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Comment by rmellow | Hacker News Reader

Your comment sent me on a multi day journey into DAPs.

Indeed, it's heartbreaking how otherwise capable hardware is ruined by bad design decisions (UI, form factor, touchscreens, ...)

I found a workable solution after many hours:

1. Bought a Hifi Walker H2 on Amazon. It suffers from poor UI design, including typos. Otherwise, the hardware is great.

2. Installed RockBox on it. After a little customization, it resolves the crappy UI. The one pain point is RockBox will not support Bluetooth or USB DAC, if you care about these features.

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So I have an update! I bought the HiBY R2 II directly from their website it shipped immediately (on a weekend!) and I had it in my hands (in Ireland) less than a week later. It's basically everything the Shanling Q1 should have been. It's slimmer, almost half the weight, has a sane OS (so there's no need for Rockbox) and sounds great. Also had better battery life than the Q1 and you can play/pause using an inline remote on your wired headphones (and yes, Shanling screwed that up too). Bluetooth is rock solid. All in all I love it. I can even sync my music and playlists to it with MusicBee (on Linux) with very little messing around, and with a huge SD card it holds all my music.

Edit: the walker was my next choice but I thought they were discontinued? Anyways, the HiBY is available.

My own update: decided to dust off my old iPod and repair the fault LCD, battery and hard drive.

The (minor) downsides: modern features like Bluetooth and USB-C are possible, but only through soldering.

Rockbox unfortunately lacks polish, and it for some reason turns itself off after a while playing music.

FYI, a few weeks later with the HiBY and I absolutely love it. I'm getting another one to replace my wife's aging Sony walkman (one of the extremely simple, light-weight ones). She doesn't want me to, because she loves it's size and weight. But she regularly complains about syncing music and playlists to it. And with a 512GB SDCard you can just tell MusicBee to "sync everything", which is extremely simple compared to removing stuff you don't listen to and hand-picking the newer stuff that will fit. And of course, Wifi, Bluetooth, etc.

In fact I might buy two, because I know they'll discontinue this thing and I don't know if anybody will make anything like it again.

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