The music player you wish you had in the early 2000s
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It’s wild that 40+ years after they pretty much invented the portable music player, people need to be reminded that they still exist
The NW-a30 I bought years again sounds exactly like what you are looking for. The software is not android, it’s snappy and intuitive and Sony has decades of experience making these devices
An 8gb for $79 (why is 8gb of storage still a thing when stores are giving away 32gb flash drives for free?) or a $799 player that costs more than my phone and desktop computers combined.
Nah. This ain't it.
now if only i could find a decent FOSS audio player for android. it is critical that the player interface orders files by directory structure and displays the filename because a lot of audiobooks and audio drama series or podcasts use the series title in all files and don't have a file specific title (and those that do mess it up by not having episode or chapter numbering. this often makes the individual chapters/episodes indistinguishable from each other. unfortunately most available audio players assume that the title is enough to pick a file, but that really only works for songs, not audio books, audio drama or podcasts.
sorry for the rant.
That’s the player I wish I had in the 200s.
I've also got a Sansa Clip+ that is super small and great with Rockbox.
I don't recall what happened to mine (lost? broken? gave it to someone? don't recall), but I wish I had bought 20 of them when I could to last the rest of my life.
The Sansa Clip has physical buttons. I can operate it without having to look at it.`
I think they meant iPod. iPad was a MadTV gag in the early 2000s.
Will certainly be interested to see what price this launches at.
The general consensus on MP3s is that 320kbps VBR is universally transparent quality, whereas that number is about 120kbps VBR for Opus.
Honestly, depending on the music and how good an ear you've got, Opus at 96kbps is pretty great.
As long as you’re using LAME, MP3 is transparent far below 320k. There’s never a need to go that high. For archival purposes, use FLAC, not MP3.
I put it on my Sandisk E200 back in the day; 2Gb and then I stuck in another 2Gb card. It was so responsive, and the scroll-wheel UI was so convenient. The wheel seized up (still usable, but had to turn it like a safecracker instead of with your thumb), so I gifted it to a co-worker's son.
What I always wanted to see was something with an "old Blackberry" style side-mounted scroll-wheel, for eyes-off operation.
I can't seem to find any PCB-mounted jogwheels that both (a) rotate in a plane parallel to the board and (b) are meant to be operated by touching the edge of the wheel (rather than its face, like the dial on the Sansa Fuze) and (c) don't cause the depth of the device along the axis perpendicular to the PCB to become huge (i.e. like a knob-style encoder without the knob).
I can't remember how battery life compared for MP3/AAC (was RockBox able to use the hardware decoder?).
https://www.linsoul.com/products/xduoo-x3ii
I wish it were the size of a Clip+.
> lasts a full day on a charge
The iPod Classic could do 36 hours of playback so I wonder why this can only manage 24 hours.
> 2200-mAh battery with a standard, 3-pin JST connector
For years I have wanted a MP3 player with a 18600 battery. If the developers are reading this, consider a version with a 18600, even if the form factor is not as ergonomic.
> Firmware supports MP3, FLAC, Opus, and Vorbis codecs
No audiobook (m4b, directory of MP3s) support yet. This would be a nice feature to have.
> The iPod Classic could do 36 hours of playback so I wonder why this can only manage 24 hours.
It says a full day, not 24 hours (so probably 8-12 hours).
I had an archos with 80Gb mechanical hdd in early/mid 2000s that I believe lasted more than that. Sadly it died (went into a washing machine) with a lot of my favorite music inside it, including some dj sets that I can't seem to find anymore (not sure of who played and what year...). It was an amazing piece of hardware, better than (unmodified) ipod of 8Gb at the time.
Maybe not for joggers though.
It's an ESP32, so I wonder if you could extend that via software, as in disable EVERYTHING you don't need and run in the lowest power mode possible while doing playback.
There are plenty of good rockbox able MP3 players on the market. What I need is buttons with feedback.
Later I had the worst designed mp3 player created by man which despite having physical buttons, still required you to look at the screen to use it because button presses were (a) context specific (required sequences) and (b) not idempotent (the first press was ignored and brought the device out of sleep mode).
You get the same problem sometimes even with physical buttons, when some bright spark decides it would be clever for some control range to "wrap around". Where once you could just hold the button for a second to get to the end of the range, and know where the device is w/o looking, and then tap N times to get what you want, now you have to stop whatever else you were trying to do, look at the device's display, and adjust the thing under full attention.
Not everything needs to be a touch screen, or present 'smart' controls.
3,5mm jack, no Android, physical volume button, SD card, all audio formats, high quality Bluetooth, high quality output, good price and sturdy. Battery is not great, but it's okay.
That's unfortunate
I'd pop 3 albums on 3 disks for a day of listening around the city. No complaints at all. Nostalgia.
https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/gfk65j...
I wish they'd taken it to SD card storage but my palm pilot could so I ended up using that
Hope Tangara is better!
And it has the capability of MP3, Ogg, and Flac playback. Oh, and it has an FM radio too. Oh, and I forgot. Video too.
As it stands, it's going to be a fun nostalgic device.
• I found some LineageOS (not very stable, but it works well for audio, which is 100% of the life reason for the device).
• Put Voice for Audiobooks,
• AntennaPod for Podcasts,
• NewPipe for downloading YouTube interviews, lectures or other primarily voice content.
• It rocks Olauncher Lite/Simple/Whatever (some no-bullshit fork, cannot recall the exact name) with three swipe actions (left, right, double-tap) for the three primary apps.
• all of that is from F-droid for sure
• the hardware has microSD card shot, I don’t know the maximum amount, but I use the 8 GB card I had lying around, and it has been quite plenty for me.
Usually, I don’t listen to music. Only while working with my computer or laptop, for focus / eliminate the noise outside. So I use the smartphone for some farm work (I own a tiny city farm) and for driving, when I’m in mood for listening to something (sometimes I just listen to nothing, when I’m low on energy).
It has a Bluetooth module and a Jack. I listened to wired headphones, but I broke the two of them that I have (Sony and Marshall). Now I have two pairs of Bluetooth headphones and I listen to them, nothing in my workflow changed.
I like this workflow very much, as you can re-create it with any Android smartphone. E.g. I have some tiny HTC (Beats branded) Android 4-something smartphone and apart from LineageOS (which isn’t necessary, it’s just me, I enjoy/prefer to not have unneeded bloatware) all the other software is available. I am not sure for Voice, as it’s quite new. But NewPipe and AntennaPod (both old versions, but still) work very well. If you have any more modern device (which would be very cheap to buy secondhand if you don’t), it’s very convenient.
I like Samsung devices for that purpose, as apart from being aesthetically ugly (I mean older devices, prior to Galaxy S9 from circa 2017), they’re quite good, usually have microSD card support and are flashable. E.g. Samsung Galaxy S3 or S4 (I have both, both physically broken, destroyed by the kids), they are very capable of the task. My current one is a low-end Samsung Galaxy Grand, something like that. But if I’d buy another one, I’d go for the Galaxy one instead.
It’s not open source, but all the models I mentioned have swappable batteries (mind-blowing!) and are cheap to repair.
That system works for me very well and I’m happy to share that with others, maybe someone would use it too.
One thing I really miss on all NON iPod / NON Android devices is the ability to control playback via headphone remote[2].
I did a lot of research how to build such a thing myself and found out that it would be too much work to design a PCB that fits my needs and build a custom firmware for it with my skills. My personal approach would be much smaller, something about the size of the iPod Nano 7g.
However, my conclusion also was, that an ESP32 is NOT the perfect chip for this[3] - more the Allwinner T113-S3 (discontinued) on the X-Boy-Plus[5] or the new ArtinChip D21x/D13x in the CyberPad 1[4].
My personal opinion is, that it is hard to build a custom device that has decent battery life, supports Wifi+Bluetooth, is still powerful enough to play all audio codecs and does not have a completely custom firmware that cannot be used in anything else but this device...
Recently I found a promising article, where Flutter has been ported to run on a small RISC-V device[6], which would make at least the software development part a decent experience.
For now, I'll stick with my iPod Nano 7g, as an alternative my Fiio M6 (discontinued, Android 7 with Custom App support). For more modern Apps I use the Unihertz Jelly 2e (Android 12), that has a custom media button, has an Audio Jack and is still available in shops today. Repair process is also ok and I think there also might be LineageOS Support.
The apps I use are Substreamer[7] with Navidrome[8] and Audiobookshelf[9].
[2]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/36...
[3]: https://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,54269.msg252243.h...
[5]: https://github.com/hsinyuwang/X-Boyhttps://github.com/advply...
[6]: https://systemsdigest.com/videos/tiny-flutter-future-dart-fl...
[7]: https://substreamerapp.com/
Well, rockbox was cool and we had it in the early 2000s. Don't know whats with the revisionistic headline.
It was the perfect music player, and I had it in the late 2000s.
It even had DOOM on it!
It had no screen, so most of the device was covered in buttons that could be easily used without looking at it.
The company followed up with a sequel model, the Zen Stone II, that was worse in basically every way, a trend that more or less continues to this day.
Every time someone puts a screen on a music player, they decide that using the music player should require looking at the screen. (As here, where the buttons are images shown on a touchscreen!) Why?
I still have a Cowon D2 that had a Rockbox port that apparently wasn't really complete. Its main drawback as I saw it was not supporting SDXC (i.e. largest supported SD card was 32GB) but in retrospect that's not so bad. I don't remember whether the Rockbox port supported the SD card at all. The player had 16GB of internal flash and a full sized SD slot. It had an excellent DAC and plenty of drive power in its headphone amp, while still having around 50 hours of play time on its 1600mah(?) lipo cell. Replacing the cell with a phone battery of the era wasn't too difficult. It was a great player and would have been even better if they had opened up the hardware docs enough to get Rockbox completely working.
The player I wished for in the early 2000s had an SD slot, had an AM/FM receiver, and ran on an AA cell. Today, realistically, it should also have bluetooth. Depending on its size, maybe it could use an 18650.
On rockbox.org there is a forum thread about porting rockbox to Android and apparently there are significant technical obstacles to doing that. I don't know what the obstacles are. I don't offhand know of Android music player apps that I really like, but there are some usable ones. And phone hardware is good enough for this purpose that the whole induestry of dedicated audio players is now close to wiped out.
> No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
I suspect there are retrophiles out there who still want to use rotary dial phones. That is fine, but enough vintage rotary phones are available on ebay for those who want them, that someone trying to crowdfund a new one would face an uphill battle. This music player seems about the same way.
Aren't there FIIO players that come a lot closer to the nerd dream anyway?
I enjoy listening on large speakers at home or while driving. I am not listening to music while walking or going somewhere. I rather watch the surroundings, interact with people or think.