like Snake and Pong, but newer games like 2048, along with "will it run" classics like Doom and Quake. In middle and high school, all the cool kids (nerds) had Rockbox thrown onto their iPod, not for any of the features like those I mentioned above, but usually for the throw more games on your MP3 player to play in class like RockBoy, the GameBoy emulator ported to RockBox.

Rockbox has also been used as a basis for some fun hacking, this article from PoC||GTFO used a patched version of Rockbox on an iPod to practice " antiforensics" when plugged in to a computer, to help make it more difficult for forensic analysts to figure out what the device was used for.

If you want to get Rockbox for yourself, and you don't have a supported player lying around at home in a junk drawer or something, I suggest looking for a supported player on eBay but be aware prices for these things have been going up as the years have gone on. The Clip players in particular can go for nearly $50-60 now when they were sold between $35 and 50 when they were still in production. If you want to get an older iPod, look into upgrading the storage to solid state if you can.