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Comment by peterburkimsher | Hacker News Reader

I use iTunes 10.6.3 and sync to an iPod.

That keeps track of play counts on both devices, lets me make smart playlists and playlist folders, and syncs music, contacts, and calendars all over USB without any cloud services prying into my personal data.

Apple went from being a leader in the music-listening industry with excellent UX to trying to compete with Spotify and YouTube, who are frankly not even that great (e.g. trying to keep playing a song in the background).

Flash memory was small when the iPhone came out in 2007, so everything moved to streaming. Now the capacities are finally big enough again (e.g. 128GB iPhone SE), Apple's broken their sync services.

I like having play counts, ratings, and playlists, and I like that I've continually built up my music library since the days of Soundjam MP for the Rio 600.

Doppler is trying to put a new theme on Finder's MP3 playing feature, but it's not the syncing library manager that I need.

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I have a standalone MP3 player the size of a matchbox. (Anybody remember matchboxes?)

The battery is good for 15 hours of play, it takes a 128GB microSD card, and it can play FLAC as well as MP3. The buttons are real and tactile and oriented so that you don't have to look at it to figure them out. It appears as a USB mass storage device with a FAT32 filesystem, so every computer I've used in the last 20 years can put music on it. If you put music in directories, it will navigate the directory structure. If you build m3u playlists, it will use those. You can ask for a random shuffle of all tracks or inside a directory.

It doesn't have play counts or ratings. If you have a USB3 microSD reader, that's faster than updating directly through the USB2 interface.

Also, it's running an open-source alternative firmware called Rockbox.

Please, I have been looking for a descent music player for a while (since my Creative Zen had a hard drive failure). Did you get yours new or used (if so, which brand? how much money? where from?), did you hack it together your self (if so how)?

Probably a Sansa Clip or similar (not too familiar with their current model lineup but it roughly mirrors my experience with them back when I used one).

I own several Clip Plus models. They're great... and discontinued.

rockbox.org firmware takes about three minutes to install, and can be uninstalled at any time.

>Apple went from being a leader in the music-listening industry with excellent UX to trying to compete with Spotify and YouTube, who are frankly not even that great

They might "not even be that great", but they are where all the listeners and the money are.

Ripping, listening to non-streaming music, etc, is becoming rapidly a hobbyist thing for older generations and a minority of hipsters. The whole rise in music industry profits in the last years was in the streaming area, purchases and digital downloads are down.

So anybody touting some specialized device, that takes ripped or bought mp3s, etc, is mostly living in the past as far as the market is concerned.

>They might "not even be that great", but they are where all the listeners and the money are.

Thats true I think. Or maybe people just stopped buying music and Apple had to figure out another way to make money. It wouldn't make sense for them to invest in features that made non-streaming easier or more appealing to consumers. I noticed this very recently on a road trip where somebody mentioned it was going to be boring without music since they were out of data. I was confused for a second because I guess I'm the older/hipster dude, I've always thought of streaming as a doubly wasteful model where you lose battery life along with data.

> I've always thought of streaming as a doubly wasteful model where you lose battery life along with data.

Exactly! I was a streamer too, but then I switched to flip phone. So now I think I'm even hipstery than you.

Basically, no music for me except good old fashioned radio. And London Grammar on YouTube.

> I use iTunes 10.6.3 and sync to an iPod.

> That keeps track of play counts on both devices, lets me make smart playlists and playlist folders, and syncs music, contacts, and calendars all over USB without any cloud services prying into my personal data.

I use the latest version of iTunes and an iPhone with the latest iOS on it, and still use them in exactly the same way you describe. Like you, I prefer to have complete control over my own data, without passing it through third-party cloud services. So far, Apple has not taken away the ability to do this, despite their heavy marketing push for iCloud. (I literally have never used iCloud at all for anything, ever.)

I use whatever the latest version of iTunes is and sync to an iPhone X over my personal Wi-Fi connection. For whatever reason their default sync is very bad. If you instead put all your iTunes music in a playlist and choose the option to sync only that playlist it works nearly perfectly. I've been using this method since the iPhone 4s came out and have only had issues syncing maybe once or twice a year. I sync a few times per month.

does this method allow other playlists to sync as well? it sounds like you have only 1 playlist on your iOS device.

You can sync as many playlists as you want. Its honesly the best way to put music into the device.

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