RPod is the Rockbox fork I wanted for my iPod Classic. On top of stock Rockbox:

• Album covers while browsing
• Files and Playlists that open where you expect
• A sleep timer
• One custom theme, Hermit

The look

• Album covers while browsing. Open an artist and every album shows up with its cover, so you pick by sight. Stock Rockbox and its themes only show covers on Now Playing.
• The backdrop. A Karl Friedrich Schinkel landscape, dithered for the iPod screen, behind every menu. It also fills the boot and shutdown screens.
• Gold. Icons drawn pixel by pixel, and menu titles in the style of the logo.
• The selection. A see-through gold row with letterpressed text, so the backdrop shows through.
• Now Playing. One gold panel: song, cover, album, artist, time and a thin progress bar. While music plays, the menus keep a small player under the list.

What changed from stock Rockbox

About 1,100 lines of C on top of stock Rockbox. Release by release: CHANGELOG.md.

Browsing

• Album cards: open an artist under /Artists and every album shows as a card with its cover and name. An album without art gets a default card. Only the rows on screen load their cover, and a few stay cached. "All Songs" is pinned first.
• Bookmarks as cards: cover, book name and time.
• Files: a gold icon for every kind of file. A playlist opened here shows its songs, and play starts from the song you pick.
• Files and Playlists from the main menu always open at the top, never in the last folder or playlist you were in.
• Every song in a playlist has the note icon.

Menus

• Main menu, Settings and the Now Playing menu trimmed to six items each, with the icons lined up row by row across them.
• Sleep in the Now Playing menu: 15, 30 or 60 minutes, or End of track, which pauses when the current file ends (one file per chapter makes it "end of chapter" for audiobooks).
• Brightness gets its own shortcut folder: Low, Mid, Max.
• Repeat is Off, All or One. A-B repeat and repeat-shuffle are gone.
• Shorter menu names through a custom language file.

Volume

• Volume reads 0 to 100, in even steps: every click moves it the same amount.
• The volume bar is full at 100.
• The volume limit is fixed at 0 dB. Above that, Rockbox pushes the output into distortion.

Small things

• Song titles on screen drop remaster notes: "Song (2011 Remaster)" shows "Song". Files and tags stay as they are.
• A line still scrolling from the previous screen stops before the next one draws.
• The selected row keeps its highlight after the list wraps around.

Install

Use at your own risk. iPod drives and music databases are fragile: an interrupted copy, an unclean unplug or a bad firmware can corrupt the database or the drive. Back up your music and your .rockbox folder before installing.

Every time you copy anything onto the iPod (the zip, covers, music), eject it properly and wait until it is fully unmounted before you unplug. On Linux: sync, then udisksctl unmount -b /dev/sdX1. Pulling the cable mid-write is the most common way to corrupt it.

One zip, everything in it: the RPod firmware, codecs, plugins, the theme, fonts and language, set up to boot straight into the RPod look and menus. Sound settings stay at Rockbox defaults.

1. First time on Rockbox? Install the Rockbox bootloader once with Rockbox Utility, the official installer. Already running Rockbox: skip this.
2. Download rpod-ipod6g-<date>.zip from Releases.
3. Plug in the iPod, unzip onto it so the .rockbox folder lands at the top of the drive, eject.

The zip writes over the iPod's .rockbox folder, settings included, so back it up first if you have one. Your music is untouched, and so is the bootloader.

Album covers

The covers come from small thumbnails in each album folder, in three sizes: 32x32 for the album rows, 56x56 for the player under the menus and 80x80 for Now Playing. tools/make-thumbs.sh makes all three from the album's cover.jpg (or folder.jpg, front.jpg), or else from the first song's embedded art. Albums are expected as Artists/<artist>/<album>/. It runs on Linux and macOS and needs ImageMagick and ffmpeg.

# make the thumbnails in a staging folder; nothing on the iPod is touched yet
tools/make-thumbs.sh /path/to/IPOD/Artists ~/rpod-thumbs
# copy only the thumbnails onto the iPod
rsync -rtm --include='*/' --include='cover.*x*.bmp' --exclude='*' ~/rpod-thumbs/ /path/to/IPOD/Artists/
# eject properly before unplugging
sync && udisksctl unmount -b /dev/sdX1

Albums it finds no art for are listed in ~/rpod-thumbs/no-art.txt.

Build the firmware

The full source, with every change as its own commit, is the rpod branch of the Rockbox fork: github.com/remigius-labs/rockbox/tree/rpod. It sits on top of Rockbox commit 59cc0282ec38919e22b7448d0f24c0713da4c21e.

git clone -b rpod https://github.com/remigius-labs/rockbox.git
cd rockbox
# ARM toolchain: tools/rockboxdev.sh, then:
mkdir build-ipod6g && cd build-ipod6g
../tools/configure --target=29 --type=n
make -j8 && make zip

The same changes as one file: firmware/rpod.patch, which applies to that commit with git apply.

The custom language file (shorter menu names) builds with make $PWD/apps/lang/remi.lng inside the build folder; a prebuilt one is in theme/.rockbox/langs/.

Tools

Design tools used to make the theme, in tools/. They expect a Rockbox simulator build; set RPOD_SIM to its folder (default ../../rockbox/build-sim).

• icons.py, usb-medallion.py, mock.py, rbfont.py: icon set, USB screen, offline screen mocks drawn with the real Rockbox fonts.
• make-thumbs.sh: the album cover thumbnails.
• make-release.sh: builds the one-zip release from a firmware build.
• take.sh: records a scripted run through the simulator in a hidden X display (the GIF above).

Limits

• RPod is built for my own iPods and shared for anyone curious. The release zip has only been used on my own devices and is untested as a fresh install, so back up first and use it at your own risk.
• Built and tested on the iPod Classic 7th gen (Rockbox target ipod6g), 320x240 only.
• Albums split into CD 1 / CD 2 folders do not show a cover in the album rows yet.
• The theme's colours are tuned for the iPod screen; the simulator looks brighter.

License

• Firmware patch and tools: GPL-2.0, like Rockbox (see LICENSE).
• Theme: CC BY-SA 3.0, starting from PodOne, a theme by Guillaume Cocatre-Zilgien (see theme/LICENSE).
• The backdrop is a painting by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), public domain.
• Fonts in the release zip: Terminus by Dimitar Toshkov Zhekov (SIL Open Font License 1.1) and Nimbus (public domain), both from the Rockbox font pack (see theme/FONTS.txt).