Way too chunky. And no AAC?
The music player you wish you had in the early 2000s
51–60 of 97 posts
Re: The music player you wish you had in the early 2000s
#52Cool, rockbox? Oh, not rockbox... Well, rockbox was cool and we had it in the early 2000s. Don't know whats with the revisionistic headline. https://www.rockbox.org/
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?
Re: The music player you wish you had in the early 2000s
#53I 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.
Re: The music player you wish you had in the early 2000s
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
for me it was sd cards and mp3 and flac support, any insight into why you prefer opus?
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.
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.
Re: The music player you wish you had in the early 2000s
#55I get over 2+ weeks of playback time on my modded iPod classic with Rockbox and a half tb of storage. That’s the player I wish I had in the 200s.
I tested mine and it came out to around 65hrs w/ rockbox playing FLACs. I've also got a Sansa Clip+ that is super small and great with Rockbox.
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.
Re: The music player you wish you had in the early 2000s
#56When reading the title I automatically thought about Winamp.
It really whipped the llama's ass after all.
Re: The music player you wish you had in the early 2000s
#57SD-card capable with Opus support, that's all I ever want frankly, and this has it. Will certainly be interested to see what price this launches at.
> Will certainly be interested to see what price this launches at. $249. https://chaos.social/@jacqueline/111586778394138531
Aimed at hipsters then
Re: The music player you wish you had in the early 2000s
#58Why does it have no buttons? There are plenty of good rockbox able MP3 players on the market. What I need is buttons with feedback.
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.
Re: The music player you wish you had in the early 2000s
#59This 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].
[2]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/36...
[3]: https://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,54269.msg252243.h...
[5]: https://github.com/hsinyuwang/X-Boyhttps://github.com/advply...
[6]: https://systemsdigest.com/videos/tiny-flutter-future-dart-fl...
[7]: https://substreamerapp.com/
Re: The music player you wish you had in the early 2000s
#60I get over 2+ weeks of playback time on my modded iPod classic with Rockbox and a half tb of storage. That’s the player I wish I had in the 200s.
I tested mine and it came out to around 65hrs w/ rockbox playing FLACs. I've also got a Sansa Clip+ that is super small and great with Rockbox.
I had an RCA Lyra RD1021, it was almost the size of a matchbox. I’m still tempted to use it while running instead of a phone.