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Comment by ksynwa | Hacker News Reader

Sorry but I have a tangential question. What is the state of portable music players these days? Are there any that are good and reasonably priced?

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https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/TargetStatus

I have one of AIGO EROS Q / EROS K / AGPTek H3 / HIFI WALKER H2 / Surfans F20 with Rockbox and it's great. And the existence of reasonably prices half-terabyte SD cards is obviously a great improvement too.

A used iPod (probably flashed with the open source Rockbox firmware) for the cool factor and reducing ewaste. This is an amazing guide: https://yuuiko.github.io/iPodGuide/iPodGuidev2-1.pdf that gives recommendations on what model and the mods you can do. I have a 5.5 gen with an SD card mod all for £50.

Edit: Actually, I forgot the eBay listing said it was a 5.5 gen but the serial number when I got it was just 5th gen, and I got a full refund! £20 in total then.

The CPU in the iPod Video is a measly 80MHz compared to the 216MHz iPod Classic. I'd recommend anyone to buy a Classic.

The DAC in the video 5.5 series was considered to be much better (Wolfson).

https://old.reddit.com/r/ipod/comments/qzjugl/cirrus_vs_wolf...

To add to that, here's a guide for the actual modding process - https://opista.com/posts/ipod-classic-modding-guide

FIIO's M21 looks pretty decent:

https://www.fiio.com/m21

Its an audiophile market now, you know .. gold buttons sound better, and all that.

"reasonably priced"

$300 is reasonable, imho. Cheaper than an iPhone anyway.

It's not really a mp3 player that a regular person would use anyway. Seems to be all on high-res audio and high power output for the headphones. No casual music listener needs that.

"Buy now" button goes to a 404 page? Or maybe I need to be on a Chinese VPN, who knows these days.

(Anyway, I was merely interested in the price range, and probably not actually buying.)

Sony Walkman series also has nifty looking devices, but way over my budget (even the entry level model).

Dunno whats up with their "Buy Now" button, other than its not unusual for manufacturers to not actually sell their products direct.

Amazon has it listed for 220euro's, which is a reasonable price imho.

Of course there are other manufacturers out there, this is just the one I know about ..

https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/106533110

I wanted to dip my toes in and bought a HiBy R4, it is now my primary music player and I have no regrets. Fair warning, it can kick off a headphone rabbit hole.

Wow that looks really nice. Any idea if the player is able to handle R128_* loudness normalisation tags? I couldn't find any information about it online.

Apologies I am unfamiliar with it... if you can point me to a sample I would be happy to try.

Yes, but you need spend apple-level money on obscure Chinese stuff that looks suspiciously like a cheap android phone with no cell modem, or you can spend relatively very small amounts on cheap players with wildly varying software and hardware quality, or you can buy and refurbish a used ipod.

Replaced with usually expensive (as compared to non-Applle devices) "digital audio players".

Mod an iPod with hundreds of gigabytes of SD storage, a bigger battery, and bluetooth

By the way, take a look at Snowsky Echo Mini

Normally, a phone with a streaming app or large SD card.

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