Specifications

Chapter 2. Installation 13

2. Installation

Installing Rockbox is generally a quick and easy procedure. However before beginning

there are a few important things to know.

2.1. Before Starting

DRM capability. It is possible that installation of the bootloader may lead to you per-

manently losing the ability to playback ﬁles with DRM.

USB connection. To transfer Rockbox to your player you need to connect it to your

computer. For manual installation/uninstallation, or should autodetection fail

during automatic installation, you need to know where to access the player. On

Windows this means you need to know the drive letter associated with the player.

On Linux you need to know the mount point of your player. On Mac OS X you

need to know the volume name of your player.

Note: The following steps require you to change the setting in Settings → Sys-

tem Settings → USB Mode to MSC from within the original ﬁrmware. Further

note that all original ﬁrmware settings will be lost immediately after patching the

bootloader, so you may need to correct this setting again after installing rockbox.

2.2. Installing Rockbox

There are two ways to install Rockbox: automated and manual. The automated way is

the preferred method of installing Rockbox for the majority of people. Rockbox Utility

is a graphical application that does almost everything for you. However, should you

encounter a problem, then the manual way is still available to you.

There are two separate components which need to be installed in order to run Rockbox:

The Rockbox bootloader. The bootloader is the program that tells your player how

to load and start other components of Rockbox and for providing the dual boot

function. This is the component of Rockbox that is installed to the ﬂash memory

of your Sansa.

The Rockbox ﬁrmware. Unlike the Sansa ﬁrmware, which runs entirely from ﬂash mem-

ory, most of the Rockbox code is contained in a “build” that resides on your

player’s drive. This makes it easy to update Rockbox. The build consists of a

The Rockbox manual (version rUnversioned directory-150516) Sansa Clip+