This looks promising. Pretty much all modern portable music players are janky Android devices with awful hardware and software. I've been looking for something to dethrone the Zune HD for me, which has a small form factor and intuitive interface
It’s wild that 40+ years after they pretty much invented the portable music player, people need to be reminded that they still exist
The NW-a30 I bought years again sounds exactly like what you are looking for. The software is not android, it’s snappy and intuitive and Sony has decades of experience making these devices
An 8gb for $79 (why is 8gb of storage still a thing when stores are giving away 32gb flash drives for free?) or a $799 player that costs more than my phone and desktop computers combined.
the most important use of my phone is to play audio. to the point that i almost considered getting a pinephone so that i could run something else besides android and get a better FOSS audio player (and a keyboard). but i decided against it because it was just a bit to expensive for what it offers.
now if only i could find a decent FOSS audio player for android. it is critical that the player interface orders files by directory structure and displays the filename because a lot of audiobooks and audio drama series or podcasts use the series title in all files and don't have a file specific title (and those that do mess it up by not having episode or chapter numbering. this often makes the individual chapters/episodes indistinguishable from each other. unfortunately most available audio players assume that the title is enough to pick a file, but that really only works for songs, not audio books, audio drama or podcasts.
Check out Cowon products. Big fan since the J3. Sadly they haven't made anything quite as good since, but the Plenue D2, that i have now, is very decent.
Sansa Clip+ was very close to audio player perfection as far as I'm concerned. Simple but functional, no frills, had exactly the features it needed, no less and no more, and at a very reasonable price. Rockbox made it better, but even without it was pretty darn good.
I don't recall what happened to mine (lost? broken? gave it to someone? don't recall), but I wish I had bought 20 of them when I could to last the rest of my life.
Jinkies! I understand that it's an indie project and don't doubt that's just the price point it needs to be, but that's sadly a bit too rich for my blood.
Some older portable media players are supported by Rockbox, which supports Opus. Unclear if there's any supported devices currently in production. As for SD cards, I know SanDisk devices on that list supported microSD cards.
I was expecting to see them say "it runs Rockbox."
I put it on my Sandisk E200 back in the day; 2Gb and then I stuck in another 2Gb card. It was so responsive, and the scroll-wheel UI was so convenient. The wheel seized up (still usable, but had to turn it like a safecracker instead of with your thumb), so I gifted it to a co-worker's son.
What I always wanted to see was something with an "old Blackberry" style side-mounted scroll-wheel, for eyes-off operation.
I want to know where to source that blackberry jog-wheel.
I can't seem to find any PCB-mounted jogwheels that both (a) rotate in a plane parallel to the board and (b) are meant to be operated by touching the edge of the wheel (rather than its face, like the dial on the Sansa Fuze) and (c) don't cause the depth of the device along the axis perpendicular to the PCB to become huge (i.e. like a knob-style encoder without the knob).
I rip/buy all my music using FLAC, and then put what I want for e.g. flights on my phone in Opus since you can get muuuch smaller files w/o degrading quality.
The general consensus on MP3s is that 320kbps VBR is universally transparent quality, whereas that number is about 120kbps VBR for Opus.
Honestly, depending on the music and how good an ear you've got, Opus at 96kbps is pretty great.
Good to know. I see "just use 320K" as the mantra in a lot of forums, but I also see people claiming they can hear the difference between Opus @ 128K and 192K, which I promise you I do not. Frankly, 96K and 64K are pretty great to my ears.
With a decent encoder (and most are decent these days) VBR at V0 should be transparent too, and is much smaller than a fixed ratio of 320kbs. I'm not entirely sure how it compares to Opus, but it's a better target than 320kbps fixed rate.
Opus is Vorbis‘ successor. Vorbis should no longer be used for encoding, except if you need to stay backwards compatible. Eg if you needed to shrink a FLAC collection I‘d use Opus.
The iPod Classic could do 36 hours of playback so I wonder why this can only manage 24 hours.
> 2200-mAh battery with a standard, 3-pin JST connector
For years I have wanted a MP3 player with a 18600 battery. If the developers are reading this, consider a version with a 18600, even if the form factor is not as ergonomic.
> Firmware supports MP3, FLAC, Opus, and Vorbis codecs
No audiobook (m4b, directory of MP3s) support yet. This would be a nice feature to have.
> The iPod Classic could do 36 hours of playback so I wonder why this can only manage 24 hours.
It says a full day, not 24 hours (so probably 8-12 hours).
I had an archos with 80Gb mechanical hdd in early/mid 2000s that I believe lasted more than that. Sadly it died (went into a washing machine) with a lot of my favorite music inside it, including some dj sets that I can't seem to find anymore (not sure of who played and what year...). It was an amazing piece of hardware, better than (unmodified) ipod of 8Gb at the time.
The form factor up around that kind of battery size is actually pretty ergonomic (though I do have big hands). I've got a phone in that range (just under 1lb) and it's nice. Solid. I like the heft of it, it feels like I'm carrying around a filofax.
Maybe an issue with patents? All the formats there are open source with the exception of MP3, that from what I remember had its patents expired a few years ago.
It's an ESP32, so I wonder if you could extend that via software, as in disable EVERYTHING you don't need and run in the lowest power mode possible while doing playback.
To be fair, It's more comparable to MP3 players in the 50 to 100 usd range. (See zishan, f.audio, hiby, shanling, fiio, xduoo)
The difference is it is using open source hardware and software. Chinese MP3 players have little repairability, limited to no modding and a terrible OS. This tries to fix that.
Still expensive in my opinion but I'm waiting to see if people make interesting things out of it.
I wish interface designers would understand this, the value of physical buttons. There seems to be this universal push to make everything as much like a phone as possible - flat, smooth touch controls, and while that's dandy for a device that you're already going to be looking at, it's an absolute hindrance in other contexts. Because now that device that you could have operated in your pocket, or while keeping an eye on something else, that device now demands your attention. Cognitive load is incurred where it need not be.
You get the same problem sometimes even with physical buttons, when some bright spark decides it would be clever for some control range to "wrap around". Where once you could just hold the button for a second to get to the end of the range, and know where the device is w/o looking, and then tap N times to get what you want, now you have to stop whatever else you were trying to do, look at the device's display, and adjust the thing under full attention.
Not everything needs to be a touch screen, or present 'smart' controls.
The cool thing about mp3 players and phones with physical buttons is you could control them in your pocket with one hand while riding a bcycle to school. I remember texting someone on a T9 numpad, once you got the hang of it you could do it with the phone behind your back!
Later I had the worst designed mp3 player created by man which despite having physical buttons, still required you to look at the screen to use it because button presses were (a) context specific (required sequences) and (b) not idempotent (the first press was ignored and brought the device out of sleep mode).
I got a Shanling
MP3 player when looking for features like these, and I've been very satisfied:
3,5mm jack, no Android, physical volume button, SD card, all audio formats, high quality Bluetooth, high quality output, good price and sturdy. Battery is not great, but it's okay.
2200mAH and a 120mA average usage is about 18 hours of playing. My typical usage when I had a commute and a weekly exercise habit was about 2 hours a day, so this would last more than a week.
I had an iRiver 350 slim so 700mb cds but it fit in my pocket and ran all day. The UI was wayyy better than any other CD MP3 player I could find and let you just store albums in folders and use the multi line remote to browse and play.
I wish they'd taken it to SD card storage but my palm pilot could so I ended up using that
Neat! I recently bought a Sony NW-A306. I wish the battery lasted longer. Also, Android is slow and janky. On the other hand, it's Android so it runs Spotify.
Bluetooth SBC only? None of the other high fidelity BT tech? OK there are taking that 'early 2000s' too literally. I hope there is a way to drop higher codecs into this.
Interesting. I wish something like this aimed to be Roon Ready or like an open source version of what Astell & Kern offer, where people can make their own DAP.
As it stands, it's going to be a fun nostalgic device.
Which had a hard drive. The last gen classic is much thinner (and probably had better battery life than the Tangara). It’s hard to understand why does it have to be so bulky but I assume it’s intentional (e.g. full size SD slot).
I use a hand-me-down low-end shitty Samsung Android smartphone for that.
• I found some LineageOS (not very stable, but it works well for audio, which is 100% of the life reason for the device).
• Put Voice for Audiobooks,
• AntennaPod for Podcasts,
• NewPipe for downloading YouTube interviews, lectures or other primarily voice content.
• It rocks Olauncher Lite/Simple/Whatever (some no-bullshit fork, cannot recall the exact name) with three swipe actions (left, right, double-tap) for the three primary apps.
• all of that is from F-droid for sure
• the hardware has microSD card shot, I don’t know the maximum amount, but I use the 8 GB card I had lying around, and it has been quite plenty for me.
Usually, I don’t listen to music. Only while working with my computer or laptop, for focus / eliminate the noise outside. So I use the smartphone for some farm work (I own a tiny city farm) and for driving, when I’m in mood for listening to something (sometimes I just listen to nothing, when I’m low on energy).
It has a Bluetooth module and a Jack. I listened to wired headphones, but I broke the two of them that I have (Sony and Marshall). Now I have two pairs of Bluetooth headphones and I listen to them, nothing in my workflow changed.
I like this workflow very much, as you can re-create it with any Android smartphone. E.g. I have some tiny HTC (Beats branded) Android 4-something smartphone and apart from LineageOS (which isn’t necessary, it’s just me, I enjoy/prefer to not have unneeded bloatware) all the other software is available. I am not sure for Voice, as it’s quite new. But NewPipe and AntennaPod (both old versions, but still) work very well. If you have any more modern device (which would be very cheap to buy secondhand if you don’t), it’s very convenient.
I like Samsung devices for that purpose, as apart from being aesthetically ugly (I mean older devices, prior to Galaxy S9 from circa 2017), they’re quite good, usually have microSD card support and are flashable. E.g. Samsung Galaxy S3 or S4 (I have both, both physically broken, destroyed by the kids), they are very capable of the task. My current one is a low-end Samsung Galaxy Grand, something like that. But if I’d buy another one, I’d go for the Galaxy one instead.
It’s not open source, but all the models I mentioned have swappable batteries (mind-blowing!) and are cheap to repair.
That system works for me very well and I’m happy to share that with others, maybe someone would use it too.
This is great news and the device looks promising. I wonder if rockbox[1] could be ported to it, but since Rockbox does not natively support Bluetooth or Wifi, it might be not the right firmware for this device.
One thing I really miss on all NON iPod / NON Android devices is the ability to control playback via headphone remote[2].
I did a lot of research how to build such a thing myself and found out that it would be too much work to design a PCB that fits my needs and build a custom firmware for it with my skills. My personal approach would be much smaller, something about the size of the iPod Nano 7g.
However, my conclusion also was, that an ESP32 is NOT the perfect chip for this[3] - more the Allwinner T113-S3 (discontinued) on the X-Boy-Plus[5] or the new ArtinChip D21x/D13x in the CyberPad 1[4].
My personal opinion is, that it is hard to build a custom device that has decent battery life, supports Wifi+Bluetooth, is still powerful enough to play all audio codecs and does not have a completely custom firmware that cannot be used in anything else but this device...
Recently I found a promising article, where Flutter has been ported to run on a small RISC-V device[6], which would make at least the software development part a decent experience.
For now, I'll stick with my iPod Nano 7g, as an alternative my Fiio M6 (discontinued, Android 7 with Custom App support). For more modern Apps I use the Unihertz Jelly 2e (Android 12), that has a custom media button, has an Audio Jack and is still available in shops today. Repair process is also ok and I think there also might be LineageOS Support.
The apps I use are Substreamer[7] with Navidrome[8] and Audiobookshelf[9].
The music player I had in the early 2000s was also identical to the music player I wished I had. It was a Zen Stone; a tiny device with flash storage, a USB port, and an audio jack. I plugged it into a cassette tape adapter and used it to play music in my car.
It had no screen, so most of the device was covered in buttons that could be easily used without looking at it.
The company followed up with a sequel model, the Zen Stone II, that was worse in basically every way, a trend that more or less continues to this day.
Every time someone puts a screen on a music player, they decide that using the music player should require looking at the screen. (As here, where the buttons are images shown on a touchscreen!) Why?
Non rockbox, non easily swappable battery (though it uses a rectangular cell with a JST connector), looks like an early ipod, no speaker(?), costs $249? Um no. There are still plenty of Sandisk and other players around that can run Rockbox.
I still have a Cowon D2 that had a Rockbox port that apparently wasn't really complete. Its main drawback as I saw it was not supporting SDXC (i.e. largest supported SD card was 32GB) but in retrospect that's not so bad. I don't remember whether the Rockbox port supported the SD card at all. The player had 16GB of internal flash and a full sized SD slot. It had an excellent DAC and plenty of drive power in its headphone amp, while still having around 50 hours of play time on its 1600mah(?) lipo cell. Replacing the cell with a phone battery of the era wasn't too difficult. It was a great player and would have been even better if they had opened up the hardware docs enough to get Rockbox completely working.
The player I wished for in the early 2000s had an SD slot, had an AM/FM receiver, and ran on an AA cell. Today, realistically, it should also have bluetooth. Depending on its size, maybe it could use an 18650.
On rockbox.org there is a forum thread about porting rockbox to Android and apparently there are significant technical obstacles to doing that. I don't know what the obstacles are. I don't offhand know of Android music player apps that I really like, but there are some usable ones. And phone hardware is good enough for this purpose that the whole induestry of dedicated audio players is now close to wiped out.
> Non rockbox, non easily swappable battery (though it uses a rectangular cell with a JST connector), looks like an early ipod, no speaker(?), costs $249? Um no.
Yep, Slashdot is "news for nerds" and the ipod was the player that Steve Jobs was able to sell to hipsters. It was not the player that nerds wished they had. This new thing seems close to silly. There have been a bunch of such projects on the rockbox forum and all of them bogged down.
I suspect there are retrophiles out there who still want to use rotary dial phones. That is fine, but enough vintage rotary phones are available on ebay for those who want them, that someone trying to crowdfund a new one would face an uphill battle. This music player seems about the same way.
Aren't there FIIO players that come a lot closer to the nerd dream anyway?
Well, I did not wish to have a music player like that in early 2000s.
I enjoy listening on large speakers at home or while driving. I am not listening to music while walking or going somewhere. I rather watch the surroundings, interact with people or think.
