Now that the N9 has become my main music player (with 64gb's of storage how could it not?) I have come to desire some of the functionality I had in my old Cowon J3 as well as the Rockboxed Sansa Clip+ I use when I work out. Really it comes down to having gapless playback, expanded Codec support, crossfading, multichannel equalizer, etc.... I must say that the N9 has surprised me as a music player in a good way. It drives some of my higher end headphones better than expected. I know there's a thread dedicated to comparing the sound of the N9 to other phones/players and it helped confirmed what my ears already told me. It will never be a Cowon J3 (its hardware + BBE makes that device a beast) but can definitely be improved.

With the above in mind how difficult would it be to port the N900's version of Rockbox or build our own? I'm no developer and just recently migrated over from Android to Maemo6 so forgive my newbness if this is a silly inquiry. Are their others interested in such an endeavor? My semester break is coming up and I plan on seriously looking into this and would love some direction!

--chemical1der

I dug out this thread while looking to see if anyone else had commented along such lines; I'm really quite interested myself, even if just for the sake of gapless playback (which I'm really missing on the N9). If anyone has made any progress towards Rockbox on the N9 (even if just finding out specific issues standing in the way), please let us know, and I'll follow up here myself when I get the chance to set up a proper build environment and try and at least compile the Maemo/N900 version for a Harmattan target.

All we need is a properly written player to be happy with, not particularly rockbox itself. N9 produces a very good sound, especially with some alsamixer tunning. So far there isn't any good player out there. There is a couple of WIP project, though.

QuasarMX seemed the best and the most promising so far.
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=81318

I am quite hopeful eventually we will get a proper player feat. all the stuff we need. What QuasarMX foremost needs is more bass!

I do not have a N9 but a N900 and it made me discovering Rockbox. As a walkman-man generation I can say that Rockbox is the most evolutive player I ever seen so far. If I could have it on my own pc, I'll do (the last version of gmusicbrowser sattisfied me at least).

Try Rockbox and any other player will seem a toy.

Not only a good renderer, not only gapless, but playlist management in real time is a must (eg you can delet or move the next song on the current playlist, or add a song permanently or just the time it plays) Realy if someone can port it, it's THE BEST player for music lover.

keithzg: I got sidetracked during the holidays and haven't created my own build environment or looked into port issues quite yet. However, I am still very, very interested in doing this so maybe we could chat via PM?

Julien_2006: yes, once you go Rockbox you never go back!

Darkskies: QuasarMX is very promising! It'll be great when we have a host of music app options for the N9!

-chemical1der

Don't get me wrong, if you want to go for this, be my guest. I am looking forward to get a properly working player too!