Rockbox rocks

I purchased a refurbished Sansa C240 v2 MP3 player several years ago to listen to podcasts and FM radio. I'm addicted to NPR, but that's another posting (as I write this I'm listening to Blue Collar on WCBE). The Sansa is a light, compact hardware package, complete with a micro SD card slot. Nice. The only apparent disadvantage is the lack of a replaceable, standard (AA, AAA) battery which means I can't pop in a spare when the battery dies.

Eventually, I grew dissatisfied with it. The firmware just didn't work as well as I would have hoped. It had a tendency to lock up and become unresponsive. Recovery required running it until the battery discharged completely; the on/off switch would not switch. I eventually set it aside to gather dust in my "projects" box.

Earlier this week I stumbled across Rockbox, an open source media program that replaces the firmware. I already considered my Sansa a domino tile ("brick" seemed much too big for the unit), so I had little to lose by installing Rockbox on it. Rockbox supports several dozen different models of media players including the Sansa c200 v2 series, well almost. The RB website considers the c200 v2 series firmware unstable, but the major complaint seems to be reduced battery life, although I can't find a direct battery comparison. My experience has been that Rockbox is much more stable than the original firmware.

Rockbox comes with a GUI installer, so I connected the unit to my netbook running Debian Linux using its USB cable and fired up the installer. It completed the installation in a few short minutes (it may have been less than one!). The installer has versions for Windows, Mac and Linux computers.

I fired up the Sansa, and, lo and behold, it worked! I'm still learning all of the features, but even with a few hours of playing with it, Rockbox provides much more capabilities than the original firmware and seems to be much more stable. It plays the normal MP3, Windows Media Audio, WAV, FLAC, Ogg/Vorbis, and many other formats. It can record from the embedded microphone or FM broadcasts using one of four recording formats (WavePack, WAV, AIFF, or MP3), allowing you to select the type of recording to fit memory and sampling accuracy needs.

It also provides plugin applications including a calendar, stopwatch, light (display set to all white), calculator, spell checker and many others, including games. The FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) application displays the real-time frequency curve of the audio track being played. Very impressive for a small device.

All-in-all, a very impressive project that has made my Sansa C240 v2 a decent device again. The Systems/Credits lists 579 contributors to Rockbox. My thanks to each of you.