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

one day of charge seems kind of paltry for a purpose-built device

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.

You can get an XDuoo X3ii for $125. It's not exactly in-production, but it will be new in-box.

https://www.linsoul.com/products/xduoo-x3ii

I wish it were the size of a Clip+.

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.

> Bluetooth audio support (SBC codec only)

That's unfortunate