Using an old Android phone as a music player | Hacker News Reader

Using an old Android phone as a music player

monocyte.blog

62 pointssurprisetalk41 comments

>"for the debloating i used xda forums. they have a lot of forum posts about what is safe to remove from any device but as always be careful. don't try to remove gpu drivers or something"

Suggestion: Use the Universal Android Debloater

https://github.com/Universal-Debloater-Alliance/universal-an...

Kinda bizarre to see much ado over what's ultimately just installing a music app. The concept of an edge to edge screen with a notch being an "old android phone" is also very bizarre. (that's before even getting into specs and the fact that this was a flagship phone so this is not "slumming it up" by any means, cause it's not a situation dealing with a truly old or weak phone either. like, there's genuinely no hardship there to overcome, besides shitty rom situation)

It's like a preview of some future generations idea of "old tech" and "accomplishing something". Ooh installing some apks. Using two phones, groundbreaking. (with such revelations as, using another phone with a 3500 mAh battery would save battery on some other phone likely with its own 4-5k mAh battery. great stuff.) And there could be a neat and useful writeup about using any and all kinds of phones as 'just a music player' or some other kind of focused device (some older phones may still have pretty good cameras), but this is just barely even instructive at all

That's an uncharitable take. Blog posts can and should exist at every level of expertise and depth. What's trivially easy and hardly worth blogging about to you might be the gateway/lightbulb moment to someone else, no?

It is a bit, yeah, but mostly towards this perfectly fine personal blog post being posted here like it's something, with quite a general title too that'd almost suggest there's something more to it that'd be worth reading, when it's not so much actually. Most of that post is just photos of phone and app screens. The "lightbulb moment" is pretty much wholly encapsulated in that short title. "Yeah, you could use an old phone as a music player". That's pretty much it right there in entirety. Even whatever you might imagine an article about that topic to be, after reading that title and having that "moment", might be more worthwhile imagining and thinking about than actually clicking and reading.

I did a lot of research in this field and additionally in audiobooks.

While I still think that the iPod Nano 7 is the perfect device for me, I recently got my hands on a HiBy R1. For 60 bucks it is a remarkable non Android device (in fact it is buildroot based with a publicly available toolchain and a modding community). I have to prepare for my iPod nano collection slowly dying over the next years.

I also use an old Android GrapheneOS phone (Pixel 4a) along with some apps as a backup:

  Substreamer APP (cross platform)
  DSub
  Navidrome (Backend)
  Audiobookshelf (Backend)
  Prologue (iOS)
  Voice (Android, Paul Woitaschek)

Navidrome backend even supports smart playlists while Substreamer App supports Offline Sync, this is very handy to use.

My workflow is:

  1. Obtaining Audio CDs (cheap, high quality)
  2. Ripping flac with EAC [1]
  3. Tagging with beets music organizer
  4. Convert inplace to mp3 v1 with beets
  4b. Archive the flac (on disk and bluray)
  5. Add to navidrome
  6. Star / rate in navidrome
  7. use a smart playlist to sync top titles and New Albums offline
  8. use a shell script to download to USB for my old car without Bluetooth

Works pretty well and after the ripping step pretty much full auto. The only reason i still prefer iPod Nano 7 over Android is the limited remote of my cable headphones (longpress is not detected on Android) and the near flawless UX.

1: https://pilabor.com/blog/2022/10/audio-cd-ripping-hardware/

I also have a HiBy R1, and have had it for the majority of 2026. Would definitely recommend it to others.

Once you get past the need for a microSD card (and once you've bought a good quality one), it becomes a fantastic flac player. And, like OP said, it's great for (scroll based) distraction free listening.

I haven't looked into the modding community for it, yet. Thanks for the tip-off on that.

Just to give you a start:

https://github.com/bidhata/Hiby-R1-Mod

https://github.com/yetisoldier/Hiby-R1-Audiobook-Mod

The latter also has great documentation in the repo. You can enable developer mode / adb by (this may differ in non 1.6 firmware versions):

  Go to about
  Tap 10 times on the version / HiBy Logo (dev options)
  Tab 10 times on "about" beneath the back arrow (enable adb)

After this you can

  adb devices # list devices, should have the Hiby present
  adb shell   # root shell on the device

The root partition is readonly, so to store something, you need access to the micro sd card or use /tmp. As a starting point you could take a look at

  /etc/init.d/S92_03_start_music_player

I managed to compile my WIP Rust / Slint music player app [1] to run on the HiBy framebuffer, but since it is WIP, I did not manage to go further yet.

1: https://github.com/yetisoldier/Hiby-R1-Audiobook-Mod/issues/...

The author is using PowerAmp.

I am using AIMP. I was specifically looking for apps with downloadable APKs for sideloading. I can't use the Play Store because I don't have a google account. Looks like PowerAmp also has an APK.

I'd also very strongly recommend F-Droid. TBH I can't really speak to the quality of music apps on it - I just use VLC - but it doesn't require an account and it has lots of good apps.

I use Auxio from F-Droid. It's quite simple (which to me is a benefit) and my only real complaint is how similar shuffle on and off look on Android Auto. It handles non ASCII titles correctly where some others didn't (from what I remember due to weirdness with the Android media store) and it picks up new media/edited quickly and reliably which can be a sore spot with others. I don't know how Android's media store is apparently so incompetent that most music apps don't work correctly using it.

can also vouch for Auxio - happy user of 5 years

No album shuffle (like on iPods, like taking random CDs from your shelf; https://github.com/OxygenCobalt/Auxio/issues/221) and no way to correct headphone's frequency response (either AutoEQ presets like PowerAmp or at least a good enough parametric equalizer) makes it a no-go for me.

I use the F-Droid apps Transistor to listen to streaming radio and Antennapod for podcasts on an old phone:

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.y20k.transistor/

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/

Use Aurora Store to download apps from Play Store without an account (very trustworthy app IMO, has been around and working for years):

https://auroraoss.com/aurora-store

PowerAmp is paid, and Aurora Store can't do paid apps or in-app purchases without a Google Account. It's better to download the APK and buy a license key on the official website, which doesn't require Google Play Services if you do it that way.

Ah, I forgot. I thought there was a free version. I haven't used PowerAmp in like a decade.

AuroraStore CAN download paid apps, you just need to login to your account and buy them through Google Play (app or website through browser) first.

Looks like they also allow you to buy with a credit card on their website, and they say Google Services aren't required if you buy that way. Very cool!

Stop sideloading. Start installing.

PowerAmp is an incredible app, used it and loved it before. I have a self-hosted streaming setup, so I've personally found Symfonium (1) to be my go-to. I'm glad things worked out for the author with this setup, and honestly the headphone jack is a sight for sore eyes.

(1) https://www.symfonium.app/

I wonder does anyone here do the whole music piracy pipeline (e.g. downloading torrent -> cue splitting -> converting to lossy) entirely on their phone?

I personally find it more convenient to do that on my computer and then `adb push --sync` the PC music directory to the phone, but I'm curious what are other people's setups

I still do it the latter way! Though only because I'm unnecessarily picky about how my tags are formatted, cover art presented and picks of appropriate codecs. It would be an immense chore to do it completely from my phone at the moment, but I'm also pleased to see how much actually can be done on the go^^

I do Lidarr for the downloads, MusicBrainz Picard for the data cleanup, then use the Synology DS Audio app to selectively add music to my phone (since it doesn't all fit). I wouldn't want to do all this on my phone, it's capable enough I guess since it's just lightweight torrent downloads but then I would have the reverse problem: how to get the music onto my computer.

I use Spotizerr to download all newly liked songs on my Spotify to my Navidrome server and then just stream it with Symfonium which has the option to auto cache specific albums.

I just use VLC but I just play long sets not individual tracks

Now if Winamp was available for Android so I could use the Enhancer plugin...

https://winampplugins.co.uk/enhancer/enhancer.html

I've never found a sound processor that can make music sound so amazing somehow

I’m not quite sure what the point of this article is. Removed some apps and installed a music player on an old phone?

Indeed, why is this on the front page of HN?

Not very interesting, complex or far from intended purpose, but using a thing you have at hand to do a thing you don't have something at hand for is the literal meaning of hacking. This is probably the only on-topic post on the front page for a very long time.

I've been using an iPhone 5 as a standalone portable music player and an iPhone 3G (not 3GS) as an office music player daily since they came out.

Even the latest versions of macOS support them perfectly, down to the icons.

Sidebar, PowerAmp is the app I miss most moving from Android to iOS. Nothing on iOS comes close, Doppler is the closest I've found and it's just OK.

It’s still nowhere near as good as Poweramp but I’ve found Jewelcase to be better than Doppler.

PowerAmp and Symfonium for Android are excellent. If you don't mind the occasional pain of beta software, I intend to fill this gap on iOS with Poppy. https://www.reddit.com/r/PoppyApp/comments/1tiyki0/about_pop...

I couldn't find a good player for linux, so am using Symfonium on my old android phone with music on raspberry pi with navidrome

I have an old LG V-60 lying around which with its quad DAC is the perfect phone for this

>using one of smartphone's main functions

To disable phone processing and distorting audio by phone:

1. Root 2. Install 2 modules: Audio misc settings and audio sample rate changer by zyhk

This was giving multiple other hacks to get "quality". Author was a madman, advising disabling services to minimize jitter. But hey, it worked.

Or just USB DAC.

Nothing beats the Zune HD

Now I'm wondering if I can load plexamp on my ancient Nexus 5a...

Wake me up when you start using a Lumia 820 in lockedown mode as a music player.

Because what the world needs is more Microsoft crap.

My point was you can take an e-waste phone and make it functionally an MP3 player, and an MP3 player only, with the features already built into the device.

File copy is standard Windows portable drive interaction, and probably is a portable drive on Linux as well, with a standard Windows-style file system organization, making copying music mind-numbingly easy.

Then you open settings and set the app vault to be no homescreen, no notification drawer, no status bar, no home buttons, with only the Music app approved, and voila! You have an MP3 player with bluetooth and Qi wireless charging.

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