If you have a large music collection or care about sound quality, just any mobile computing device won't do. However, while most music players support free-licensed formats like.flac, and a few even support.ogg, you won't find any that are sold with free-licensed firmware. That's where Rockbox [1]comes in. Rockbox is a project that develops free firmware, as well as an installer for adding the firmware to your music player. The process is the equivalent of rooting your phone, giving you complete control over a device. In effect, it creates a piece of open hardware where none existed before. Rockbox's small team of developers has been at work since 2001. Today, the project fully supports several dozen different models of music players, including Apple, Samsung, and SanDisk. Another dozen models are partially supported, and several others are in early development. However, if a music player is not listed as being supported on the project site's home page, check the forums. Sometimes, a model may be a repackaging of an earlier device. For example, while the SanDisk Clip Sport is not listed as supported, it turns out to be merely a rebranded SanDisk Clip Zip. As with any effort to replace firmware, the possibility exists that you could brick a device by installing Rockbox on it. The chance is slim, since Rockbox generally works by bypassing rather replacing a device's bootloader, and the installer includes an uninstaller that (at least in my limited experience) works perfectly well. All the same, disabling the music player remains a possibility. To avoid complete disasters, make sure that you have copies of all the files on a music player before you attempt to install Rockbox, and remember that you install at your own risk.

Downloading and Installing Rockbox

To install Rockbox, download the stable version for your music player model to your home directory. Uncompress the archived file, and the Rockbox utility is ready to use. You can also install manually using your music player's online manual [2], but, for most cases, the Rockbox utility is easier and quicker to use (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Rockbox utility simplifies installing the free firmware.

[...]