I bought a cheap, $30 refurbished MP3 player off of woot back in December ’08: the . I love the price, but the firmware was buggy, the interface was sloppy, and the features were moot.
Enter Rockbox. An open source alternative firmware for a bunch of different popular MP3 players. It has a huge community of developers and users, so–naturally–the code is pretty solid and the features are innumerable.
The Sansa MP3 Player
Sansa running Rockbox
Sansa running doom in Rockbox
Unfortunately, the Sansa e260v1 is officially supported, but the Sansa e260v2 is not. That being said, I–and many, many others–have successfully loaded Rockbox onto their e200v2 series Sansa.
Of course, when making modifications to your firmware, you always risk the chance of completely bricking your device. Do not attempt this unless you’re willing to accept that risk. If you do brick your Sansa, you might be able to recover it
Note: As this is a pre-release, it has been put out only for testing purposes. Things were stable for me, but you’re likely to experience bugs. If you do discover an unknown issue, please report them by replying to the initial post. Lastly, I think there are known issues with 2 pieces of this release: SD and USB support.
If you want test latest (bleeding) version of Rockbox, you can compile it yourself straight from the svn trunk. One more great thing about Rockbox: there is ample documentation to assist your ever endeavor
Anyway, I’m off to hack my reborn, amazing Sansa– staring with a theme.
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Hi, I’m Michael Altfield. I write articles about opsec, privacy, and devops ➡
[…] can be absolutely ruined by poorly designed firmware. My old Sansa e260 was this way, but once I installed rockbox, it was like the device was freed from a software prison. And, of course—another benefit of […]