This is the manual for Rockbox. Rockbox is an open source firmware replacement for a growing number of digital audio players. Rockbox aims to be considerably more functional and efficient than your device’s stock firmware while remaining easy to use and customisable. Rockbox is written by users, for users. Not only is it free to use, it is also released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which means that it will always remain free both to use and to change.
Rockbox has been in development since 2001, and receives new features, tweaks and fixes each day to provide you with the best possible experience on your digital audio player. A major goal of Rockbox is to be simple and easy to use, yet remain very customisable and configurable. We believe that you should never need to go through a series of menus for an action you perform frequently. We also believe that you should be able to configure almost anything about Rockbox you could want, pertaining to functionality. Another top priority of Rockbox is audio playback quality – Rockbox, for most models, includes a wider range of sound settings than the device’s original firmware. A lot of work has been put into making Rockbox sound the best it can, and improvements are constantly being made. All models have access to a large number of plugins, including many games, applications, and graphical “demos”. You can load different configurations quickly for different purposes (e.g. a large font for in your car, different sound settings for at home). Rockbox features a very wide range of languages, and all supported models also have the ability to talk to you – menus can be voiced and filenames spelled out or spoken.
This manual is intended to be a comprehensive introduction to the Rockbox firmware. There is, however, more help available. The Rockbox website at http://www.rockbox.org/ contains very extensive documentation and guides written by members of the Rockbox community and this should be your first port of call when looking for further help.
If you cannot find the information you are searching for on the Rockbox website there are a number of support channels you should have a look at. You can try the Rockbox forums located at http://forums.rockbox.org/. Another option are the mailing lists which can be found at http://www.rockbox.org/mail/. From that page you can subscribe to the lists and browse the archives. For searching the list archives simply use the search field that is located on the left side of the website. Also you can ask on IRC. The main channel for Rockbox is #rockbox on irc://irc.freenode.net. A bunch of helpful developers and users are usually around. Just join and ask – if someone knows the answer you’ll usually get an answer pretty quickly. More information including IRC logs can be found at http://www.rockbox.org/irc/. We also have a web client for joining the rockbox IRC channel so there is no need for you to install additional software to your computer.
If you think you have found a bug please make sure it actually is a bug and is still present in the most recent version of rockbox. You should try to confirm that by using the above mentioned support channels first. After that you can submit that issue to our tracker. Refer to section E for details on how to use the tracker.
We have some conventions especially on naming that are intended to be consistent throughout this manual.
Manufacturer and product names are formatted in accordance with the standard rules of English grammar, e.g. “Ipod playback is currently unsupported”. Manufacturer and model names are proper nouns, and thus are written beginning with a capital letter.
Links to the wiki are abbreviated by the name of the wiki page. Those names are still linked so you can simply follow them like any other link in this manual. If you want to access a wiki page manually go to http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/ and type the page name in the “Go” box at the top of the page.