My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman
rubenerd.com
rubenerd.com
It may well be better than the competition currently, but it is still got a shitty interface that demands your attention for anything. Small example: to switch off you have to press and hold the off button (edit: a few seconds), then it pops up a modal but asks you whether you really want to turn it off. Err, yes please? The 'off' button at the top is actually well engineered you can't hit it by accident, it's hard to hold in and you have to do it for several seconds. I don't want to a confirmation dialog popping up that when I'm getting off a bus. It isn't needed.
The damn thing demand your attention all the time. I used to have an Archos, I could navigated using its clunky front-the lever without looking. Not with this you can't. You have to concentrate.
The buttons shown on the side are too small to feel unless you concentrate (the smaller ones are ~2mm wide, the volume 'bar' is thankfully usable after a bit of practice).
There's other problems with it - turn it on? Pretty animation + almost a minute startup time before it's ready. Unplug it from charging, it remains on despite going blank, on standby, looking like it turned itself off - come to use it in a few days, it's gone flat - "but I just charged it, what happened?".
It's beautifully well-made in hardware, sound is really great, the UI... I bloody hate navigating the music on it. It's an absolute pain in the arse. Bring back proper user interfaces, not touch screens. You know, with user testing.
It's a lovely bit of kit that I just don't want to use.
Rant over.
And the hardware itself was great, even when it was for a proprietary standard.
Their first Thunderbolt support came crammed into a hacked USB port on one of their laptops.
I'm sure I'm forgetting some other examples.
It can only charge the battery while switched on. The last time the battery was at 15% when I plugged it in, and the Walkman instantly booted up Android, draining the battery to 7% before it started charging. I do not know what happens if the battery charge isn't enough to boot up the OS and I'm too afraid to try.
It's a really neat device and I like using it, but it has so many puzzling quirks.
It might go nowhere, but if they're lucky, some really good interface ideas might pop up that could then be incorporated into the official product. This Walkman line and its embedded software has a relatively long lifespan, so a lot of people might benefit from improvements.
Ditto for navigation, in car systems (the designers of non-tactile systems deserve a special place in hell and hopefully their victims don't haunt them in person), phones and so on. They all seem to thrive on your attention instead of just getting the job done and staying out of the way otherwise.
They do? My LG has a power button and it turns off when I press it. So does the TCL in my studio.
> I can’t describe what a breath of fresh air this is compared to how bad modern smartphone music and streaming apps have become.
Well, I was hoping they would try to describe it, because personally, I would have to wear my most deeply shaded nostalgia glasses to think that MP3 player UX has ever been comparable to what Spotify offers nowadays.
And we can not even directly compare a MP3 player to Spotify, which is paid to do an entirely different and way more complicated job, considering that you are able to browse and organize a completely different and incomparably larger (and automatically growing) set of media.
In the end, this feels like a case of someone convincing themselves of a peculiar diet, where the believe in its effectiveness does all the heavy lifting. Which is great, when it works for that person – but probably not applicable in general and likely worse than the market solution.
As for high fidelity audio, I doubt there is much between devices these days. I remember back when I was buying portable cassette and, later, CD players there did used to be a real noticeable difference between the audio fidelity of different brands (ironically with Sony often cashing in on their brand and than having worse fidelity than hardware from significantly cheaper competitors). However these days everyone is listening to lossy compression over bluetooth so there isn't really going to be much room for the host hardware to improve. As always, the headphones you use will make much more of an impact.
Of course some phones are quite solid in terms of sound, with some music there's no difference either way, but without comparison you can't really know what's missing unfortunately.
I do really notice the difference on non-portable hardware though. I have used a bunch of different USB devices and they vary wildly. I have 4 amplifiers and several audio switching boxed rack mounted right next to me (they power 9 speakers, 2 CRT TVs, 4 LCD monitors and a projector :D).
Worse, for which usecase?
I as a musician like to listen to full albums (as opposed to single songs) I like to manually read up on music and then listen to that specific music from that specific world region and era. Spotify can be neat to discover some starting points for that search, but it is arguably shit at the listening experience I am looking for. For people who don't care so much about what is playing in the background it is certainly doing a good job tho.
I need to listen a lot to mixes and recordings as well, and an MP3 player certainly has an easier UX for that, than the typical phone - plug it in and copy over. How would you do that on spotify? I use a nextcloud sync setup, which works — but setting that up to work flawlessly with your audio-player app (e.g. poweramp) can be a bit tricky at times.
So yeah, Spotify ftw. if you convinced yourself of that peculiar diet, to use your words.
For most use cases.
> I as a musician like to listen to full albums [...]
How does Spotify prohibits you as a musician from listening to an album or reading up on music or looking at music from eras? I detect nothing in any of these tasks that Spotify would make harder than any of the alternativ ways I know of. If anything it should be easier, considering the considerable amount of meta information that resides in Spotify (for example finding music from a specific era or displaying lyrics) and that you don't have to gather yourself.
> How would you do that on spotify?
I wouldn't. I would use foobar for that, because that's the right tool for the job. I also try no get confused about what the job is, what the available tools are and which tool can replace which for a specific job.
That's not the only UX hurdle if you're someone who curates a library of things to listen to instead of engorging from an algorithm. Sure, you can follow albums and artists but since you can't organize them, these features gets useless if you have anything more than 100 items. The UI is in general is way too simple, with very sparse information density compared to your traditional music player. Was it because of necessity or style that all these previous tools opted for all these features Spotify shirks? I'll let you decide that.
You could add the whole albums to the playlist, one by one, and then play the playlist w/ shuffle disabled. This last bit makes it a limited workaround, however.
On the other hand, Spotify API could allow to implement the custom solution to shuffle these, similar to https://spotifyshuffler.com/, if you have enough skills, time, and determination to do that.
One workaround that I and other users make use of is to just add the first track of albums as links to the albums themselves. It's whatever. It's a bit stupid this is something I have to fucking deal with in the biggest music interface that the planet makes use of. Anyways, I mainly mentioned that as example of the ethos of Spotify UI/UX and what kinds of user they're primarily catering to. I guess I'm in the excluded group in this implementation of "worse-is-better" or something. (Is there a term for that group? Power user can't cover it because people with disabilities are usually in it.)
Like yourself, I do also listen to full albums. You can do that on Spotify very easily. You can listen to recommendations (either via Spotify's own suggestion engine or curated playlists) of music from genre's, region, era, etc too. Sure you cannot add your own mixes to Spotify but the beauty of smart phones is that I can use a different app for that (and as an ex-DJ I really am into listing to DJ sets so I very much to use my phone in that capacity).
And this is really the point of the GPs comment. It wasn't that Spotify (specifically) replaces the need for a walkman but rather that smart phones support an array of more convenient ways to consume music with Spotify as one example. If you don't like Spotify then that's fine because we all have our own personal preferences. But you're not just limited to Spotify on a smart phone.
Can you load into Spotify a very specific recoding that's rarely available? I have a few CDs hard to source from rare live recordings.
If you just want to listen to background music, or a given song from a given bad, sure. If you want to listen to a specific recording that happened at a given date for which you have the CD, I don't think Spotify can do that.
> I think smart phones are the best thing to happen to portable music.
If they had hardware buttons, yes, but that's rarely found. Also, the DAC is rarely any good (less of a problem now that LDAC and AptXhd are becoming popular).
Are these hardware buttons and a good DAC worth $400 to $4000? Maybe not to you, but they are worth that for me.
Weirdly, yes you can. I stumbled across that option myself on the desktop client when search for a song that wasn’t in Spotify’s catalogue.
> If you just want to listen to background music, or a given song from a given bad, sure. If you want to listen to a specific recording that happened at a given date for which you have the CD, I don't think Spotify can do that.
It can, but you really don’t need to use Spotify if you don’t want to. I still keep Subsonic around for exactly this kind of scenario (and podcasts too). So I use Spotify for 90% of my listening but Subsonic for anything I’ve curated myself from physical media.
> If they had hardware buttons, yes, but that's rarely found.
All smart phone has hardware volume buttons. My Bluetooth earphones have hardware play and pause buttons. And the device we are comparing it against (the new Sony Walkman) is also touchscreen based like smart phones. So there isn’t really anything between modern Walkmans and smart phones these days.
> Are these hardware buttons and a good DAC worth $400 to $4000? Maybe not to you, but they are worth that for me.
You have no idea how much I’ve spent on audio hardware so please don’t assume I cheap out and don’t care about audio quality. In my home office alone I have an entire rack full of professional grade hardware. But I’m also pragmatic about what I buy. A £400 MP3 player isn’t going to sound any better than an iPhone when I’m listening to lossy music. The real differentiator there is what (ear|head)phones I use. However when I am sat at home my vinyl collection, I notice all the nuances of cheaper hardware much more.
I don't care much about volume buttons - it's usually adjusted to what I think is right and rarely tweaked.
What I care about is buttons to control the tracks: there are no next/previous track and play button on the smartphones I tried.
> And the device we are comparing it against (the new Sony Walkman) is also touchscreen based like smart phones.
It also has actual hardware buttons.
> So there isn’t really anything between modern Walkmans and smart phones these days
Well, if you exclude the buttons I care about, yes.
> when I’m listening to lossy music
You do, but I don't!
> The real differentiator there is what (ear|head)phones
Agreed, it's often the limiting factors. I had played with FLAC files before but couldn't find much of a difference.
Now that I have proper headphones and earbuds, I do!! And it's actually why I'm waiting for proper neckbad earbuds to consider exercicing with music: just like I don't want to listen to lossy music, I don't want to be exposed to bad earbuds.
Spotify has two drawbacks though: you need a constant Internet connection and it removes tracks at will. The constant internet connection can be solved by downloading media to the device, but the fact that some tracks (even whole albums) can become unavailable suddenly is utterly disappointing. This is the reason I keep buying CDs. Spotify is an amazing tool to listen on the go but whenever I feel a real connection (no pun intended) with an artist's music, I have to buy their art in a physical format.
Blame the copyright holders aka the Big Four/Big Five: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry
Streaming services would gladly stream anything you want to you.
There are services that let you download to your local storage, whatever you buy from them. Bandcamp is the obvious example, but in the past there was eMusic and even iTunes. Spotify could do it, but they just don't want to. How else are they going to help themselves to your wallet every month?
Sure streaming services want to give me anything I desire...anyhting except allow me to download an audio file that I can keep on my system. Then I wouldn't have to give a crap about whether Spotify still had the rights to it.
Well, you'd think so, but I've had albums which I had downloaded disappear if I hadn't listened to them for a while.
So the "download" isn't really stable.
So just in those simple ways Spotify is worse.
That said, it was still one of my favourite portable music players because it sounded amazing and supported MP3 CDs too.
You might have different experiences to me.
My iPod was never a distraction whilst driving in the way that Spotify, with it's manifold failure modes and inconsistent/unresponsive UX, can be.
With depressing regularity I drive without either music or podcasts because that's preferable to dying (or killing someone else) in a car crash because I'm fussing with Spotify after it's crapped out in some weird way yet again.
Again, not a problem I ever had with my iPod. I know they do crash occasionally - happened to a friend - but I can't remember a single incident in the 7 - 8 years I used mine regularly (multiple hours, every day) where it crashed.
Spotify is terrible software to the point of being dangerous. I can't see how that is desirable UX.
I'll agree that people with early iPods had an easy time finding their music. If you truly love recommendation engines, that old style is not for you. But it would be nice to have the same interface on CarPlay for the rest of us.
Definitely.
Your experience does sound demoralizing. I am not sure I have had Spotify crash on me thus far and certainly not with any regularity. I think it's safe to assume that you have an untypically bad experience, because if what you described was true for most people, Spotify would have no users.
Which begs the question, why do you stick to it? There are competing services. How could they possibly do a worse job, in light of what you are describing?
I had free Apple Music for six months and I think it actually sounds better than Spotify (or at least I preferred it, I absolutely do not have audiophile ears) but I don't want to pay for a third music service (we also have Pandora because their radio stations are great) and my kids prefer Spotify.
It's obviously a niche product, but if they started streaming in FLAC and paired it with their own audiophile player, it would be a fantastic marketing stunt they would probably turn a profit by selling the devices. God knows what audiophiles do to be able to listen to audio on the go with a good DAC and amp.
Leaving aside the UI issues (most of which can be alleviated with hardware buttons having tactile indicators like bumps / different sizes etc), my core concern is you are leaving not just the preservation job (prey none of the albums/songs gets deleted after an IP right renegotiation) but the curation job to Spotify.
I don't want that. Curation is the most important thing even. I carefully select the albums I want to listen to. I don't ever want software to try to guess my tastes or fill in the blanks when the playlist is over.
It might be good for Spotify as they can show better stats (more tracks listened to, more engagement, whatever) but it's not for me as I'd rather have audio stop to let me take another decision about what I want to listen to: I care about my own experience much more than Spotify might.
-------------------
From the article:
> You don’t need to use any special desktop software; you mount the Walkman as a USB storage device and transfer files. Wait… that’s it? Yes!
>The player indexes any music you add, but keeps the files in place. This lets me use rsync to regularly diff and copy new ripped CDs or downloaded tracks across, even on FreeBSD. It also decouples syncing from music organising, so no more finagling iTunes in Wine, or using the garbage new macOS Music.app. As a (diagnosed) OCD suffer, this literally makes me happier than it should.
----------
These are features I had in my MP3 player about the time the first iPod came out (looked like a thumbdrive with a couple of buttons and a 2-line LCD screen on its side). Features I highly prefer, along with the fact that no internet connection is required at any time. I'm not looking for a device to be the front end for Spotify, Apple, or any other service - just an MP3 player that lets me play podcasts, music, lectures, etc. - e.g., any audio file that I want to, ideally in most of the common audio formats (including ogg).
[Edited for format.]
Boy... what a massive range of prices. There's a touchscreen-less device for $75, one resembling the one described by the author at $350, an $850 model with different chassis and higher output but nothing else I can immediately see, and then models jumping up to $1100, $1400, $3200 (!), and even $3600 (!!!) which is apparently made out of a gold-plated copper. I was vaguely interested in such a product but even $350 seemed too much, let alone the other ranges of products with, for the general audience, not much in the way of obvious differing benefits.
Give me a dedicated interface if you’re gonna charge me that much for a dedicated device! At least comparable to an iPod nano in “time to play mp3”
For instance Sony's audio branch is probably completely separate from the camera branch, which is separate from the TV branch, which doesn't talk to the EV car branch. I don't know if financially they are separate companies, but from what I got they are clearly cut divisions.
I imagine them as an archipelago of products and services, all under a common flag, but only talking to each others by delegations.
For instance Sony has a NFC venture that is really good with encryption and hardware data transfers, it's even integrated in their VAIO computer line. Yet their Network Walkman was an utter pile of poop when it came to move songs from the computer to the encrypted MD disc.
They also support Felica (NFC-F) on most of their hardware.
> Yet their Network Walkman was an utter pile of poop when it came to move songs from the computer to the encrypted MD disc.
The only NFC part in the walkman is pairing headphones by touching them - something I actually enjoyed!
Now I wish music could be transferred in the same way!
I was also skeptical, but after hearing the difference, I'm not coming back. I'm rediscovering my favorite tracks! I'm hearing instruments in the background that I couldn't hear before!!
> even $3600 (!!!) which is apparently made out of a gold-plated copper
TBH I don't care much about gold, but 40h battery life? That speaks to me. And if there's as much of an audible difference as I got from my middle range NW-Z507, I'll be happy to spend $3600 on an item that brings me happiness every single day.
You’ll be happy to hear that you also get that on the cheap low-end devices!
It won't matter much if their quality is so poor I don't want to bother listening, or if the interface doesn't provide hardware buttons meaning I won't be able to skip tracks in my car.
I'll get one and see how I like it!
With a rockboxed sansa I get about 60 hours of battery life and bookmarking on stop with a list of recent bookmarks per file.
Can this sony do any of that? Hardware music player have gone down hill.
Even if you don’t love the lack of headphone jack in the typical phone [1], the solution is an adapter that costs less than $10. What open hardware project can compete with that?
[1] Non-audiophiles are perfectly happy with AAC/AptX codecs over Bluetooth, the bottleneck is still the quality of your headphones, IMO, and the convenience of never tangling a cable greatly outweighs missing out on the audiophile ghost whispering that they supposedly hear
Labeling those who vehemently miss 3.5mm as audiophiles is a straw man or phenomenal proportions.
I like aux because it's easy. It just works.
> It has NFC for pairing with wireless headphones, but it also has a headphone jack so you can choose. Shock of horrors
Although the best one I own is a Stax which needs an entire speaker amp.
(My old galaxy s2 had microsd, replaceable battery, grippy exterior,and of course 3.5 mm jack while being smaller in every dimension so I am skeptical as to some of the arguments other than "apple did it so entire industry will copy it")
As indicated above - I'm not am audiophile but I enjoy listening to music, and miss the easy convenience of 3.5mm jack on my phone along with everything else. A headphone amp would completely counter act the convenience and practicality.
I still have them both with me and in active use - mostly as remote controls, kids games, etc.
Perhaps more pertinently, my daily driver is a Galaxy Note 8, which also has a 3.5mm jack and MicroSD card. There's really nothing that my 4-generations newer, work-mandated iPhone has, in terms of functionality and definitely battery life, that Note 8 does not. iPhones are about sexy impracticality, and that's clearly where market has gone (Unlike S2 & S5, Note 8 also cannot be held without a case) - I'm just a old grouch who misses the olden days :).
You can turn on do not disturb.
Solved problems.
However, they really are terrible for podcasts and audiobooks. There aren’t any real bookmarking features to speak of. For that, I use a Rockbox-compatible player (my preference is for a refurbished old HDD-based iPod with a new battery and SD card storage).
You can buy a one-foot 3.5 mm extension cord with a right angle plug for a few dollars to avoid repeatedly stressing the jack.
+1, it's a great audiophile quality tiny little player.
i recently got a HiBy R3 Pro Saber, but still frequently come back to my Rockbox'ed Clip+ for its much smaller size.
Sansa Clip+s with Rockbox is the perfect solution. I went through three before being unable to pick up any more without paying triple price.
Why do great products disappear?!
I have had two Clip+ in the last 15 years. I retired the first one because I broke the clip off; it still works otherwise. I was using them about 2 hours a day until the pandemic.
Now I am using an hiby R3, which is quite clunkier, but allows me to choose between microsd storage and streaming from the phone in high quality, while also having 2.5mm balanced IEMs (kind of a gimmick, but I like their sound a lot).
edit: and of course being able to finally ditch USB-mini is great.
I'm not sure what causes these players to become unresponsive. It's happened to me when it tries to play an unusual file or after I've transferred music to the device and left it plugged into the computer for a while.
They are still my favorite standalone portable mp3 player, even with the stock firmware.
Until you see something done well, we get seduced by "features" and loose track of how nice a really well design thing can be. (Got to hand it to old Apple, they did know design.)
My biggest gripes are the interface.
- It takes forever to rebuild its database when I add new music to the SD card. No matter how much I searched, I couldn't figure out how to build this myself on the computer side when I added music.
- Creating playlists isn't possible. You can add to existing playlists, but if you want new ones you need to add them from the computer side. I did find that if I add a skeleton playlist file to the SD card I can add to it on device, but that means I need to plan ahead for what playlists I'm going to want.
- Navigating is a pain when you have a big collection. I collect live music, so sometimes I have hundreds of "albums" for a given artist. It's painful to find what I want.
The inconvenience of using it has led me to usually leave it at home and fall back to the Music app on my iPhone and use iTunes Match to shove all of the music up into the cloud after I've transcoded it from lossless to a smaller lossy form. I know lots of people hate that app, but so far it's the only one that I can fly around in my 90k+ song collection with. I'm always on the lookout for better ones, or better dedicated devices, but so far no luck finding one that isn't a pain to use.
I'm fussy about what I like, I buy a CD, rip, and listen. Usually I want to throw that track away after a few listens. You can't delete the track you are listening to (you can sort of, depending on how you found it via the UI, but usually you can't) so you must remember to delete it at home on your main computer. That's a major feature for me and it messes that up.
I do agree with your post - the UI is bad. Even with the tiny buttons, a better UI would be nice. It seems to be designed for people with relatively small collections. I find this a lot - devices that market to audiophiles emphasize sound quality as all that matters, but often ignores that audiophiles may also have massive music collections. They usually suck on the "how does the audiophile organize and find the music they want to hear through that fancy expensive hardware" aspect.
Your attention is too valuable. We are squandering it on devices that are designed so you can't think clearly.
Also, my GPS can (and has) jumped out of my backpack and dropped over 100ft and worked (and still works) just fine. Not sure I would like to bet my life hoping the same outcome with my phone while I am in the middle of nowhere.
Bag one if you can get it since it has been discontinued.
That there is no wifi in my mind is a feature rather than a bug.
I also like to think that model name is an homage to the hip hop group, N.W.A. :-P
[0] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-walkman-nw-a55-hi-res-16gb...
If you have a full Sony setup (walkman + headphones) DSEE Extreme sounds just like that, and seems to be purely software.
One of my "tests" is to run my favorite Pavarotti rendition of Verdi's La donna e mobile - with DSEE Extreme on, it's night and day.
However, on my normal FLACs, it's far less important.
Some people even dislike it: https://www.reddit.com/r/sony/comments/ipcqf9/dsee_extreme_o...
I’ve played pipe organs that do the same thing with “resultant” stops to fake 32’ or 64’ stops.
In the end the experience was far inferior. My wireless earphones were harder to manage and connect, the UI and build quality were outright unpleasant ($40 price tag, wasn't willing to spend more), and podcasts wouldn't save the point I last stopped at. Not only that, but the MP3 player didn't recognize the track number from within the MP3 data, meaning that albums were played with the tracks in alphabetical order, until I found a program that could change the file names to contain said number at the start of the file name.
The problem was clearly the really crappy MP3 player I got, but I couldn't find anything better that was reasonably priced in the market available to me in Europe. If I could find something then I'd love to give it another shot.
I clip mine to the inside of my left pants pocket, and other than track selection, I can operate the entire thing without having to look at it.
Is this still true with latest iPhone? I would expect that iPhone hardware is not a limiting factor for audio quality (assuming a wired adaptor for HiFi headphones)
Some older devices I've owned had good-quality DACs - a Palm Treo being the best. My current ThinkPad has a downright awful DAC, to the point where music sounds _better_ over my Bluetooth headphones (Audio-Technica ATH-M50xBT) than when plugged straight in. The quality issues are even more egregious for the cheap dock I use for my work MacBook Pro, which puts out so much electrical noise over the headphone jack as to be annoying even in in Zoom calls.
[EDIT: looks like the Apple 3.5 mm headphone dongle has a good DAC, see other comments by hug/JohnJamesRambo below]
The latest iPhone doesn't have a DAC in it for headphones. The little 3.5mm-to-lightning dongle is active -- it contains a tiny DAC/amp powered by the lightning port.
Is the tiny lightning dongle a good DAC? The answer is largely "it's fine". Anyone who isn't on the cork-sniffing side of audiophile trends will find it acceptable, assuming the amp is capable of driving the load of whatever headphones you're plugging into it.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...
I remember when I had a first gen iPhone and the call quality was atrocious with AT&T compared to my RAZR on Verizon. You get used to it over time but back to back it was pretty dramatic.
https://www.whathifi.com/advice/how-to-play-hi-res-music-you...
Quoting the article:
"Next, you need a decent DAC such as the Audioquest DragonFly Cobalt, Cyrus soundKey or Chord Mojo 2 and a good pair of headphones, such as the Grado SR325x, Shure Aonic 3 or Austrian Audio Hi-X55.
This is just a starting point, of course. Don’t be afraid to build up to a more revealing system. You could combine the Chord Hugo 2 DAC with a pair of Beyerdynamic T1 (3rd Generation) headphones for a more premium set-up. That might be a touch overkill and punishingly transparent for an iPhone, but these are hi-res files, after all."
More to the point I don't want dongles for my phone either. These are all solutions for Apple cheapening the product.
I’ve got a decent quality pro audio interface and monitor headphones. I’ve also got airpod pros. The AirPods sound much much better and I prefer listening to anything with them.
It’s all subjective.
> I’m not an audiophile, and I’m sure said people would blanch if they read about the files I play. But the audio quality is a noticeable upgrade from my iPhone 8. It sounds so much clearer, especially in the midrange. Its EQ settings also add extra sparkle and pop, for want of better words! It’s the biggest uplift in sound I’ve experienced since I bought AKG monitors for home.
According to gsmarena measurements, the output of the iPhone 8 is extremely accurate across the entire spectrum[1]. Sampling a few gsmarena reviews, this is also true for a typical modern Samsung or Xiaomi phone, or even an ancient iPhone 4s.
I believe accurate audio quality is indeed a solved problem, and what the author's describe as an upgrade in quality is just more pleasantly tuned (though distorted) EQ settings (c.f. the "warm" sound of vinyl vs accurate redbook CD-audio).
[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_8-review-1664p7.php#
We must have very different definitions of "budget" because 200 EUR for MP3 player is nowhere close to budget line in times when you can buy decent budget phones for that money or how much I spent for great cassette Panasonic walkman. He is also comparing prices of technology at peak with price of technology pretty much nobody buys anymore and they should be giving pretty much for free.
Btw 16GB model having 12.26GB available capacity I'd expect from some Android phone and not dumb MP3 player.
It is shocking how bad the experience of listening to my own music has become on iphones. Dongles (different for ipads and iphone of course), itunes for windows is barely usable, there is a bug they never fixed where the music player on iOS randomly mismatch the album artwork, and there are so many conflicting gestures that I always end up messing what I am trying to do. And like a year ago an OS update auto-decreases the volume if it deems I am listening too loud. Android isn't an option for me because Google.
But it's a pain to have to carry two devices, manage two batteries.
And I already own the music, legally purchased on itunes and amazon. Why would I rent it?
I use Spotify for previewing, exploring and making some buying decisions but my actual collection is mine. It's lossless, DRM-free and I plan to have it for ages to come.
Granted my music tastes are esoteric but silently modifying my playlists felt grievous. Now I make sure that subscription money goes on supporting artists directly.
Here's a very in-depth showcase of your options: https://barrowclift.me/post/fourth-annual-ios-music-player-s...
For me the killer feature of the desktop music.app is still the option to transcode to a lower bitrate during sync. My lossless music library spans close to 2 TB (and growing) these days. SD cards are very expensive at that kidn of storage - so in contrast to the article sd cards certainly don't provide limitless space.
Anyway. To meet mobile storage requirements I need to transcode it to 256 kbps AAC and I don't want to handle this manually or manage a second lossy library. music.app / iTunes easily does this on the fly during sync.
I'm sure other software / hardare players can do that too - but if it's the same process why would I carry an additional device around? The iPhone is just very convenient for that purpose. Otherwise I really like Sony's Walkman range.
Bag one if you can get it since it has been discontinued.
It's also helped me rediscover a lot of old music from my formative years. If I had to choose between my old favorites and all the new neat stuff I've found on Spotify, I would choose the old stuff! And I can still pull out my phone for those occasions I want something on Spotify, but if that happens enough, I buy the CD and it gets loaded into the collection.
It even sent me down a rabbit hole of getting a home stereo again. It's so nice leaving music playing in our living room.
For music on the go, iTunes makes it dead simple to copy/paste playlists onto my android phone's storage.
If the audio quality isn’t better why is it so much better than the “bad” subscription services?
I understand critiques of how little they pay artists but I mean from a customer perspective, why is spotify et al bad?
I assume you have to buy download organize and sync the music for this system?
Is it just nostalgia? Just a single purpose device that cant text you etc?
Because Spotify et al doesn't give you a big directory full of MP3s. On top of that, the physical interface and features of a small dedicated player is a better user experience.
Smartphones can play offline media. They can play media hosted on a private server. Nobody’s forcing any smartphone user to use Spotify in particular. There’s always alternatives like VLC and countless others that offer that same functionality.
To me, a dedicated player is redundant hardware with less processing power and refinement than a typical smartphone.
Even Apple, king of the locked down proprietary experience, has a Music app with the option to completely disable and hide their streaming service from even being visible. You can sync music via a USB cable or WiFi from local files just like it was an original iPod.
Sometimes offline requires more effort. I would rather my kid have a dedicated MP3 player that does just that instead of a phone that requires locking down with too many points of breach. Way more cheaper to replace too compared to a lost/damaged smartphone.
The other thing is, most smartphones today are insanely over-complicated and not reliable at all. They consume an insane amount of system resources, their battery life is piss-poor, they're constantly being updated which leads to more instability. And new devices aren't necessarily backwards compatible with old apps, meaning you might end up with a phone just for music anyway, or end up losing a useful app. A dedicated device with a simpler RTOS can actually function faster, better, more reliably, for longer.
And to top it all off, the software of a Sony Walkman is usually top-notch. Good EQ presets, an interface designed to make it easy to navigate, with all the player options you want, with UX front and center. Quality control is high because you have to assume the user will never update the firmware.
And having a bunch of MP3s by default is just the simplest thing you can do. Usually the software auto-indexes and sorts and creates playlists etc by the ID3 tags, but if not, you can organize them manually into folders and manual playlists. You have pretty much total control over the music selection, experience, quality.
I don't have to worry about my music being removed because the licensing changed at the streaming provider. I tried various streaming services and all of them removed music from me at some point. This isn't something that's particularly negotiable for me.
I can trivially add songs that aren't on a streaming service using youtube-dl or similar.
I can change songs by pressing a physical button on the side of the player, meaning it doesn't have to leave my pocket and I don't have to look at it. This is particularly useful while exercising.
My main criticism is that this is all redundant hardware with basically no unique capabilities.
Even if the DAC is extra special, that’s something you can get on a phone via USB.
It gets more and more difficult to have a UI dedicated to offline music - you can disable streaming, but you can't disable the 'Radio' section of the Music app for example.
Similarly, the user experience has got quite a bit worse for navigating your catalogue: 10 years or so ago, you used to be able to click the Name of the Artist or Album that was playing, and it would jump to either the artist or the album respectively: these days, on iOS 15, doing that does nothing other than jump back to the currently playing song list (so current album normally), neither does hold-and-press. I have to navigate with the back button, or go back through library, and find the artist each time, or use search.
There are third part dedicated apps and I've tried some of them (and bought Ecoute and VOX), but they're not perfect either.
I need my smartphone to do a whole bunch of things outside playing music, and restricting myself to specific models with physical audio control buttons and small screens makes the market a lot smaller and would probably leave me with a poorer phone than picking one without needing to think about its ability to play music while exercising. I did this for my previous phone and the result wasn't very pleasant, so went with the separate players this time around.
Different headphones might be an option, but again a lot of the better phones are ditching headphone jacks, so it would be restricting my phone options.
- They don’t use any mobile data, and work when in a mobile-phone black spot (e.g. the national parks I go to most weekends). This is the main one.
- I can store all my music on there, without needing to use any storage space on my phone.
- They last forever with some basic maintenance. My iPod was made in 2006. I’ve upgraded the battery and replaced the HDD with an SD-card, but otherwise it just keeps on going.
- I can switch EQ profiles on my Walkman super-easily to suit different music or headphones. No navigating menus, it’s done in under a second.
- Tactile controls and voiced menus on my Rockboxed iPod. I can use the device entirely without looking at the screen. Handy when driving, but also useful when jogging or cycling, any other time you’d rather not stare at a screen instead of being aware of your environment.
- I can load them up with the exact pressing of music I want to listen to. For many old albums, which have gone though a dozen re-releases and remasters, this makes a difference. In fact, for some albums I have several different releases on my player, all with their distinct character, pros and cons.
- Brilliant bookmarking in Rockbox for audiobooks. Super customisable. And dedicated players never do a software update and lose your state. It’s always ready to go, precisely where I left it.
- Car mode. Brilliant for cars like my weekender that predate proper phone connectivity. Rockbox will automatically pause your audiobook when you turn off the ignition and start again when you’re back.
- Ability to enable dynamic range compression to combat road noise. All in a few button presses, without looking at the screen.
Are they for everyone? Of course not. But all of the above things matter to me personally.
I use iPod Classics, I haven’t tried rockboxing any, though. I’ve been meaning to but haven’t yet.
Many artists I like aren’t on all (or any) of the streaming platforms. I also still buy CDs and generally like owning my copies as much as I can.
I hate user interface changes/companies like Spotify having the ability to disable basic features on a whim
No internet, buy once/no ads/no drm, and no touchscreen are important to me. The click wheel is just so good lol
I’ve started using my old iPod video again, and enjoying it for music, but curious on your use case for it as deviated audiobooks. How did you rebuild it specifically for audiobooks? Just toss RockBox on it?
I also generated “talk files” to voice the filenames.
My Walkman is an NW-A45 upgraded with custom firmware from www.nwmods.ml.
There’s theoretical stuff about losing access to music but there’s the entirely practical issues that come from playing music off of a remote server that has to track plays etc vs stuff on disk and a software stack that doesn’t have to be concerned about new features or some upselling to meet KPIs.
And of course a dedicated player is just a player, so you’re gonna be able to quickly open and do stuff. The problem with Omnidevices is you gotta first navigate to the single purpose thing
This has happened to me noticeably a bunch of times. It happened on Spotify, which I’ve since switched away from, but it happens on Tidal too (which I use now). I’m not sure if Spotify still has this feature, but Tidal will show me a song “grayed out” if it was on a playlist but it’s unavailable now. It isn’t often, but sometimes songs/albums that I really like just… go away. You wouldn’t always notice, but it is definitely a very real issue!
* Offline mode still doesn't work properly, after literally years of development. If you lose connection while streaming and want to switch to your 'downloaded albums'? Nope, the app will hang on a blank screen or crash. As londoner, this means spotify basically doesn't work on the tube at all - again, _even in offline-mode_.
* App will generally blank screen, hang, or crash semi-regularly for no apparent reason at least a couple times a day.
* Audio quality is awful. The default is 96kbps, which I believe even the most untrained listening can hear the crumminess of.
* Tons of missing music, even from mainstream artists.
* UI makes it difficult to navigate playlists <-> artist <-> song <-> album, traversing the hierarchy of music associations
* UI prioritises pushing podcast & other unwanted commercial content at you, make it difficult to find what you want and navigate the library
Then you've got the scumminess of the company itself that you alluded to (not paying artists, toxic corporate politics, etc).
One of my most cherished personal mottoes: "If the answer involves giving money to Sony, you asked the wrong question."
¹ https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/support/digital-music-pla...
Also please add an option to slow down or speed up the material with reasonable anti-aliasing and an option to retain pitch.
Please make it so that you can scroll through thousands of mp3s and preview without interruptions.
Let me store cue points recallable by dedicated physical buttons.
At this point you may see that I am actually describing professional DJ player, but these things are mad expensive and bulky.
It's helped me rediscover some of my classics!
The 507 is Android, which was both a pro (more apps) and con (battery life) especially since the Sony default player is a bit special. I didn't need Android as I don't use streaming, but I wanted USB-C, and that excluded previous models like the A55.
The battery life is less of a problem than I thought it would be, as my earbuds are drained first.
However, I'm still not a fan of the Sony music player. If you want to try Sony newest Android lineup, I recommend installing the foobar music player.
If you use wired headsets and the limited battery life is a problem for you, check the 1ZM2: https://musicphotolife.com/2022/05/sony-wm1zm2-review-digita...
A very important, perhaps dominant, factor in all of this is how the music was ripped/encoded. Except in my car, for which I did separate rips, I don't bother with MP3-320. For the X5, having 200 CDs ripped via WMA9 locks me in, until I can find a week or two to re-rip to a more modern lossless format.
I grew up on vinyl via my (crazy/rich) older brother's Class A/B stereo. I'm spoiled, and feel sorry for the people today that think MP3-120 is "good enough".
I prefer the 900N outside, and the 1000XM inside.
To exercise with some music, I'm waiting for good neckband headphones with active audio cancellation: ideally something like the Anker Soundcore Life U2 - same form factor and USB-C plug, but with LDAC, AptX HD and a quality at least on par with the Shure AONIC.
Yes I'm super picky :)
> Hearing the sound-stage and subtle do-dads buried by lesser set-ups is a pet-peeve of mine.
Oh so much this!! I'm hearing instruments that I hadn't noticed before! The first week, I thought it was in my head, because some of the tracks I've been listening to for years started sounding different!!
But no, the Sony is that good. Again, it's worth every dollar.
> I'm spoiled
Now I'm spoiled too :) I just can't forget how much better it made my favorite tracks!
TBH, the Sony has been my best purchase of these last few years: it has even rekindled my interest in music.
Right now I'm exploring "pop urbaine", a very interesting genre that I didn't even know existed.
My favorite tracks are inbetween EDM and Raeggeton, the best example being "On fleek" by Eva - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_eEW2Ioe-o (starts at 0:30)
I would never have expected I'd take a liking to french music, but here I'm! Thank you Sony!!
> A very important, perhaps dominant, factor in all of this is how the music was ripped/encoded.
This too!
I only use FLAC ripped from known-good sources like DDD audio CDs, but after reading a few things like https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/51326/spotting-a-f... and https://musicfans.stackexchange.com/questions/12545/original... I've been thinking about developing a "scoring" app that would basically do a spectrogram and look for suspicious banding to rate my CDs on a 0-10 scale.
> For the X5, having 200 CDs ripped via WMA9 locks me in, until I can find a week or two to re-rip to a more modern lossless format.
I recently re-ripped using a slot-in Apple Superdrive with Windows Media Player Classic running on Windows 11 set to auto-rip into FLAC.
I just worked as usual and every now and then swapped the CDs from 2 huge piles on the side of my desk.
> I'm spoiled, and feel sorry for the people today that think MP3-120 is "good enough".
Same lol
See https://diyaudiostore.com/
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/
for details. Hobby-ist driven, fantastic stuff.
I use it on my fiio, phone, tablet, usb dac, etc.
I miss the ability to control playback using physical buttons, and not having to look at the device. Back when Android firmware flashing was common (OEMs rarely sell phones with unlockable bootloaders today), you could use the volume buttons to act as "forward/backward 1 track" buttons by holding them down. That hasn't worked on a single other phone I owned after 2014.
I loved the default Android music app too, and then one day the UI started showing items from Google Music Cloud or whatever, right alongside my locally stored tracks, as if they were the same. I jumped ship right away, but had to find an alternative music player app that was "offline-only".
(I've had too many failures with ExFAT where I've lost everything - the last crash having wiped out about 200GB files - so I've switched to NTFS. ExFAT is just too fragile to be used regularly as an interchange medium.)
[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.krosbits.mu...
https://www.amazon.com/FiiO-M11Plus-Resolution-Portable-Blue...
https://www.amazon.com/Surfans-F35-Resolution-Music-Player/d...
https://www.amazon.com/iRULU-F20-Bluetooth-Lossless-Resoluti...
I have a sneaking suspicion that, while I have some "musts," I probably don't even know the right questions to ask, and I guess forums for this kind of thing stopped existing.
Music is very important to me. I'm considering the WM1ZM2, but I've seen a lot of great reviews about the FiiO and Surfans - but the F20 doesn't have Bluetooth (ok if LDAC and AptXhd are supported) and the F35 doesn't have USB-C.
The M11 plus has both BT+ USB-C, along with hardware buttons. If it can give me better audio and battery life than the WM1ZM2, I'm interested!
I have an Analogue Pocket I buy second-hand game boy cartridges for, I have an e-reader on which I read e-pubs, etc.
The “integration experience” is _a lot_ tougher. I can’t buy games from an App Store and I need to plug in the reader to Calibre to get my next book… but the actual user experience is so much better. I don’t know if it’s the dedicated hardware or the uninterrupted experience or something else… it just lets the content shine through much more clearly.
I’m an app developer and I strongly believed that we can have one device replace pretty much everything else almost perfectly… but now I kinda wanna try having a Walkman and getting rid of Spotify.
My biggest pet peeve is that very much all streaming applications have very tiny progress bars, it's almost impossible to navigate through longer piece of music or podcast precisely. It's like all the functions to navigate around the music have become an afterthought and they focus on showing artwork and other bells and whistles over utility.
As if people making these apps don't actually use them.
I see this argument all the time and it's completely foreign to me. I get notifications on messages, lost calls and some very specific emails regarding downtime or exceptions in production. That's it, and it works very, very well.
I am on my second Sony E39X since my FiiO died a while ago. The Sony are way to expensive for the quality, but other button MP3 players are a different weight and price class.
I hate wasting battery for a fancy screen and Android like OS, like most MP3 players these days.
The reason I never stopped using a MP3 player is because I have 20/30+ hours of HQ music organized in folders, just as I like it.
20-30 hours. Hmm.
Clementine tells me: 16345 tracks (64 days 16:52:45)
And that's not even large by the comparison with some friends.
And yes, it all fits on my Sansa Clip+ (except that I keep the christmas music off the Clip+).
A place for everything, and everything in it's place.
As a society we already processed and answered this question in the late 00's. PMP's (heh, remember that term?) suck. All-in-one devices are better
Hot-take over.
It's difficult to disentangle this from the switch to streaming and regarding the latter it is very much unclear whether this was a consumer preference or just something that one-sidedly benefitted an oligopolistic music industry and consumers just had to live with it. Even if a preference for streaming apps reflects an uncoerced choice that a majority of consumers made back then or would make today, it's still a hallmark of a well-functioning market and a free society if the needs/preferences of the minority don't go entirely unserved by the market.
It's plain to see that the needs and preferences of minority users are being served too. This NW-A55 device obviously has a following. Sony pumps out a PMP every so often. Music nerds are probably the #1 target for weird enthusiast gear outside of gaming/pop-culture knickknacks.
... but I still think all-in-one devices are better[1] :)
[1]if you consume music just like me, and don't really enjoy the deeper aspects of collecting and curating your own music library
But it's also frustrating when one track in the middle of an album disappears, or when a few tracks from an old playlist are suddenly greyed out for some licensing reason.
For these reasons I started buying actual records of my favorite albums a few years ago. I realized I had spent X amount on 10 years of Google Music (now youtube music) and had nothing to show for it. In fact, during that time tracks had disappeared from my playlists.
So I felt more like a conservator than a music lover buying up old 90s albums.
Perhaps, and perhaps society is re-processing this question and maybe drifting towards a different answer?
Society does change its mind sometimes
> A shitty music app on my phone like Spotify is 1000x more convenient than a dedicated music device will ever be.
Perhaps for you, and you do you. For me,
Pick up phone,
Unlock screen. Shit, doesn't recognize my fingerprint. Again.
Unlock screen with PIN
Navigate to Spotify.
Start spotify, wait for the UX to load.
Try to find that song/albumn I wanted to listen to.
Connect to my headphones/stero.
Hit play
Get a phone call, now ringing over my speakers and the music has stopped
Oh, and it helpfully turns down the volume for me after a while
I'm not quite seeing the convenience here.
Yes, but I think this is being revisited. Vinyl continues to grow for example. Some of us are going away from single devices which can do everything, but can also control and spy on you for everything.
With single devices it feels like you're the curator of a collection just for you. With Spotify it feels like you're just an ear that's being leased.
Even if you don't like physical media, it's nice to have a collection that you can depend on. You never know when Spotify will take stuff away from you, or just won't add more obscure stuff. (Although, given how left wing Spotify is, I was quite surprised that you can find Werwolf by Absurd. I'm not sure how long that will last.)
Ooof, yes ! I remember my minidisc fondly but I somehow erased from my memories the atrocious file management thing.
B. I resent that this is so expensive. I'm not saying you shouldn't pay it, but it feels too expensive by half.
Thank god for inequality keeping these little anime dorks safe. God bless America.
?
> Thank god for inequality keeping these little anime dorks safe. God bless America.
??
Can you explain the point you are trying to make?
Is the problem the price of the unit? Or is it your opinion that "working class people" would tear apart the argument that the NW-A55 is a nice device?
If so, why do you think they will dislike about the device? Or which alternative will they prefer and recommend?
I'm sorry, I still don't get it - neither from a rhetorical angle, nor from a poetry standpoint.
I like poetry though, and after checking your profile I like your take on things (ex: the new programming paradigms) even if I couldn't understand your reply here or to the person who suggested putting side by side Rousseau, Montessori and Steiner.
Anyway, if you've got 5 minutes, please explain!
You said you are an academic pedagogist in training, and I'm always eager to learn more about things that interest me.
Music, sociology, and the sociology of music are SUPER interesting to me!
I'm certain I've bought a handful of albums from Amazon and Google over the years that I've put onto various phones and MP3 players. Is that not possible anymore?
I still buy CDs. That way the music is mine, and no-one can suddenly delete the CD from my bookshelf without my consent. I rip the CDs lossless, then de-jewel-case the CD and put the disc and inlay into an acid-neutral storage bag, and seal it. I can't do hi-bitrate music like this (unless I want to rip BluRay albums) but at my age, it's not like I still have a high-fidelity hearing ability anyway.
Many Bluetooth headphones have physical controls for that. E.g. my Marshall headphones have a nifty little "joystick": up/down for volume, left/right for skip, press for pause/accept call, long press to turn on/off. Elegant, minimalistic, easy to remember.
> It’s also nice having a dedicated player that isn’t inundated with notifications and other modern distractions. Separating out ebooks to a dedicated tablet worked the same wonders for my anxiety.
YMMV - I for one would be ridden by the anxiety of missing an important call on my phone while listening to a dedicated music player...
How else am I going to listen to my Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys collection?
Edit: With better I mean in terms of quality of the outgoing analog signal.
eg something like this Sony player, but OSS so hardware/software problems can be iterated on
Tapes and pencils forever. ;P
Edit: I remember one of the last-ish MP3 players was a Dell one with a micro HDD. First drop and it died. xD
City pop listeners in the states will back me up on this one (it's not even an esoteric genre!) but where's Yamashita, Kadomatsu, or Sato? The Spotify US catalog is black hole here. Ironically the best legal way for listeners to buy this music is to fly to Japan to buy vinyl.
Actually, Spotify's catalog isn't that impressive. I use Plexamp when Spotify's choices get old. Soundcloud also has infinite permutations of remixes.
I have all my music stored locally. It's about 300 CDs that i ripped (out of a 1000 CD collection) and stored the originals in the attic. Since iTunes removed their DRM, i've purchased my music there. My iPhone is "plenty" good for playing music where i want it, and with an iTunes match subscription, i have my music available in the cloud.
I don't subscribe to any music streaming service, and i doubt i ever will, especially since "modern music" seems to be about cranking out one hit wonders with very little quality and skill.
It may be survival bias, but i am hard pressed to find any band/musician from the past 2 decades we will still listen to in 2 decades time.
I also just checked their website and as of v3 it doesn't even require google services to buy, so even if you have a degoogled phone you can still use it.
What? Can anyone second this?
Rockbox was good for Sansa players.
That's always nice, although I struggle to see the need for an additional device to play mp3's at this point...
Ahh yes that is a Premium feature not even Apple or Android flagship phones are able to provide. For some reason.
This was a basic feature that all phones used to have. It was quietly removed, I suspect in an effort to push users towards iTunes/Google Play Music, both of which are dead now.