Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion

A question regarding why Rockbox was made the way it was.

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ryran:
I know we hate stickys but this is just so good.... Very well said Llorean.

insanepotato:
personally, the reason initial reason i switched to RB, was to listen to video game music (.sid, SPC). ^^

LambdaCalculus:
1) Biggest reason of all: Ogg Vorbis playback. I prefer Vorbis to MP3, and even though I had received an iPod video for Xmas two years ago, Rockbox let me enjoy my Vorbix files on the go.

2) Easily cross-platform. Rockbox doesn't care about what OS you have. On devices with a USB stack, just plug it into your computer, and drop in some music. Done.

3) More codecs than I can think of. Besides Vorbis, I've started using FLAC for select albums. I discovered Musepack. I've seen WavPack. Monkey's Audio? Hello there! SID? NSF? SPC? Cool, now I can bring some chiptunes with me on the road!

4) Retrofit new features. Do you know how cool it is to be able to watch videos on devices that normally don't play them? The iPod color and Gigabeat F normally don't play video on their OF's, and the iriver H300 and iAudio X5 have subpar video playback on their OF's. Nothing that Rockbox's Mpegplayer can't fix! ;) Plus, gotta love having a few games to kill time with!

5) It's free software. I admit, I'm a rather fierce supporter of free software. Rockbox is GPL'd, meaning I can use my DAPs with peace of mind.

6) It's just... cool!

soap:
Here are some of my reasons not touched upon by others yet.

* Directory structure based music organization.  (If you choose).
I don't like a database style of music management.  Many players force this style upon you in their original firmware.  I like to simply browse my well organized files.

* Last FM/Audioscrobbler logging support.
I love Last FM and the new (to me) music I find through the service, but Last FM needs to know what I listen to to make those recommendations, and Rockbox creates a log for them if you so desire.
* Gapless Playback.
Nothing is more annoying than many MP3 player's inability to play back my audio files without inserting unnecessary gaps between tracks.
* Replaygain.
Allows tracks from different CDs to be played back at the same apparent volume.

Strife89:
This coming from a Sansa c250 user.....

1a) I found Rockbox when I was looking for "hacks" for my Sansa's firmware so I could change a few things. In the process, I found Rockbox. I explored the website for a while and read through the manual, and I began to think, "This may be more than what I'm looking for" in a positive sense. I carefully read the instructions, and half an hour later, my Sansa was Rockboxed.

1b) My first impression was a good one. I practically fell in love with all the different options the user gets, and all of the plugins (particularly the games) came in handy from time to time. I'm hooked on Wormlet now, ;) and the Calculator has been helpful. (So has the Lamp.)

2a) Like some people, I didn't think much of all those codecs that Rockbox could use. Most of my music was (and still is) in MP3 format, and I didn't ever think that other options would be very major sources for music. Oh, how wrong I was....

2b) About three months ago I discovered that Rockbox had a .MOD codec (if you can call it that). I remembered vaguely that one PC game I liked (Invalid Tangram) had its music in a chiptune format, so I copied the .MOD files to my Sansa and gave it a listen.

I was, for whatever reason, blown away. All of a sudden, an entire new format of music that I had never listened to before (at least not knowledgeably so, if you will) had been opened to me thanks to Rockbox. I scoured the Internet with Google, and today I have about 700 MODs in their own folder, taking up 250 MB of space.

Without Rockbox, I would probably have never looked for any MODs, and even if I had, I would have to convert them all to MP3s to play them on the original firmware, which would take time and a ton of disk space. Nowadays I have a heck of an SAP and an SPC collection, too.

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