Rockbox on a Sansa Clip+ (2009) was my personal peak for portable music - overtaking ye olde mini-disc player. The newer models all sucked usability-wise in comparison - screen-wise/button-wise etc. etc.
It was 2 colour, only had 6 or 7 buttons, I could completely operate it without looking at it, and Rockbox gave it the two main features I really wanted: flac support and gapless playback.
The main advantage I have now is I can have my entire (digitised) music collection on my phone - mostly ripped from CD's or purchased from Bandcamp, because it's > 400GB, and I think the Sansa Clip+ only supported 8GB maximum back in the day. Was considering digitising stuff we only have on vinyl as there is a USB output on our turntable, but decided to just leave it in its pure form. Plus recording at 1x speed is almost like going back to the dual cassette tape recorder era and high-speed dubbing was 'special'.
Hardware-wise the clip on the back always broke quickly and then the headphone socket went at some point. Went through about 5 of them before they were obsolete/or on eBay for $100s, but were good enough and cheap enough to keep replacing. One interesting upside of the space constraint was that it made you curate your own music collection, and then opt for a different set (particularly after a few new purchases).
Looks like Rockbox now does a heck of a lot more than it used to back in the day. It's great you've breathed additional life into it.
they're at different layers. libmpv is a full media player: demuxing, decoding (via FFmpeg), DSP, output. cpal is just a thin cross-platform PCM sink on top of CoreAudio/ALSA/WASAPI/etc.
Rockbox already brings its own decoders (20+ codecs), its own DSP chain (crossfeed, EQ, replaygain, gapless), and its own mixer. I just need the host OS to accept PCM frames. cpal is the minimal portable shim for that; pulling in libmpv would mean discarding Rockbox's audio pipeline and replacing it with FFmpeg's, which would basically defeat the point of building on Rockbox firmware.
Honestly, mostly for fun and love of Rockbox, I've wanted it on my desktop since 2010 and nobody else was going to build it :)
That said, Rockbox does bring real things: a battle-tested DSP chain (crossfeed, EQ, replaygain, dithering), gapless playback that actually works everywhere, codec coverage most players have given up on (Musepack, WavPack, ...). It's a lot of mature work to throw away.
Thanks for the reply! I hope the question didn't come off as snarky... I find music players, as a genre of software if you may me, fascinating. Since there is always a new one around the corner... Remember XMMS2!? And people still use Winamp 2.xx... It is fun to always see new takes on this problem. I will give it a whirl!
Nice! I have a real soft spot in my heart for Rockbox, glad to see it still having some life.
The interface and performance are just so well thought out and refined.
Plus it contains the earliest published code I ever wrote: https://github.com/tsirysndr/rockbox-zig/tree/master/apps/pl... , so that's fun for me.
Rockbox on a Sansa Clip+ (2009) was my personal peak for portable music - overtaking ye olde mini-disc player. The newer models all sucked usability-wise in comparison - screen-wise/button-wise etc. etc.
It was 2 colour, only had 6 or 7 buttons, I could completely operate it without looking at it, and Rockbox gave it the two main features I really wanted: flac support and gapless playback.
The main advantage I have now is I can have my entire (digitised) music collection on my phone - mostly ripped from CD's or purchased from Bandcamp, because it's > 400GB, and I think the Sansa Clip+ only supported 8GB maximum back in the day. Was considering digitising stuff we only have on vinyl as there is a USB output on our turntable, but decided to just leave it in its pure form. Plus recording at 1x speed is almost like going back to the dual cassette tape recorder era and high-speed dubbing was 'special'.
Hardware-wise the clip on the back always broke quickly and then the headphone socket went at some point. Went through about 5 of them before they were obsolete/or on eBay for $100s, but were good enough and cheap enough to keep replacing. One interesting upside of the space constraint was that it made you curate your own music collection, and then opt for a different set (particularly after a few new purchases).
Looks like Rockbox now does a heck of a lot more than it used to back in the day. It's great you've breathed additional life into it.
Out of curiosity, since I've never understood it, what is the point of music player daemons? What makes them different from any old media player?
This is brilliant. The forcing function of limited hardware is one of the things that made Rockbox great, and now it gets new life on the desktop.
https://rockboxzig.mintlify.app
>Planned: Stream from Tidal
Yes please - Tidal's app is genuinely woeful and doesn't seem to use native API's in MacOS
What's the advantage of using cpal over something like libmpv?
they're at different layers. libmpv is a full media player: demuxing, decoding (via FFmpeg), DSP, output. cpal is just a thin cross-platform PCM sink on top of CoreAudio/ALSA/WASAPI/etc.
Rockbox already brings its own decoders (20+ codecs), its own DSP chain (crossfeed, EQ, replaygain, gapless), and its own mixer. I just need the host OS to accept PCM frames. cpal is the minimal portable shim for that; pulling in libmpv would mean discarding Rockbox's audio pipeline and replacing it with FFmpeg's, which would basically defeat the point of building on Rockbox firmware.
>which would basically defeat the point of building on Rockbox firmware.
What is the point of bulding on Rockbox firmware? I love Rockbox myself too so the answer can be "fun" and that is all right.
Honestly, mostly for fun and love of Rockbox, I've wanted it on my desktop since 2010 and nobody else was going to build it :) That said, Rockbox does bring real things: a battle-tested DSP chain (crossfeed, EQ, replaygain, dithering), gapless playback that actually works everywhere, codec coverage most players have given up on (Musepack, WavPack, ...). It's a lot of mature work to throw away.
Thanks for the reply! I hope the question didn't come off as snarky... I find music players, as a genre of software if you may me, fascinating. Since there is always a new one around the corner... Remember XMMS2!? And people still use Winamp 2.xx... It is fun to always see new takes on this problem. I will give it a whirl!