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Comment by leoedin | Hacker News Reader

No mention of the iPod classic. I guess not many people bought them.

I absolutely love my classic. It has every song instantly accessible wherever I am. I use it every single day.

It's a shame there's no standout replacement. Sure, you need to spend longer curating your music collection, but the reward is a far more permanent collection of music and playlists which acts almost as a time capsule for your emotions. Plus it always lets you access all your music, regardless of reception, data, record company politics or what you remembered to sync to your phone that week.

Anyone know a replacement?

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> It's a shame there's no standout replacement. Sure, you need to spend longer curating your music collection,

There's not even that much curating needed with modern storage capacity. SD cards are cheap, large, and so the only limit is how long I wait for FLACs to transcode down to AACs.

> Plus it always lets you access all your music, regardless of reception, data, record company politics

Exactly. I can't fathom why people are so in love with relying on so many unreliable parts to listen to music.

>> Plus it always lets you access all your music, regardless of reception, data, record company politics

> Exactly. I can't fathom why people are so in love with relying on so many unreliable parts to listen to music.

A phone will do exactly the same thing...

>SD cards are cheap, large

Getting a smartphone with an SD card slot these days requires some compromise. The iPhone has never had one. Galaxy S6 and Nexus 6 are arguably the current Android flagships setting the standard for quality, and neither of them have SD expansion.

There are people with more than 64GB of music at CD quality who don't want to transcode it down.

I have, and love, an iPod Classic. I got it ~in 2007. The battery is still pretty great, but there's something wrong with the Hard Drive in it. Certain songs are just trashed, play them on my computer and they're fine. If I delete them and then reload them, they might be fixed, but one or more other songs will be trashed. I tried to do a backup of it, so I could wipe and start anew, but it took more than a day and was not even half way through the backup. Mind you, the thing is not even near full of music. The worst part, for me at least, is I know how to fix it, but I'm afraid that if I take it apart, it's not going to go back together. It's taken quite a beating.

The hard drive in my iPod was dying so I replaced the hard drive with a Tarkan iFlash and SD card. Instant went from a slow clunky 32gb CompactFlash hard drive to a 128gb SD card for storage. It more reliably boots now too.

> It's a shame there's no standout replacement.

I felt the same way for a very long time, and still have both an iPod Video and Classic to prove it, but what's done it for me is a data plan way bigger than I need and iTunes Match. Obviously that fails to meet one very specific requirement - offline availability - but I do keep a decent subset synced to my iPhone for offline listening, which itself is pretty rare. If anything, I prefer the iPhone's interface for finding stuff deep in my library since I can just type out the name of a track or ask Siri to play it.

I also love my classic (actually and iPod Video). Bought in 2004, the battery has long since died and it lives permanently on its dock. I sincerely wish I could either replace the battery or the whole device with a 200gb beast in the same form factor. I know I could get one used, but the difficulty of servicing them makes that less attractive.

Nowadays you can get that easily in flash (e.g., 128 GB microSDXCs for 80 USD), so an MP3 player with a slot and exFAT support?

Well, you can get a 128 GB iPod touch, but it's pretty expensive.

I use Apollo + most of my music library on my 64GB sd card in my s4. I have 105GB of music total, so I just put my most played stuff on my phone. I push update it from Clementine.

FiiO X1. It plays FLAC as well as the standard MP3 and .wav files. $100.

The people over at head-fi.org seem to love FiiO. I recently read a review of the X1 and it seems to have exceptional build quality too!

Ive bought an headphone amp/dac from FiiO - stuff was cheap, compared to "brands" and it works just great (looks very solid too!), so I'm not suprised they love it

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