Rockboxed

So owing to my New Year’s resolution to get away from a lot of stuff, including subscriptions to tech conglomerate companies I don’t really need, I wanted a personal audio player. I remembered throwing one in a drawer because of some annoyances and decided to dig it out, before I’d spend money on a used iPod I could modify to my wants.

Fiio

There’s this subgenre of Hi-Fi equipment from China called Chi-Fi. I don’t know whether it’s a term of endearment to most people, but it is to me. You get relatively high quality equipment from brands like Fiio, Sound Artist and Topping for lower prices, especially on the consumer side. Now I’m not really an audiophile, I can barely tell the difference between 128 kilobit and 320, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. It does let me use cheap equipment without much annoyance though!

On the audio side, that is. I have this little Fiio M3K that out of the box has an onerous operating system. It works, sure, but it’s clunky and the touch interface on the front makes it slow to use. It has a bunch of features I don’t need, accessing music through it’s menu’s is confusing and its internal database for music indexing is strange and slow.

Rockbox

Enter Rockbox, this wonderful little project that lets you flash alternative operating systems on to all kinds of little Personal Audio Players. You follow the instructions and pretty soon your player looks like this:

It’s much faster and easier to use, does the basics just right and then gets out of your way. Highly recommend!