Author here. The real motivation: I've been a Rockbox fan since 2010, when I installed it on my iPod and it completely changed what that device could do. The UI, the codec support, the sheer hackability, nothing else has come close since.
I've wanted that same experience on my desktop for years. So I'm basically trying to bring Rockbox to macOS and Linux as a daemon I can use every day, with MPD-style control on top.
Rockbox on a Sansa Clip+ (2009) was my personal peak for portable music - overtaking ye olde mini-disc player. The newer models all sucked usability-wise in comparison - screen-wise/button-wise etc. etc.
It was 2 colour, only had 6 or 7 buttons, I could completely operate it without looking at it, and Rockbox gave it the two main features I really wanted: flac support and gapless playback.
The main advantage I have now is I can have my entire (digitised) music collection on my phone - mostly ripped from CD's or purchased from Bandcamp, because it's > 400GB, and I think the Sansa Clip+ only supported 8GB maximum back in the day. Was considering digitising stuff we only have on vinyl as there is a USB output on our turntable, but decided to just leave it in its pure form. Plus recording at 1x speed is almost like going back to the dual cassette tape recorder era and high-speed dubbing was 'special'.
Hardware-wise the clip on the back always broke quickly and then the headphone socket went at some point. Went through about 5 of them before they were obsolete/or on eBay for $100s, but were good enough and cheap enough to keep replacing. One interesting upside of the space constraint was that it made you curate your own music collection, and then opt for a different set (particularly after a few new purchases).
Looks like Rockbox now does a heck of a lot more than it used to back in the day. It's great you've breathed additional life into it.
If you spend a lot of time in the shell and are used to manipulating text via chains of piped Unix utilities, then MPD controlled by mpc lets you put music on without leaving that environment that is comfortable and efficient. For example, play album X but not tracks Y or Z from it that I think suck. Or play such-and-such a piece of classical music but in the recording by that particular conductor and ensemble, etc.
Our IT department has a machine called jukebox hooked up to a sound system. Since it runs a music player daemon everybody in the IT department can control the jukebox from their own frontend, phone or whatever.
Technically you could achieve the same with a web frontend, but then you're limited to that UI. A music player daemon is agnostic to the UI, meaning there can be different UIs or you can add music via command line, text interfaces etc.
I like having the music player be separate from the client that controls it. I'm currently listening to music on my home desktop PC while using my work laptop, and I can control the music playback from the work laptop by just connecting to the daemon.
You can also use multiple clients if you want. Some TUI, some graphical, some utility like mpdscrobble (that just watches what you listen to and scrobbles it to Last.fm).
Are you still on Last.fm? I finally deleted my account last year after the site had been a ghost town for over a decade. Long decline from the early millennium when seemingly every hipster in my town scrobbled and music was an IRL social thing. If I still cared for tracking statistics without the social stuff, I would use Libre.fm.
I use it for tracking statistics without the social stuff, except maybe the year-end stats. I currently have a workflow for getting my stats out of Last.fm and then using those for building playlists, and it’d not work with Libre.fm.
<del>The server-client model means you can run the server (MPD, Rockbox Zig, whatever) on your homelab, and stream music to multiple clients. So you don't have to copy all your music onto your phone, you can just run an MPD client like M.A.L.P. and it will stream from the files on your server. Then there's just one copy of your music collection, tags, etc.: no more keeping tags up-to-date between the copies on your home server, your laptop, your phone... (Do make sure your files are backed up, of course).<del>
MPD doesn't really do streaming. If you install MPD on your server and then install an MPD client on your phone, the music will play on your server when you press play on your phone. You can re-encode the playback as an audio stream and stream that to your phone, but it's not really what MPD is built for.
Thanks for the correction; edited my comment to ensure nobody gets confused by my mistake. (I'm brand-new to using MPD, just installed it last week, so I had things backwards in my head).
they're at different layers. libmpv is a full media player: demuxing, decoding (via FFmpeg), DSP, output. cpal is just a thin cross-platform PCM sink on top of CoreAudio/ALSA/WASAPI/etc.
Rockbox already brings its own decoders (20+ codecs), its own DSP chain (crossfeed, EQ, replaygain, gapless), and its own mixer. I just need the host OS to accept PCM frames. cpal is the minimal portable shim for that; pulling in libmpv would mean discarding Rockbox's audio pipeline and replacing it with FFmpeg's, which would basically defeat the point of building on Rockbox firmware.
Honestly, mostly for fun and love of Rockbox, I've wanted it on my desktop since 2010 and nobody else was going to build it :)
That said, Rockbox does bring real things: a battle-tested DSP chain (crossfeed, EQ, replaygain, dithering), gapless playback that actually works everywhere, codec coverage most players have given up on (Musepack, WavPack, ...). It's a lot of mature work to throw away.
Thanks for the reply! I hope the question didn't come off as snarky... I find music players, as a genre of software if you may me, fascinating. Since there is always a new one around the corner... Remember XMMS2!? And people still use Winamp 2.xx... It is fun to always see new takes on this problem. I will give it a whirl!
Nice! I have a real soft spot in my heart for Rockbox, glad to see it still having some life.
The interface and performance are just so well thought out and refined.
Plus it contains the earliest published code I ever wrote: https://github.com/tsirysndr/rockbox-zig/tree/master/apps/pl... , so that's fun for me.
Author here. The real motivation: I've been a Rockbox fan since 2010, when I installed it on my iPod and it completely changed what that device could do. The UI, the codec support, the sheer hackability, nothing else has come close since.
I've wanted that same experience on my desktop for years. So I'm basically trying to bring Rockbox to macOS and Linux as a daemon I can use every day, with MPD-style control on top.
Rockbox on a Sansa Clip+ (2009) was my personal peak for portable music - overtaking ye olde mini-disc player. The newer models all sucked usability-wise in comparison - screen-wise/button-wise etc. etc.
It was 2 colour, only had 6 or 7 buttons, I could completely operate it without looking at it, and Rockbox gave it the two main features I really wanted: flac support and gapless playback.
The main advantage I have now is I can have my entire (digitised) music collection on my phone - mostly ripped from CD's or purchased from Bandcamp, because it's > 400GB, and I think the Sansa Clip+ only supported 8GB maximum back in the day. Was considering digitising stuff we only have on vinyl as there is a USB output on our turntable, but decided to just leave it in its pure form. Plus recording at 1x speed is almost like going back to the dual cassette tape recorder era and high-speed dubbing was 'special'.
Hardware-wise the clip on the back always broke quickly and then the headphone socket went at some point. Went through about 5 of them before they were obsolete/or on eBay for $100s, but were good enough and cheap enough to keep replacing. One interesting upside of the space constraint was that it made you curate your own music collection, and then opt for a different set (particularly after a few new purchases).
Looks like Rockbox now does a heck of a lot more than it used to back in the day. It's great you've breathed additional life into it.
Out of curiosity, since I've never understood it, what is the point of music player daemons? What makes them different from any old media player?
If you spend a lot of time in the shell and are used to manipulating text via chains of piped Unix utilities, then MPD controlled by mpc lets you put music on without leaving that environment that is comfortable and efficient. For example, play album X but not tracks Y or Z from it that I think suck. Or play such-and-such a piece of classical music but in the recording by that particular conductor and ensemble, etc.
Our IT department has a machine called jukebox hooked up to a sound system. Since it runs a music player daemon everybody in the IT department can control the jukebox from their own frontend, phone or whatever.
Technically you could achieve the same with a web frontend, but then you're limited to that UI. A music player daemon is agnostic to the UI, meaning there can be different UIs or you can add music via command line, text interfaces etc.
I like having the music player be separate from the client that controls it. I'm currently listening to music on my home desktop PC while using my work laptop, and I can control the music playback from the work laptop by just connecting to the daemon.
You can also use multiple clients if you want. Some TUI, some graphical, some utility like mpdscrobble (that just watches what you listen to and scrobbles it to Last.fm).
Are you still on Last.fm? I finally deleted my account last year after the site had been a ghost town for over a decade. Long decline from the early millennium when seemingly every hipster in my town scrobbled and music was an IRL social thing. If I still cared for tracking statistics without the social stuff, I would use Libre.fm.
I use it for tracking statistics without the social stuff, except maybe the year-end stats. I currently have a workflow for getting my stats out of Last.fm and then using those for building playlists, and it’d not work with Libre.fm.
I haven't tried it myself but I've heard good things about Listenbrainz. Maybe something for you.
EDIT: The below is completely wrong, ignore.
<del>The server-client model means you can run the server (MPD, Rockbox Zig, whatever) on your homelab, and stream music to multiple clients. So you don't have to copy all your music onto your phone, you can just run an MPD client like M.A.L.P. and it will stream from the files on your server. Then there's just one copy of your music collection, tags, etc.: no more keeping tags up-to-date between the copies on your home server, your laptop, your phone... (Do make sure your files are backed up, of course).<del>
MPD doesn't really do streaming. If you install MPD on your server and then install an MPD client on your phone, the music will play on your server when you press play on your phone. You can re-encode the playback as an audio stream and stream that to your phone, but it's not really what MPD is built for.
MPD has built in HTTP streaming. I know at one point it didn't though.
https://mpd.readthedocs.io/en/latest/plugins.html#httpd
I note that they call it a plugin and also say the purpose of MPD isn't to stream.
Thanks for the correction; edited my comment to ensure nobody gets confused by my mistake. (I'm brand-new to using MPD, just installed it last week, so I had things backwards in my head).
You got it 180 degrees wrong. MPD means many clients can control one playback server.
Thanks for the correction; edited my comment accordingly.
If anyone is looking for opensource software that actually streams to multiple clients, check out Snapcast.
> Rockbox Zig exposes the full Rockbox audio engine — gapless playback, DSP, 20+ codecs, tag database — through gRPC, GraphQL, HTTP, and MPD APIs
https://rockboxzig.mintlify.app
This is brilliant. The forcing function of limited hardware is one of the things that made Rockbox great, and now it gets new life on the desktop.
What's the advantage of using cpal over something like libmpv?
they're at different layers. libmpv is a full media player: demuxing, decoding (via FFmpeg), DSP, output. cpal is just a thin cross-platform PCM sink on top of CoreAudio/ALSA/WASAPI/etc.
Rockbox already brings its own decoders (20+ codecs), its own DSP chain (crossfeed, EQ, replaygain, gapless), and its own mixer. I just need the host OS to accept PCM frames. cpal is the minimal portable shim for that; pulling in libmpv would mean discarding Rockbox's audio pipeline and replacing it with FFmpeg's, which would basically defeat the point of building on Rockbox firmware.
>which would basically defeat the point of building on Rockbox firmware.
What is the point of bulding on Rockbox firmware? I love Rockbox myself too so the answer can be "fun" and that is all right.
Honestly, mostly for fun and love of Rockbox, I've wanted it on my desktop since 2010 and nobody else was going to build it :) That said, Rockbox does bring real things: a battle-tested DSP chain (crossfeed, EQ, replaygain, dithering), gapless playback that actually works everywhere, codec coverage most players have given up on (Musepack, WavPack, ...). It's a lot of mature work to throw away.
Thanks for the reply! I hope the question didn't come off as snarky... I find music players, as a genre of software if you may me, fascinating. Since there is always a new one around the corner... Remember XMMS2!? And people still use Winamp 2.xx... It is fun to always see new takes on this problem. I will give it a whirl!
>Planned: Stream from Tidal
Yes please - Tidal's app is genuinely woeful and doesn't seem to use native API's in MacOS