I think I'm being the biggest downer on Rockbox here lately, but I'd like to be a rockbox fan.
I love how the original people came up with such a huge leap forward in portable OSs. I hardly know how to use all the user variables in the system.
The Hi-Res domain is here and I'd like to see Rockbox keep up.
As a complete OS novice, I imagine the way rockbox adapts to different machines is by being constructed in such a way as to resemble a virtual machine running on top of a PC or whatever. I wonder how the audio bits are handled between ports ? Ideally, the bits should be sent as directly as possible. Also, what does rockbox use for clock speed ?.... I don't know, how directly is it in tight speed control?
Before I end, I've heard one good thing, so far, about Windows 10, against a lot of bad things. I read somewhere that the audio handling engine has been completely upgraded to handle hi-res audio directly without downsampling. I'm not well enough informed to know if that's even accurate.
My only real issue with the X3's rockbox port is it's
A) a closed source fork;
B) works on the hardware which is not as the same as working in harmony with the hardware for best results - this is why rockbox users find their volume level to be decreased or sound to be a bit flatter overall
I have iPods, Sansa Clips and other older DAPs all running rockbox, so personally I was not in any kind of a rush to have yet another device running the same OS.
Rockbox has never been as concerned with Hi-Res playback as premium DAPs and I don't see that changing unless the Rockbox community who is contributing to development starts caring about Hi-Res enough to implement it.
Rockbox is a little weird because it was made as an alternate firmware to replace the crappy OS on old Archos hard drive based players/recorders (recording has always been tied into Rockbox as a core feature) - after it was stable on Archos did they experiment with forking it to other platforms and fixing up whatever needed to be fixed to make it work on that device. iPods eventually got cracked and Rockbox eventually got stable on iPods, and as iPods represented the vast majority of consumer DAPs at the time, that helped to spead knowledge of Rockbox greatly.
10 years ago when iPod Rockbox support just hit the scene, it was missing several features, crashed frequently, and only ran on a few of the oldest iPod models. Was very unpolished and unfinished seeming.... very reminiscent of what we're going thru with the X3 now. except the only person doing anything for the X3 is XVortex who doesn't have any interest in working with the Rockbox team, so we basically are stuck with one half-finished port
I don't mean to insult XVortex or his efforts to make it run on the X3, i'm sure he has his reasons for not sharing the code with the Rockbox team, but it's not good for anyone in the long run as that Rockbox version he forked will become outdated sooner or later and will fall out of relevance. I am regretful he did not choose to work with the Rockbox team on this, especially as people on the Rockbox forum are properly working on a FiiO X1 port, which shares much hardware with the X3. However if the X1 port is stable first, then it wouldn't be hard to take what they did and port to the X3 from there...
? Me personally - I like those designs. PS: do you have any idea if they will be released this year for customers? At least x5? Probably I can't afford x10 
