I think phones have generally taken over MP3 players because you can do everything an MP3 player does on your phone.
But I recently bought one because I just like a single device having that unique purpose of playing music.
One of my kids has one, a little screenless one, specifically because it doesn’t have a screen. That one kid in particular gets addicted to screens.
I’m looking at mp3 players for family road trips for this same reason. My kids go full zombie in front of any screen.
I’ve specifically gone for a AAA battery powered one so I can just enjoy music while I work on proofs.
Phones are ok, but sometimes it’s just nice to be unreachable in a random room on campus where no-one can track you down to attend meetings.
Bonus points if students see you bopping to unknown tunes while you work and think you’re crazy.
studying with it in my local library rnThats so cool.
Used to keep about 10 gigs of MP3s on my phone, but my most recent one doesn’t have a headphone jack. Really kicking myself for caving on the lack of that feature. Almost looking forward to this phone breaking just so I can find a model with that 3.5mm aux and go back to using it as an MP3 player.
Also fuck bluetooth headphones.
I use streaming services these days but my next phone will definitely still have a 3.5mm. I’m not an audiophile but my 10€ Phillips wired earbuds audio quality would be matched by bluetooths at 5-10x of their pricetag. The wireless buds I have are only 4 imes as expensive as the wired and audio quality is worse, they often lose signal and they tend to fall out of my ear regardless of which rubber plug I use.
I keep my 160GB iPod Classic on life support.
I think the clickwheel design is, in my view, the single best one-thumb no-looking-required input scheme for an MP3 player I think anyone has ever made. Plug it into, say, my car stereo AUX port and I can pick it up with a free hand to control volume, select tracks, and even navigate mostly by memory without having to look at the thing. I can just tell where I am based on the feel of the control. Infinitely better than a featureless flat slab of a touch screen that gives you no sensory feedback.
I like its solid build quality. Full metal chassis with that sexy anodized aluminum finish. I miss that. Despite having a spinning disk hard drive, it never skips, and I’ve never had read or write issues. Though I’d probably try to mod it over to some kind of flash NAND storage someday. There’s also a USB-C mod available that I’d like to do someday, since Apple 30-pin connectors are an endangered species now, and even then, carrying around an outdated proprietary cable for only one device is something I’m eager to never need to do again.
I’m also pretty heavily conditioned to not have tens of gigabytes of music stored on my phone eating up all the precious space. But that’s mostly a holdover from my previous phone, which had a 32 GB onboard memory limit and no SD card expansion slot. I guess now that I have a proper memory expandable phone and, and now that half terabyte microSD cards are relatively inexpensive, that’s no longer a huge concern…
Also, Rhythmbox can sync to it. Maybe other software too. So I don’t even need iTunes to use it.
After seeing a DankPods video on modding an old iPod, I’m pretty tempted to pick one up. I like the idea of picking up some quality IEMs to last me maybe a decade with it. I hate how disposable some tech has gotten.
I think the clickwheel design is, in my view, the single best one-thumb no-looking-required input scheme for an MP3 player I think anyone has ever made. Plug it into, say, my car stereo AUX port and I can pick it up with a free hand to control volume, select tracks, and even navigate mostly by memory without having to look at the thing. I can just tell where I am based on the feel of the control. Infinitely better than a featureless flat slab of a touch screen that gives you no sensory feedback.
can’t most of these things be achieved easily by physical buttons too? of course everything is better than touch screen buttons
I have one that’s dead. I think I accidentally broke it by setting it on some desk piece that I had no idea was magnetic. Rip chunky buddy.
Considering moving away from having a smartphone and using an mp3 player and a little dumb phone for privacy reasons.
Me too, but it’s very hard. So much stuff is becoming hard to do without the smartphone. I’m torn. But yeah, it would be cool to just have a dumb phone, mp3 player, and camera.
Does anyone else self-host their music? (I suppose this would also be a thing if you stream from Spotify) but my music device greatly benefits from having some form of Internet connection for when I want to update it.
I self-host, so when I add music to my server my phone sees it automatically. I wouldn’t want to copy my music onto my server and onto an mp3 device, nor do I want to pay for separate internet service on an mp3 device.
What are you using? I’ve got plex and jellyfin, but neither have a nice offline sync feature like Spotify (maybe paid plex does? Not sure.)
I have plexpass which let’s me use plexamp. Personally I think it is the best feature Plex has. Plexamp rocks. You can sync offline by making playlists and having them download to your phone. It will auto update as you add more. Or just download whole albums.
Although plexamp has an arbitrary 24 limit on downloaded playlists, due to any higher causing issues. However that can be avoided by having multiple smaller playlists.
If you have a Linux server, you can use the features called sonic adventure and sonic sage. Sonic adventure let’s you pick 2 or more random songs and Plex will build a playlist that organically transitions between those choices.
Sonic sage requires you to have an openai api key but basically allows you to provide a vague description of your mood or what you want to hear and it will build a playlist for it. For example “songs that feel like a nice summer day on an early July morning” is a prompt you can have.
I don’t particularly like everything Plex does, but Plexamp appears to be their passion project and it sure does show. It has all sorts of unnecessary but really cool features. Like writing songs, playlists, or albums to NFC cards.
Airsonic, which is a fork of a fork of subsonic. It works great for music. Video support is there, but finnecky.
On Android I use DSub, which is/was a paid app. It works great, best airsonic/subsonic app I’ve used (all subsonic apps work with airsonic).
When you add music to your “now playing” on your device it cashes the tracks and doesn’t delete them until the cache reaches a certain size, which you can set in your preferences. So you could set the cache to 50 gigs or whatever and pre-load 50 gigs of your favorite songs from your server. Or just cache/stream on the fly from wherever via your phone’s data or random wifi.
Not op but I’m using Navidrome with Tempo on my Android phone
++ Navidrome but I’ve been in love with Symfonium as an android client for about a year. Every other android client I tried seemed like warmed over versions of each other with slightly different GUI and a slightly different set of bugs.
However, I somehow don’t think I ever tried Tempo (doesn’t ring a bell) so I’ll at least peek at it.
Tempo still is a bit buggy but has the best ui imo
A half measure on this for iPhone users is Apple iTunes Match. It syncs your library to your phone for $25/year. It’s especially useful if the music you like isn’t on Spotify.
I’m a flac person, but when I learned Apple Muaic has lossless by default, I bit.
It’s actually great.
I have a huge music collection on my NAS at home that I stream with Navidrome. It works even on a cheap VPS and it was quite easy to setup.
I have an old SanDisk player with RockBox that I use for exercising outside.
Not having a phone with me is part of the good getting out to exercise does me.
yeah I hate having them in my pocket. It’s so bulky. MP3 players on the other hand are like credit cards weightwise, and you can still use normal fucking headphones with them
I miss my e280… With Rockbox, it got me through high school, getting to play Pokémon Silver on it
I got a used Fuze v1 off of eBay that works only as long as it boots rb from SD card, the internal flash now dead
I’ve got a hoard of 2 Fuze v2s and 3 Clip Zips that I got on ebay a few years back. I can’t imagine how much they probably are on ebay now.
I do. Just fixed an iPod Nano 6G via soldering in a new battery. I love to not have to carry my phone when doing sport and not have to buy an expensive smartwatch, just to be able to listen to music. Also the battery lasts 2 days worth listening to music. You don’t have that with Bluetooth earbuds. The new battery will last year’s, while wireless earbuds stop working after 1 or two years. It has aux which is just unreplaceable in my eyes.
I hate how we have downgraded to large phones…
I hate how big some phones have become. I wear cargo pants most of the time and i have difficulty fitting almost any flagship phone into the side pockets.
Seems you’re not the only one, as some cargo pants have “smart phone pockets”. I’ve a pair of those, and at least iPhone 12 Pro fits.
Not quite what you’re asking, but I still use my minidisc player.
I recently picked up an old LG V30 to use as a dedicated audio player. It’s got a great headphone jack, it’s got a micro-SD slot, and there’s a build of Lineage OS for it too. It’s been nice, I can use some pretty power hungry headphones with it without issues and having a dedicated device for music has been nice for focusing on the music.
I would use one if I was still curating mp3 libraries. Honestly, the lack of tracking and spying makes going back to ripping mp3s and having a stand alone player rather appealing.
Soundbound, soundcloud downloader, youtube downloaders, torrents.
Thanks. I’ve used all but Soundbound in the past, will look into it.
Soundbound doesnt work out of the box. The dev is really careful to avoid it being discovered. You need to add a list of addons, then it works great.
I do, they have better battery life, are lighter and smaller and actually have great sound quality (my alliexpress 20 dolar mp3 player have better sound than my desktop pc)
edit: I use it mostly for flac, not having so much going on electronically makes the sound extremely clear even on cheap devices with good headphones
20$ Chinese DAC is better than your PC?
probs better than the $2 DAC that came with the PC. I’m still not convinced DACs have any noticeable difference to sound quality, though.
I mean, there is a limit on where you don’t notice anymore. Personally I believe it’s the unwanted noise and hissing that you don’t want in a DAC.
Its a small difference in SNR but its kinda noticeable with good enough headphones (I have a Philips SHP9500)
Like some other people here I still use an iPod classic for all the music in my car. Haven’t had iTunes installed to change the music on it for 14 years.
you can use foobar2000 (and likely other programs, its a bit fiddly but not hard) to change the music on an iPod classic fyi, but I also understand its totally fine to be listening to the same 200gb of music you had in 2009, rockon
They are called DAPs these days. Head over to any chi-fi online shop and you’ll find plenty of them. They go from cheap to ultra high-end (thousands of dollars) for their features.
There’s also the market for dongles which one can attach to their mobile for the sound quality and extra power and since a lot of mobiles don’t have 3.5mm ports anymore.
The Sony Xperia line still offers headphone jacks. …As does Asus’s Zenfone (tho they yanked the ability to unlock your bootloader)
I don’t think they disabled unlocking the bootloader. AFAIK they no longer give the free tool to unbrick the device if something goes wrong
The unlock tool has been yanked & the unlock servers have been down since May. Tea leaves say unlocking support is gone.
I see. That is most unfortunate. Another vendor dropping support in an already constrained market is bad for the custom ROM community. I predict that in a few years, when the Pixels will gain close to 100% of the efforts of the custom ROM community, they will lock their bootloader too, rendering the entire community useless.
Yup. I recently got an older Xperia model for hardware reasons, but software… they’re another 2-year update brand
