u/alexmyago

The iPod mini often gets overlooked by Rockbox theme makers. Most layouts are built for color screens, leaving the mini’s tiny 138×110 grayscale display with very slim pickings.

To fix this, I built myago, a minimalist 1-bit theme inspired by the onebit style for the iPod Classic, fully engineered from scratch for the mini's specific resolution. I have just submitted it to the official Rockbox theme site.

Features:

- Dynamic Stereo Peak-Meter: A full-width visualizer where solid bars represent loud zones and narrow, perforated bars handle the quiet ones. The fill spreads outward from the center with the music.

- Integrated Status Badges: Four distinct badges (format, bitrate, shuffle, repeat) featuring cut-out inverted text, sitting right on the seam between the visualizer and the progress bar.

- Clean Progress Bar: Perforated layout with rounded ends, with track times perfectly aligned to the bar edges.

- UI Essentials: Dynamic play/pause/FF/RW indicators, a battery meter, and a lock icon that only appears when the hold switch is active.

- Menus: Clean, legible navigation based on the original Rockbox Nimbus font.

Tip for the best visualizer behavior: Tighten your peak-meter range via Settings → General Settings → Display → Peak Meter (set Min to -30 dB and Max to -4 dB). Since this is a global setting, it can't be packaged inside the theme itself.

Credits & Tech:

Assets: Status icons sourced from Oscar by Remo Hofer; progress-bar bitmaps from PodMini by Guillaume Cocatre-Zilgien (both CC-BY-SA 3.0). The visualizer and badge layouts are entirely original.

This is my first public theme release, so feedback is highly welcome. You can download it now on the official Rockbox website.

64GB CF card, fresh battery, Rockbox, and a custom minimalist theme with spectrum visualizer I built myself.

Also swapped the LCD filter from blue to green — reads perfectly in direct sunlight with the backlight off. Screen stays on always.

Looks stock from the outside. Anything but stock on the inside.