I have for the last week been trying out the Rockbox alternative firmware for my DAP.

Sound quality is, as far as I can hear, about the same. The sound quality using the standard firmware is excellent and this is still the case with Rockbox.

Feature-wise, Rockbox is well ahead of the default iRiver firmware. Quite a few of the extra features aren’t really all that useful, but some are. Gapless playback in particular stands out as very nice indeed. For a lot of albums, a slight pause between tracks doesn’t matter very much, but for live albums, and those where one track runs into another, it can be quite irritating.

Usability-wise, I think the default firmware has a slight edge over Rockbox. However, it’s hard to say how big the difference is because I am quite used to the default operation, so anything different is going to feel slightly odd anyway. The other downside is that when running the Rockbox software, the battery life seems to be shorter than the default. Again, I’m not sure how big the difference is, but there definitely is one.

Overall, I have been fairly pleased with Rockbox, but I was pretty happy with the player as it came anyway. Were it not for the gapless playback, I would probably go back to the default firmware, but that feature does just swing the balance. I’m sticking with Rockbox for now.