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Comment by blondin | Hacker News Reader

i still have my mp3 player from 2009. i am always worried that it will die one day and i wouldn't be able to find a good replacement for it.

i recently heard on a podcast that smartphones are bad as music players because they are very distracting. especially for athletes. a single notification or message can lower their performance for minutes. music on its own can however boost performance.

as most mp3 players are moving to using android as their main OS and requiring wifi, location and whatnot, i have learned to appreciate the simplicity of the first few generations of mp3 players. so i really like what this project is doing for some reason.

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You can find many music players from second-hand markets, still in good conditions. I purchased one for 15 dollars from eBay (it used to cost a hundred dollars) and installed Rockbox, now it can decode sounds in all encodings, including Vorbis and Opus, and I can even use it as a TOTP authentication token or Morse Code keyboard for your computer (I don't recommend one to use it as such tools, it's not good at doing these jobs, but I tried because I could... If you are a hardcore programmer, you can even try programming a 3D demoscene on the player!)

If you insist on buying a new one, the Hi-Fi community still makes audio-only music players as well.

Agreed, lots of no-name Chinese mp3 players out there at good prices; buy a box of 10 of the super simple $5 USB/SDHC models and you’ll be set for years to come.

Which $15 player runs Rockbox?

It won't be $15 -- but an affordable player that is great with Rockbox is the SanDisk Clip+. It's got a decent screen, really small form factor, microSD.

My main Rockbox'd unit is an iPod Video (5.5) with an iFlash Quad (up to 4x microSD cards) and a 2000mAh battery. Not the most expensive project, but not as cheap as the Clip+.

My guess is that the parent is talking about the Sansa c200 or something similar.

It looks like there's a few iPod Video models on eBay for $16.

Make sure they're not for parts. All you really need is the main logic board, but it's nice to start with a complete unit.

The best iPod Video is the Enhanced / 5.5 that has the 'search' item. An 80gb version of this also has more RAM, which I don't think is utilized at this time, but it might down the road. This may not be accurate now, but it was a few years ago.

The 80gb will come with the fat back. If you do the mod I did, you can use the slim back from the 30gb.

Dunno about the situation where you are, but I was recently surprised to find a pocket video player in a mall. Now, looking at an online aggregator, I see plenty of music players from 5 to 25 bucks. It seems, though, that more of them integrate video too, since I guess screens are cheap and easy these days.

I bought an MP3-playing PCB for $3 or so. You do need to do some light soldering (it came without a headphone jack connector IIRC) and maybe print a case for it, but you can have a dirt-cheap, very simple iPod-shuffle-like MP3 player in half an hour.

Just get an old crap-phone, stuff a big SD card into it, turn off wifi, turn off cellular. Ta-daa!

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