Rockboxing the Sansa
My iRiver iHP became a brick when its hard drive died. It was time for an upgrade anyway. One thing I realized after all that use was that I really didn’t need to carry 20 gigs of music around. My new player had to be small, sleek and support Rockbox, the open-source firmware for mp3 players. I chose the newly supported Sandisk Sansa e270.
The factory firmware on the Sansa is pretty and worked quite well at first, but I soon experienced problems. First of all, and strangely enough, the minimum volume was uncomfortably loud. There was actually a setting to fix this. Next, advancing to the next song required hitting the button twice, sometimes. If the LCD is on, hit the button once to advance, if the LCD screen is sleeping, hit the button once to wake it, then again to advance. How annoying! The final straw came after I added more songs to the player, but was unable to find them and play them.
Installing Rockbox was much easier than I had imagined. All I had to do was download and unzip a file onto the player, then run a small installer that writes a boot loader to the player. The original Sansa firmware is still there and can be booted. But now Rockbox boots by default.
The default Rockbox is plain-looking, but it is feature-rich. I quickly found font and theme files that can be unzipped to add Rockbox eye-candy. I can’t believe how fast it boots, and I am convinced the player actually sounds better now. How long before factory players start shipping with this on it?
November 27th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
I’ve been using Rockbox for a couple of years now, on two different iPod models. While it’s software isn’t as intuitive as the default iPod software, it is much more feature-rich (and supports the open format, FLAC, that I need it to support). Unfortunately, Rockbox takes a lethargically long time to adopt their software to new iPod releases. The current iPod versions that are in stores are not supported yet.