The music player you wish you had in the early 2000s

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.

I want this device!

> lasts a full day on a charge

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.

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.

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.

>> lasts a full day on a charge

> 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.