Rockbox for iBasso DX50 dual boot with stock firmware

[headwhacker]

Rockbox for DX50 with cwm recovery

Thanks to xzcc for porting Rockbox to DX50

Latest build and install steps from Cholero
 

Unofficial Installation instruction for Rockbox on iBasso DX50

prerequisites: A DX50 with any stock firmware. If you have an older rockbox installation with CWM (= all before 02/25/2015), follow first the purple reverting instruction below.
There are 2 different ways for  the update: choose either brown (microSD fat32) or green (internal storage)

• Download the files:
  • Firmware 1.9.4 including the rockbox dualboot app. (older version: 1.9.3)
  • the latest rockbox build* from the official page:

    iBasso DX50 ​

    this is a development build but problems are rare
     source code: rockbox git tree   -   changelog
• connect your player to the computer to have access to its storage 
• extract the update.img form DX50Firmware...zip to the root of your
  a) either microSD card (which has to be formatted to fat32)
  b) or internal storage
• extract the content of the rockbox-build-zip to the root of the internal storage of your DX50 (it contains one single folder: ".rockbox"). If the file manager asks questions about merging or overwriting because of an older rockbox installation, overwrite all existing files (settings won't be lost)
• Update the Firmware (brown or green, as above):
  a) reboot to recovery: Power off the device, then power it on while you are holding vol+then select "apply update from SDcard"
  b) Boot the official Frimware and select: Settings / Advanced / System update
  -> Firmware 1.9.3 containing the rockbox dualboot app will be flashed (update.img)
• that's it, you're done 

 
-> to switch between Mango and rockbox, you have to put the "lock" switch to "locked" position when you are booting then the dualboot selector will appear
 
Revert CWM to stock recovery (if you had an older rockbox installation)

• download stock recovery
• copy the zip file to the root of the internal drive of your DX50 (or where you usually put cwm-zips)
• Reboot to cwm: Power off the device, then power it on with holding vol+
• Flash stock recovery in cwm:
  install zip from sdcard / choose zip from sdcard

 
 
* or an optimized custom rockbox build containing these patches  "Modern User Interface" ps10, User selectable hold switch mode ps13, "Debounce" patch ps1
can be dowloaded from zippyshare
 
 
 
 

 
 
 

Theme Installation How-To (Courtesy of Cholero)

1. Download any Theme you like from the official Rockbox page as a packed zip:
http://themes.rockbox.org/index.php?target=cowond2

2. Connect your player to the computer and open the internal memory (usual name: DX50). There should be a folder "rockbox", open it

3. Open the downloaded theme zip file. In the zip file there is a folder named ".rockbox" (yes, with a dot)

4. Open the ".rockbox" folder in your theme-zip and extract all the content to your "rockbox" folder on your player
you're done, now you can select your new theme in Settings -> Theme Settings -> Browse Theme Files

 
 

 
Themes collection compiled by Deho.
 
Rockbox themes

 

[Cotnijoe]

Looking forward to trying these out once some tweaks are worked out

 

[Varoudis]

  >move settings back to /sdcard
a little bit difficult, have to think how to do it best first
 
 
>Any news about battery performance:
looks not worse than mango to me - low load in 'top', hours of playing
 
 
> Does volume up/down button affects volume in HO? It does not seem to be the case for me. I had to adjust volume from the menu. It appears LO has a fix volume.
lineout should have fixed volume, no?
 

 
Setting on SD? is that good? what if you have multiple SDs?

 

[SkyBleu]

Can I get some UI pictures, if any?
 
I'll upgrade my DX50 to RB when it's stable with less bugs here and there.
 
Good job, xzcc!

 

[spurxiii]

Thanks, I'll try it out soon

 

[xaddictionx]

Is it easy to install rockbox on the DX50?

 

[headwhacker]

Is it easy to install rockbox on the DX50?

 


It's as easy as the same process as the firmware update from Ibasso.

 

[xaddictionx]

Is it easy to install rockbox on the DX50?

 


It's as easy as the same process as the firmware update from Ibasso.

Glad to hear that! will definitely try it out. I thought the steps listed on the page looks horrendously alienated. Couldn't understand the programming codec and steps haha.

 

[headwhacker]

Does Rockbox support sampling rates higher than 24/48 on DX50? Not sure if anyone has answered this question before

 

[nc8000]

Rockbox plays anything but downsamples to 16/48 before sending it to the dac as I understand it

 

[ratinox]

Setting on SD? is that good? what if you have multiple SDs?

/sdcard is the partition on the embedded MMC that is exposed over USB. It's what we typically refer to as the internal storage on the device. This is a legacy of the early days of Android where a uSD card slot was part of the hardware specifications and a microSD card was necessary just to use the OS. When Google eased the uSD requirements they chose to use a chunk of eMMC as the /sdcard file system to maintain backwards compatibility with older applications.

Removable cards are usually mounted as /mnt/ext_sdcard or something similar. DX50 uses the /mnt/ext_sdcard mount point.

Correction: DX50 uses /mnt/external_sd.

 

[jj69]

Is anyone working on the possibility of updating Rockbox to handle greater bit depths and sampling rates?

 

[ratinox]

Can I get some UI pictures, if any?

Ask Google about "rockbox android ui" and select the images tab. It looks like that.

 

[ratinox]

Rockbox plays anything but downsamples to 16/48 before sending it to the dac as I understand it

Correct. And then the DAC oversamples so that most aliasing artifacts are pushed above 20 kHz where they're inaudible, and then it uses a low pass filter at 20 kHz to cut those artifacts off. All that a 192 kHz file does is skip the oversampling step. You still get the 20 kHz low pass filter to remove high frequency artifacts. That's why nobody has bothered implementing so-called high resolution playback in Rockbox. It's just going to be cut off by the DAC. This includes the Wolfson WM8740 chip in DX50. You can read Wolfson's own spec sheet here:

http://www.wolfsonmicro.com/documents/uploads/data_sheets/en/WM8740.pdf

Citing note 2 on page 7:
2. All performance measurements done with 20kHz low pass filter. Failure to use such a filter will result in higher THD+N and lower SNR and Dynamic Range readings than are found in the Electrical Characteristics. The low pass filter removes out of band noise; although it is not audible it may affect dynamic specification values.

 

[ratinox]

Copied over from the main DX50 thread.

>move settings back to /sdcard
a little bit difficult, have to think how to do it best first

Understood. Symbolic links is just the quick and dirty hack that I can do without changing the source code.

>Holding the FF and RW buttons doesn't repeat in menus.
and should?

Yes. For example, on the Clip series, holding "down" continuously scrolls through menus. I expect similar behavior here.