Rockbox gets large mention in PC Plus magazine

[drippydonut]

Rockbox got a fairly large mention in this month's issue of PC Plus, one of the UKs top computing magazines...
I suspected someting along the lines of Rockbox or IPL when I saw the headline on the cover...
"Hack your hardware... power-up your MP3 player"

Here's the section...

Upgrade your MP3 player

Fixing one device 'feature', such as region coding, is useful enough. BUt the best hardware hacks do a whole lot more. If you have a compatible MP3 player then flashing it with the open source Rockbox (www.rockbox.org) firmware could let you see some amazing improvements. These will vary depending on your player, but the possibilities include a 50% fall in boot time, playlists loading 10 times faster, longer battery life, new player features such as support for more formats (OGG, FLAC, AC3 decoding on an iPod), and non-audio extras such as games.

Rockbox works with a variety of players, most famously Apple's fourth generation iPod (grey-scale and colour), fifth and upgraded fifth generation (video - 30 and 60GB models only), first generation nano and first and second generation iPod minis. But it also runs on some Archos (Jukebox 5000, 7000, Studio, Recorder, FM Recorder, Recorder V2 and Ondio) and iRiver players (H100, H300 and H10 series), along with others from iAudio and Toshiba.

The exact steps for installation vary depending on your player, but they're generally straightforward. With a colour iPod. you'd start by making sure it uses the FAT32 file system - that is, its been initialised by iTunes on a PC, rather than a Mac.
If you're in doubt, plug it into a Windows PC with iTunes and it will offer to reformat it for you. It's safe to say 'yes' - assuming you've got a copy of all the files it contains - because you'll still be able to use it with Macs later.

You'll need to upload some files to the iPod, and back up its firmware too. This will require some disk space, so make sure that it's not crammed full; we'd recommend 150mb to be safe. Then get along to the Rockbox download page (www.rockbox.org/download) and grab the correct firmware for your decide. Pick up the manual and the Fonts package, too.

Now use a USB connection to plug the iPod into your PC, then extract the firmware file you've just downloaded to the root folder of the player drive. Do this correctly and the main folder should now contain a '.rockbox' folder and a file called 'rockbox.ipod'. Extract the Fonts package too, and you should now have a '\.rockbox\Fonts' folder. The iPod won't use these new firmware files by itself though, so we need to add a Rockbox bootloader to make this happen.

Download the appropriate iPodPatcher tool (http://download.rockbox.org/bootloader/ipod/ipodpatcher) for your PC, and the bootloaader itself (http://download.rockbox.org/bootloader/ipod/bootloder-ipodcolor.ipod) to a nw folder called C:\Rockbox on your PC.

Open a command promt window, and enter this code to change to the new folder:
//cd c:\Rockbox//

Ensure your Ipod is connected to the PC. and type:
//ipodpatcher --scan//

The ipodpatcher will find your iPod and report its decide number, such as 'disk device 2'. Make a not of that number, as you'll need it next. Then enter the following - replacing N with the disk number you've just discovered - to back up your current firmware partition:
//ipodpatcher N -r bootpartition.bi//

Now type the following - replacing N with the device number again - to upload the new boot loader:
//ipodpatcher N -a bootloader-ipodcolor.ipod//

When the upload has finished, disconnect your iPod from the PC and it should reboot, letting you try out Rockbox. See the manual for more on how to use it. If you have problems, you can always go back to the old system - jjust conect the iPod to your PC, delete the 'rockbox.ipod' file, and enter the disk number below in a PC command prompt window:
//ipodpatcher N -d//

This will restore the firmware from the backup you created earlier, and you'll have a stardard iPod again.

Well, that's the theory, anyway. In practice, it's at least conceivable that the initial backup didn't work properly, or there might be problems restoring it. So don't get too confident; like most hardware hacks, there's always the possibility things can go horribly wrong. You should only go ahead if you're happy to take that risk.

Tired of your old MP3 player? Revitalise it with the excellent Rockbox firmware. [arrow pointing to Creative Zen V ]

Alltogether quite impressed. They say to download the manual, indirectly mention the 80gb is not yet supported, and I as far as I can see (from the little I've seen of installation on an iPod) the instructions are pretty accurate. Only stupid thing is the photo of the Zen V next to it !


I'm starting to be very impressed with the magazine. Last issue they had a large guide for Windows users about switching to Linux instead of Vista. Continuing to flick through this month's issue there's a small section about using Vorbis, Speex and FLAC instead of MP3.

[Llorean]

Well, the installation instructions are outdated, but they were correct at one point in time, which is better than I can say about several of the articles I've read (with the exception of the uninstall restoring the backup, it doesn't actually need the backup).

But all in all, one of the better articles among those that include instructions.

[gnu]

There was an article some time ago in a german PC magazine: That's how I found Rockbox! It was pretty acurate too!

[scorche]

They also have a very wrong definition of "flashing", but oh well...  Generally, it is one of the more correct articles.

[Rincewind]

And they say Rockbox enhances the battery life of some devices - only to talk about exclusively about iPods afterwards  

[linuxstb]

It's amusing how most of the recent "articles" about Rockbox seem to devote a large amount of space to reproducing the installation instructions for the ipod. instead of the author of the article actually doing some work and writing some original content.  The instructions are also out of date by the time they are printed...

[psycho_maniac]

If I was on the rockbox team Id thing that this publicity is better then no publicity. Wouldn't you think?

[saratoga]

We really need to get some sort of press link/page/email/etc setup so that they contact us before writing the article.

[Llorean]

"Any publicity is good publicity" applies to things where all you need is interest.

One interesting thing about Rockbox is that nobody gets paid. So, for example, any time I spend in these forums providing technical support, etc, is time I can't be spending pursuing other interests of mine. When an article full of misinformation goes out, that has a tendency to increase the support load, because people assume the article is correct and use it as their primary source of information for installing or setting up Rockbox.

Even if only a small percentage of people who've read the article do this, it still results in increased traffic to the support channels, and increased time by myself and the other volunteers to try to resolve issues, or even simply sign on, say "Please read the manual" and sign back out again.

So while any publicity is good publicity, articles that get things significantly wrong (moreso than this one does, as I said, overall it's quite good) do have a negative impact to an extent as well.

It's definitely good to spread the name of Rockbox around and attract more attention, for the project as a whole, but for the support personally it'd be really, really nice if articles avoided posting specific instructions that may or may not be valid by the time they're published.

[GodEater]

It's amusing how most of the recent "articles" about Rockbox seem to devote a large amount of space to reproducing the installation instructions for the ipod. instead of the author of the article actually doing some work and writing some original content.  The instructions are also out of date by the time they are printed...

Damn right - I think we should email the magazine and ask for a cut of whatever they paid the journalist to cut and paste our instructions into his article!