8.  General Settings

8.1.  Playlist

The Playlist sub menu allows you to configure settings related to playlists.

Recursively Insert Directories.

If set to On, then when a directory is inserted or queued into a dynamic playlist, all subdirectories will also be inserted. If set to Ask, Rockbox will prompt the user about whether to include sub-directories.

Warn When Erasing Dynamic Playlist.

If set to Yes, Rockbox will provide a warning if the user attempts to take an action that will cause Rockbox to erase the current dynamic playlist.

8.2.  File View

The File View menu deals with options relating to how the File Browser displays files.

Sort Case Sensitive:

If this option is set to Yes, all files that start with upper case letters will be listed first, followed by all files that begin with lower case letters. If this option is set to NO, then case will be ignored when sorting files.

Sort Directories:

This option controls how Rockbox sorts directories. The default is to sort them alphabetically. By date sorts them with the oldest directory first. By newest date sorts them with the newest directory first.

Sort Files:

This option controls how Rockbox sorts files. All of the options for Sort Directories are available in this option. In addition, there is a By type option which sorts files alphabetically by their type (such as .mp3) then alphabetically within each type.

Show Files:

This option controls which files are displayed in the File Browser.

All:

The File Browser displays all files and directories. Extensions are shown. No files or directories are hidden.

Supported:

The File Browser displays all directories and files supported by Rockbox (see section A.1). Files and directories starting with . (dot) or with the hidden flag set are hidden.

Music:

The File Browser displays only directories, playlists and the supported audio file formats. Extensions are stripped. Files and directories starting with . or with the “hidden” flag set are hidden.

Playlists:

The File Browser displays only directories and playlists, for simplified navigation.

Show Filename Extensions:

This option controls how file extensions are shown in the File Browser.

Off:

The file extensions are never shown.

On:

The file extensions are always shown.

Only unknown types:

Only the extensions of unknown filetypes are shown.

Only when viewing all types:

Only show file extensions when Show Files is set to All.

Follow Playlist:

This option determines what directory the File Browser displays first. If Follow Playlist is set to Yes, when you enter the File Browser from the WPS, you will find yourself in the same directory as the currently playing file. If Follow Playlist is set to No, when you enter the File Browser from the WPS, you will find yourself in the directory you were in when you last left the File Browser.

Show Path:

If this setting is set to Full Path the full path to the current directory will be displayed on the first line in the File Browser. If set to Current Directory Only only the name of the current directory will be displayed.

This has a similar effect on the Database browser. If set to Current Directory Only or Full Path, then the title of each menu will be displayed on the first line in the Database Browser.

8.3.  Database

This sub menu allows you to configure the database. See section 4.2 for more information about using the database.

8.4.  Display

LCD Settings:

This sub menu contains settings that relate to the display of the player.

Backlight:

The amount of time the backlight shines after a key press. If set to Off, the backlight will not light when a button is pressed. If set to On, the backlight will never shut off. If set to a time (1 to 90 seconds), the backlight will stay lit for that amount of time after a button press.

Backlight (While Plugged In):

This setting is equivalent to the Backlight setting except it applies when the player is plugged into the charger.

Backlight on Hold:

This setting controls the behavior of the backlight when the Hold switch is toggled. If set to Normal the backlight will behave as usual. If set to Off the backlight will be turned off immediately when the Hold switch is engaged and if set to On the backlight will be turned on and stay on while the Hold switch is engaged.

Caption Backlight:

This option turns on the backlight a number of seconds before the start of a new track, and keeps it on for the same number of seconds after the beginning so that the display can be read to see song information. The amount of time is determined by the value of the backlight timeout setting, but is no less than 5 seconds.

First Keypress Enables Backlight Only:

With this option enabled the first keypress while the backlight is turned off will only turn the backlight on without having any other effect. When disabled the first keypress will also perform its appropriate action.

Scrolling

This feature controls how text will scroll in Rockbox. You can configure the following parameters:

Scroll Speed:

Sets how many times per second the automatic horizontal scrolling text will move a step.

Scroll Start Delay:

Controls how many milliseconds Rockbox should wait before a new text begins automatically scrolling.

Scroll Step Size:

Defines the number of pixels the text should move for each step, as used by the Scroll Speed setting.

Bidirectional Scroll Limit:

Rockbox has two different automatic horizontal scrolling methods: 1) always scrolling the text to the left until the line has ended and then beginning again at the start, and 2) moving to the left until you can read the end of the line and then scrolling right until you see the beginning again. Rockbox chooses which method it should use depending of how much it has to scroll to the left. This setting lets you tell Rockbox where that limit is, expressed in percentage of the line length.

Screen Scrolls Out of View:

Screens can be manually scrolled horizontally by pressing Long Prev/Next. Setting this option to Yes will keep the list entries at their fixed positions and allow them to be scrolled out of view, whereas No will only scroll those entries which surpass the right margin.

Screen Scroll Step Size:

Defines the number of pixels the horizontal manual screen scroll should move for each step.

Paged Scrolling:

When set to Yes scrolling vertically on pages that surpass the screen size will page up/down instead of simply changing lines. This can be useful on slow displays.

Status/Scrollbar:

Settings related to on screen status display and the scrollbar.

Scroll Bar:

Enables or disables the scroll bar at the left.

Status Bar:

Enables or disables the status bar at the upper side.

Volume Display:

Controls whether the volume is displayed as a graphic or a numeric value on the Status Bar. If you select a numeric display, volume is displayed in decibels. See section 6.1 for more on the volume setting.

Battery Display:

Controls whether the battery charge status is displayed as a graphic or numerical percentage value on the Status Bar.

Peak Meter:

The peak meter can be configured with a number of parameters.

Peak Release:

This determines how fast the bar shrinks when the music becomes softer. Lower values make the peak meter look smoother. Expressed in scale units per 10ms.

Peak Hold Time:

Specifies the time after which the peak indicator will reset. For example, if you set this value to 5s, the peak indicator displays the loudest volume value that occurred within the last 5 seconds. Larger values are useful if you want to find the peak level of a song, which might be of interest when copying music from the player via the analogue output to some other recording device.

Clip Hold Time:

The number of seconds that the clipping indicator will be visible after clipping is detected.

Clip Counter:

Show the number of times the clip indicator went active during recording in front of the peak meters.

Scale:

Select whether the peak meter displays linear or logarithmic values. The human ear perceives loudness on a logarithmic scale. If the Scale setting is set to Logarithmic (dB) scale, the volume values are scaled logarithmically. The volume meters of digital audio devices usually are scaled this way. On the other hand, if you are interested in the power level that is applied to your headphones you should choose Linear display. This setting cannot be displayed in units like volts or watts because such units depend on your headphones.

Minimum and maximum range:

These two options define the full value range that the peak meter displays. Recommended values for the Logarithmic (dB) setting are -40 dB for minimum and 0 dB for maximum. Recommended values for Linear display are 0 and 100%. Note that -40 dB is approximately 1% in linear value, but if you change the minimum setting in linear mode slightly and then change to the dB scale, there will be a large change. You can use these values for ‘zooming’ into the peak meter.

Default Codepage:

A codepage describes the way extended characters that are not available within the ASCII character set are encoded. ID3v1 tags do not have a codepage encoding contained so Rockbox needs to know what encoding has been used when generating these tags. This should be “ISO-8859-1” but to support languages outside Western Europe most applications use the setting of your operating system instead. If your operating system uses a different codepage and you are getting garbled extended characters you should adjust this settings. In most cases sticking to “ISO-8859-1” would be sufficient.

8.5.  System

8.5.1.  Start Screen

Set the screen that Rockbox will start in. Selecting Resume Playback will resume playback where it was when the player was shut off if there is a playlist to resume and will then end up in the WPS. Selecting Previous Screen will make Rockbox start in the screen it was when the player was shut off.

8.5.2.  Battery

Options relating to the battery in the player.

Battery Capacity:

This setting can be used to tell Rockbox what capacity (in mAh) the battery being used has. The default is , which is the capacity value for the standard battery shipped with the player. Rockbox uses this value to estimate remaining battery life for the info screen and WPS. Changing this setting has no effect whatsoever on actual battery life. This setting only affects the accuracy of the battery life estimation as shown on screen.

Charge During USB Connection:

This option lets you control whether the player should charge during the USB connection and hence draw the full 500mA. Turning it Off is recommended if the dap is connected through an unpowered USB hub or a laptop port.

8.5.3.  Disk

Options relating to the hard disk.

Disk Spindown:

Rockbox has a timer that makes it spin down the hard disk after it is idle for a certain amount of time. This setting controls the amount of time between the last user activity and the time that the disk spins down. This idle time is only affected by user activity, like navigating through the File Browser. When the hard disk spins up to fill the audio buffer, it automatically spins down afterwards.

Directory Cache:

Rockbox has the ability to cache the contents of your drive in RAM. The Directory Cache takes a small amount of memory away from Rockbox that would otherwise be used to buffer music, but it speeds up navigation in the file browser by eliminating the slight pause between the time a navigation button is pressed and the time Rockbox responds. Turning this setting on activates the directory cache, and turning it off deactivates the directory cache.

Note: The first time you enable the directory cache, Rockbox will request a reboot of the player and upon restarting take a few minutes to scan the drive. After this, the directory cache will work in the background.

8.5.4.  Idle Poweroff

Rockbox can be configured to turn off power after the unit has been idle for a defined number of minutes. The player is idle when playback is stopped or paused. It is not idle while the USB or charger is connected , or while recording. Settings are either Off or 1 to 10 minutes in 1 minute steps. Then 15,30,45 and 60 minutes are available.

8.5.5.  Limits

This sub menu relates to limits in the Rockbox operating system.

Max Entries in File Browser:

This setting controls the limit on the number of files that you can put in any particular directory in the file browser. You can configure the size to be between 50 and 10,000 files in steps of 50. The default is 400. Higher values will shorten the music buffer, so you should increase this setting only if you have directories with a large number of files.

Max Playlist Size:

This setting controls the maximum size of a playlist. The playlist size can be between 1,000 and 32,000 files, in steps of 1,000 (default is 10,000). Higher values will shorten the music buffer, so you should increase this setting only if you have very large playlists.

8.5.6.  Car Adapter Mode

This option turns On and Off the car ignition auto stop function.

Car Adapter Mode:

When using the player in a car, Car Adapter Mode automatically stops playback on the player when power (i.e. from cigarette lighter power adapter) to the external DC in jack is turned off. If the Car Adapter Mode is set to On, Rockbox will pause playback when the external power off condition is detected. Rockbox will then shutdown the player after the length of time set in the Idle Poweroff setting (see above). If power to the DC in jack is turned back on before the Idle Poweroff function has shut the player off, playback will be resumed 5 seconds after the power is applied. This delay is to allow for the time while the car engine is being started.

Once the player is shut off either manually, or automatically with the Idle Poweroff function, it must be powered up manually to resume playback.

8.6.  Bookmarking

Bookmarks allow you to save your current position within a track so that you can return to it at a later time. Bookmarks are saved on a per directory basis (for dynamic playlists) or for individual (saved) playlists. They are stored next to the directory/playlist they reference. You can store multiple bookmarks for the same track.

Bookmark on Stop.

This option controls whether Rockbox writes a bookmark to the disk when playback is stopped. Setting this to No turns automatic bookmarking completely off. In contrast Yes turns automatic bookmarking on while Ask asks on stopping the track if a bookmark should be created. With the above options Yes and Ask if there is an existing .bmark file the current position information will be added to the front of the existing list, up to the maximum number of allowed bookmarks per file (currently 10). If no .bmark file exists, one will be created with the new bookmark information. Finally, if the Maintain a list of Recently Used Bookmarks option is enabled, the bookmarking information will be added to recent bookmarks list.

Yes – Recent Only.

Turns on automatic bookmarking – One bookmark only

Ask – Recent Only.

Asks if a bookmark should be created when stopping track – One bookmark only

With the two Recent Only options, nothing is written to the .bmark file. If the Maintain a list of Recently Used Bookmarks option is enabled, the bookmarking information will however be added to recent bookmarks list.

Note: The Resume function remembers your position in the most recently accessed track regardless of how the Bookmark on Stop option is set.

Load Last Bookmark.

When the Load Last Bookmark option is set to Yes, Rockbox automatically returns to the position of the last bookmark within a file when that file is played.

When the Load Last Bookmark option is set to Ask, Rockbox will give the user the option of starting from the beginning of the track of or from the bookmark.

When the Load Last Bookmark option is set to No, playback always starts from the beginning of the track, and the user must play the bookmark or use the Load Bookmark function in the Main Menu, while the file is playing, to resume at the bookmarked location.

Maintain a list of Recently Used Bookmarks.

This list of Most Recent Bookmarks (MRB’s) may be accessed through the Recent Bookmarks option of the Bookmarks sub menu of the Main Menu. When set to Yes each new bookmark will be added to the MRB list. Setting this to No disables the addition of bookmarks to the MRB list. Unique Only behaves like the Yes setting but in addition all older entries for the current (dynamic) playlist will be removed from the MRB whenever a new entry is added.

Bookmark Actions context menu.

When viewing any bookmark list, pressing the standard context menu key (Long Select) will bring up the Bookmark Actions context menu.

Resume will commence playback of the currently-selected bookmark entry.

Delete will remove just the currently-selected bookmark entry from the list.

8.7.  Language

This setting controls the language of the Rockbox user interface. Selecting a language will activate it. The language files must be in the /.rockbox/langs/ directory. See section 12.1.3 for further details about languages.

8.8.  Voice

Voice Menus.

This option controls the voicing of menus/settings as they are selected by the cursor. In order for this to work, a voice file must be present in the /.rockbox/langs/ directory on the player. Voice files are large and are not shipped with Rockbox by default. The voice file is the name of the language for which it is made, followed by the extension .voice. So for English, the file name would be english.voice. This option is on by default, but will do nothing unless the appropriate voice file is installed in the correct place on the player. The Voice Menus have several limitations:

• Setting the Sound Option Channels to Karaoke may disable voice menus.
• Plugins and the wake up alarm do not support voice features.

Voice Directories.

This option controls voicing of directory names. A voice file must be present for this to work. Several options are available.

Spell.

Speak the directory name by spelling it out letter by letter. Support is provided only for the most common letters, numbers and punctuation.

Numbers.

Each directory is assigned a number based upon its position in the file list. They are then announced as “Directory 1”, “Directory 2” etc.

Off.

No attempt will be made to speak directory names.

You can use pre-generated .talk clips to have directory names spoken properly, but you must enable this explicitly (see below).

Use Directory .talk Clips.

This option turns on the use of .talk clips for directories.

On.

Use special pre-recorded MP3 files (_dirname.talk) in each directory. These must be generated in advance, and are typically produced synthetically using a text-to-speech engine on a PC.

Off.

No checking is made for directory .talk clips; they are not used even if present. This can reduce disk activity.

Use of a .talk clip takes precedence over other directory name voicing. Otherwise (e.g. if a .talk clip is not available), voicing uses the method set under Voice Directories above.

Voice Filenames.

This option controls voicing of filenames. Again, a voice file must be present for this to work. The options provided are Spell, Numbers, and Off which function the same as for Voice Directories. You can use pre-generated .talk clips to have filenames spoken properly, but you must enable this explicitly (see below).

Use File .talk Clips.

This option turns on the use of .talk clips for files.

On.

Use special pre-recorded MP3 files for each file. This functions the same as for directories except that the .talk clip file must have the same name as the described file with an extra .talk extension (e.g. Punkadiddle.mp3 would require a file called Punkadiddle.mp3.talk).

Off.

No checking is made for file .talk clips; they are not used even if present. This can reduce disk activity.

Use of a .talk clip takes precedence over other filename voicing. Otherwise (e.g. if a .talk clip is not available), voicing uses the method set under Voice Filenames above.

Say File Type.

This option turns on voicing of file types when Voice Filenames is set to Spell or Numbers. When Voice Directories is set to Spell, “Directory” will be voiced after each spelled out directory.

Announce Battery Level.

When this option is enabled the battery level is announced when it falls under 50%, 30% and 15%.

See VoiceHowto for more details on configuring speech support in Rockbox.