Rockbox rocks!

Thu, 02/14/2008 - 11:19pm — corfy

I got my new MP3 player today.

I was expecting a SanDisk Sansa e260 version 2, which is the latest model. While what I got was brand new, I actually got the version 1 of the player instead of version 2.

Some people might be a bit upset at getting the older version. I couldn't be happier.

You see, version 1 let me install Rockbox, which is an open-source software application that runs on the player itself. Rockbox doesn't work yet on version 2.

There are a number of reasons I wanted to do this. For one, my Sansa came with the ability to only play MP3, and WMA audio files. Both of them are fairly common, but still, that is somewhat limiting. And if I had version 2 of the e260, I would have gladly worked within those file formats, which is similar to my old MP3 player.

But by installing Rockbox, I now have the ability to only only play MP3 and WMA files, but also OGG, MPC, AC3, MP4, ADX, Speex, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, ALAC, Wavpack, Shorten, SID, MOD, NSF, SPC, and MIDI files.

OK, I'll be honest. A lot of those I have never heard of. The key ones for me are OGG (an open-source alternative to MP3), WAV (a common file format that dates back years), MIDI (a simple instrumental format), and FLAC (a format that doesn't compress the audio, giving the best sound quality). And of those, OGG is the most important one.

But there are other advantages of Rockbox over the default software. First, it is very customizable (which is one of the advantages of open-source software in general). Second, there are numerous plugins I can add to increase functionality, from video, picture and text viewers to games.

And, of course, Rockbox plays better with Linux than the built in software. I could have worked around the default software a lot easier on this model than my old MP3 player, but this makes it very easy to work with.

Comments

Wed, 06/11/2008 - 11:38pm — w (not verified)

version i.d.

can i ask ... how did you identify it as a Ver 1? i am looking around and want to make sure i get v1!

thx

Thu, 06/12/2008 - 9:34am — corfy

At the time, I got mine from

At the time, I got mine from walmart.com, but I didn't know what version it was when I ordered it. From my understanding, there is little information on the package to distinguish the various versions. The only way to tell is to look at the back of the player.

When I ordered it, I was hoping to get v1, but what I really needed was a player that I could hook up to my Linux computer and transfer music, and I knew that both v1 and v2 would allow me to do that.* Getting v1 and being able to run Rockbox on it was a much added bonus.

Considering that v1 hasn't been made since December, I think you will probably have a hard time finding v1 now, but I could be wrong.

* - My previous MP3 player would allow me to hook up to Linux like an external harddrive, and I could transfer all the music to it I wanted, but the database could only be rebuilt using an external program... a program that only ran on Windows. So I could move all the files I wanted, but until I hooked it up to a Windows computer and ran the database program, I couldn't listen to the music. As much as I tried to get it to work on Linux, it never would. The final straw came when the battery pretty much gave up the ghost. The e260, however, whether talking about v1 or v2, builds its own database, so it doesn't need an external program. Rockbox also builds its own database.