Unofficial Rockbox builds

Russian version of this page

Summary of changes against the official versions Some additional functions description

I use the Rockbox software on my Cowon iAudio X5L player for several years and now on Sansa Clip+ as well with great pleasure. During this time I occasionally tried to improve it's functionality in some aspects to make it yet better fitting my needs. The results of these activities are represented here.

See the project homepage for official Rockbox releases, accompanying documentation and other useful resources related to this excellent software, but here you can find only my apocryphal builds, information about the applied patches and some additional stuff.

Rockbox builds

These builds are based on the master branch of the Rockbox development source and include a bunch of fixes and enhancements as well as the latest main project updates up to build date denoted at the bottom of this page. Summary of the master changes history is available here.

All fonts and English voice generated by Mbrola speech synthesizer are included. Being downloaded and properly installed on a device all this should work just out of the box. In addition, auto-generated Russian voice is provided for each build as a separate archive. Simply unpack it alongside the respective Rockbox build if you need.

Choose an appropriate build for your architecture:

Apple iPod Mini 2G

Apple iPod Classic/6G

Cowon iAudio X5

Cowon D2

Sansa C200

Sansa E200

Sansa Fuze

Sansa Fuze v2

Sansa Fuze+

Sansa Clip

Sansa Clip v2

Sansa Clip+

Sansa Clip Zip

iRiver H120/H140

iRiver H320/H340

Creative Zen

Creative Zen X-Mozaic

Sony NWZ-E370/E380

Sony NWZ-E460

HiFiMAN HM-60x

IHIFI 760

xDuoo X3

xDuoo X3II

xDuoo X20

AgpTek Rocker

Note for those users who are interested in speech interface

In all these builds speech feedback initially is turned on only for menu. But some menu sections, such as font or language choice, in fact, are implemented as file lists. To make them speaking as well, it is necessary to go to Settings / General settings / Voice , choose Spell for Voice directories and Voice file names and enable using talk clips both for directories and files.

Since personally I use Sansa Clip+ and Cowon iAudio X5, all fixes and additions are tested by me only on these architectures. Other builds were created for my friends who like these improvements and asked me to do that.

Additional goodies

Alternative bootloader for Cowon iAudio X5

Since the official Rockbox bootloader for Cowon iAudio X5 player overrides the original firmware, I prefer the alternative one that allows to keep Rockbox along with the original firmware. See the README file included into the archive for details.

Playing midi-files

Although Rockbox natively supports a bunch of sound file formats, but if you want it to be able to play midi-files as well, grab this archive and unpack it in the .rockbox folder on your player after Rockbox installation. It should be enough.

Creating voice thumbnails

The voicebox shell script is designed to make voice thumbnails for file names and FM radio presets on a Linux machine. It makes use of the rbspeak shell script for actual speech synthesis. This script in turn uses Mbrola speech synthesizer for producing English speech and Ru_tts engine for Russian. See embedded comments for more details. To compress produced sound the rbspeexenc program is used that was generated from the Rockbox sources.

On Debian and Ubuntu all necessary speech synthesizers can be installed from my repository by command:

sudo aptitude install mbrola mbrola-en1 freephone enlex ru-tts rulex

An extra advantage of this tool is that it uses different voice pitch for different objects, thus, folders and files of various types are distinguishable simply by voice.

Talking FM radio presets

The FM radio presets pack for a bunch of cities (mostly Russian) along with voice thumbnails is available here. Downloaded archive should be unpacked in the .rockbox directory on the device where Rockbox is installed. The voice thumbnails were created by Russian and English speech synthesizers depending on the alphabet used in the station names. The base information about radio stations and their frequencies was taken from radiomap.eu.

Recorder presets

In order to simplify switching from one source to another in recorder I've created basic presets for each one:

voice — record from microphone, place file into /voice directory, 22 kHz mono compressed as mp3 64kbps;

directory, 22 kHz mono compressed as mp3 64kbps; radio — record from FM radio, place file into /radio directory, 44 kHz stereo compressed as mp3 128 kbps;

directory, 44 kHz stereo compressed as mp3 128 kbps; line — record from line input, place file into /record directory, 44 kHz stereo PCM wave format.

To make use of these presets grab the archive and unpack it into /.rockbox folder on the device.

Feel free to e-mail me with all related questions and suggestions.

Igor B. Poretsky

Last modified on Sat, 05 Sep 2020 23:57:53 +0300