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.
studying with it in my local library rnThats so cool.
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.
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.
Shouldn’t be too hard to get a little usb c adapter. But still, I am very glad to have my 3.5mm.
Having to choose between audio output or power delivery isn’t the choice users should be faced with. 3.5 mm jack has been long-lived standard for a reason & it doesn’t take up meaningful physical space. Removal was to sell matching bluetooth earbuds whose batteries die & aren’t repairable so you’ll come back to consume a new set every couple of years.
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 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.
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
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.
Yea, I’ve thought about it more since my original post and it’s looking less likely that I’m going to be able to do this.
I can’t really give up Whatsapp as annoyingly that’s the only way most of my family will communicate. So I’d need a modern dumb phone capable of running Whatsapp, kind of negating the point.
Graphene OS it is!
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.
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.
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
Yes. I used an iPod classic forever but my newer car didn’t play nicely with the old software. So a few years ago I bought the newest iPod touch 256GB from 2019. This software works much better through the USB cable so I can read and control the iPod through my head unit.
I just love having a dedicated music player always plugged into my car. Phones are a hassle to have to set up every time getting into the car and then my music getting interrupted by texts and whatnot. I also listen to a lot more podcasts than music on my phone while I’m at work. But I like the fact that I can hop back in my car at the end of the day and my music automatically resumes from where I left off earlier, no matter what else I had been listening to on my phone in between. That’s the best experience for me.
That’s a good ass use case. Never thought of it that way.
Not quite what you’re asking, but I still use my minidisc player.
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
I have an Astell & Kern SR25 MKII DAP (digital audio player) and I use it quite frequently. The sound quality far surpasses what my phone can produce when connected to any of my speakers or headphones.
It plays FLAC files and any other audio file type you can think of. And it acts as an offline music library when needed (64 GB of memory plus a 1TB microSD).
The better the headphones/speakers I use, the more it outshines anything coming out of my other electronic devices. I use it almost every day.
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)
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.
Any Rockbox fans here? I got it running on my sandisk clip+, and it’s still customizablento this day
Rockbox spoiled me for all other music player UIs.
Same, I can’t do anything else
Rockbox + sandisk is fantastic
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.
My sister does. Her phone doesn’t play nice with her car, but the player does.
