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.
I use one every day. I could probably write an essay on why, but one reason sticks out: tactile buttons. It’s great to be able to skip a track without having to poke around on a screen to find the virtual button.
I just do that with my headphones. Skipping, volume, play/pause.
Or on my watch.
Don’t you still need to press a virtual button?
The Motorola one vision has a feature that if you hold down the volume button it skips and gives you a vibration as feedback. I miss it so much on my pixel 6 with grapheneos
Oh yeah, I have that on my Samsung as use it religiously. I was asking about if it was possible on a smartwatch.
It has a twist bezel and two remappable side buttons. OG galaxy watch
I have a Galaxy watch 4! Unfortunately the two buttons can’t be mapped to media controls.
The Garmin sport watches have buttons for that, at least the Fenix series (the newer versions have additionally touchscreen support).
Tactile buttons are the main reason I got one too! It’s getting hard to find new Digital Audio Players that still have physical buttons (and that doesn’t run Android). I ended up getting a Sony NW-A55 a few years ago and i love it.
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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.
We do the same with our screen obsessed oldest. He loves it!
I’m looking at mp3 players for family road trips for this same reason. My kids go full zombie in front of any screen.
I’ve specifically gone for a AAA battery powered one so I can just enjoy music while I work on proofs.
Phones are ok, but sometimes it’s just nice to be unreachable in a random room on campus where no-one can track you down to attend meetings.
Bonus points if students see you bopping to unknown tunes while you work and think you’re crazy.
It’s probably worthwhile to differentiate between “MP3 Players” and DAPs (Digital Audio Players) that are designed to play high resolution music (mainly FLAC files) through high-end wired headphones. Companies like FiiO and HiBy make these and they sell for $500 and up. I have a HiBy R5 Sabre that has a balanced output for driving my decent Dan Clark Aeon headphones. This all sounds spectacularly good playing high res files or a service like Tidal. It runs on a special version of Android, so you can install apps, etc.
Having said all of that, I do 90% of my portable music listening through bluetooth earbuds driven from my Samsung phone, so not sure the money I invested in my DAP setup has been worth it, and I probably wouldn’t do it again.
I have a HiBy R6 Pro but honestly the software on these arnt great and the screen hasnt worked properly since the within the 1st year stopping me from selecting track 2 without trouble. But yea anyway, I mostly started using my Wireless Momentum 4s for portable use and now just use my phone for the most part.
Yes, the SW on the HiBy devices can require careful handling to get around issues. I mainly use USB Audio Player Pro and it seems to work fairly reliably on my R5. I also often use Plexamp for playing my Plex stored FLACs and that also works well most of the time.
My worry with these devices is how long HiBy will continue to support it with OS updates and security patches, not that I use the device for anything sensitive, but it does use my Google account for the app store.
For Bluetooth, I have the original Samsung Buds Pro and the SONY WH900N’s, which I love and using LDAC for the connection, the sound quality is very good. I also just got the Soundcore Liberty 4 NC as my daily use buds for music and Teams calls and I am very impressed with them for the price. They multi-point connect to my phone and my iPad.
Samsung phone, so not sure the money I invested in my DAP setup has been worth it, and I probably wouldn’t do it again.
So, I’ve always considered myself a bit of an unfulfilled audiophile. Have never had the free cash that I was willing to spend to get all the audiophile gear, but yet I can definitely tell (surprisingly so) that I pay more attention to how my music sounds than most people I know including family members.
My unpopular opinion is FLAC via Navidrome (transcoding disabled) –> Symphonium Client on my phone (with a good bit of time spent tweaking EQ/DSP settings to my liking) –> Buds2 Pro is probably somehow still inferior to what I’d be getting with an audiophile setup, but it’s honestly so breathtakingly lovely to listen to sometimes that it’s hard for me to imagine it getting that much better.
I’m aware there is room to go above that, but it already sounds so damn nice it’s hard for me to imagine it being worth much more effort or expense.
If anything, I haven’t used a set of good over ear headphones since decades ago, and I could see that being a big step up.
Great points and I agree. I use the original Samsung Buds Pro and those sound fantastic using LDAC with my S21.
We live in a great time for portable audio to be able to get this kind of sound and performance out of something we can carry with us everywhere we go. I really only listen to my full size non-bluetooth headphones at home, and usually I am using my SMSL desktop headphone amp for that.
We live in a great time for portable audio to be able to get this kind of sound and performance out of something we can carry with us everywhere we go
Not only do I agree, but my first portable music player was a knock off one of these, so it’s possible that I love the current state of things so much partly because I’ve seen how shitty it could be. 😁
I had one of the old black plastic Walkman cassette players and what a P.O.S. that was. Amazing how far we’ve come 😊
Ah, hello fellow old person. 🙂
I got an AK DAP that holds all my lossless cd rips and older lossless downloads. But, like you, I mainly use my iPhone, likely close to what you said: 90-10 split. Apple Music is now lossless for no extra fee. I still think it’s nice having the DAP as a standalone device.
studying with it in my local library rnThats so cool.
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 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
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.
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!
Does anyone else self-host their music? (I suppose this would also be a thing if you stream from Spotify) but my music device greatly benefits from having some form of Internet connection for when I want to update it.
I self-host, so when I add music to my server my phone sees it automatically. I wouldn’t want to copy my music onto my server and onto an mp3 device, nor do I want to pay for separate internet service on an mp3 device.
What are you using? I’ve got plex and jellyfin, but neither have a nice offline sync feature like Spotify (maybe paid plex does? Not sure.)
I have plexpass which let’s me use plexamp. Personally I think it is the best feature Plex has. Plexamp rocks. You can sync offline by making playlists and having them download to your phone. It will auto update as you add more. Or just download whole albums.
Although plexamp has an arbitrary 24 limit on downloaded playlists, due to any higher causing issues. However that can be avoided by having multiple smaller playlists.
If you have a Linux server, you can use the features called sonic adventure and sonic sage. Sonic adventure let’s you pick 2 or more random songs and Plex will build a playlist that organically transitions between those choices.
Sonic sage requires you to have an openai api key but basically allows you to provide a vague description of your mood or what you want to hear and it will build a playlist for it. For example “songs that feel like a nice summer day on an early July morning” is a prompt you can have.
I don’t particularly like everything Plex does, but Plexamp appears to be their passion project and it sure does show. It has all sorts of unnecessary but really cool features. Like writing songs, playlists, or albums to NFC cards.
Airsonic, which is a fork of a fork of subsonic. It works great for music. Video support is there, but finnecky.
On Android I use DSub, which is/was a paid app. It works great, best airsonic/subsonic app I’ve used (all subsonic apps work with airsonic).
When you add music to your “now playing” on your device it cashes the tracks and doesn’t delete them until the cache reaches a certain size, which you can set in your preferences. So you could set the cache to 50 gigs or whatever and pre-load 50 gigs of your favorite songs from your server. Or just cache/stream on the fly from wherever via your phone’s data or random wifi.
Not op but I’m using Navidrome with Tempo on my Android phone
++ Navidrome but I’ve been in love with Symfonium as an android client for about a year. Every other android client I tried seemed like warmed over versions of each other with slightly different GUI and a slightly different set of bugs.
However, I somehow don’t think I ever tried Tempo (doesn’t ring a bell) so I’ll at least peek at it.
Tempo still is a bit buggy but has the best ui imo
A half measure on this for iPhone users is Apple iTunes Match. It syncs your library to your phone for $25/year. It’s especially useful if the music you like isn’t on Spotify.
I’m a flac person, but when I learned Apple Muaic has lossless by default, I bit.
It’s actually great.
I have a huge music collection on my NAS at home that I stream with Navidrome. It works even on a cheap VPS and it was quite easy to setup.
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.
I bought one for my car when Android phones started removing the headphone jack and SD cards. When I got a new car in 2021 it no longer had an aux port. I could still connect the mp3 player with Bluetooth but that was fiddly. The car has a decent ui for playing music off USB stick which is mainly what I do these days.
I still sometimes use the mp3 player because it sounds better and I have a lot of wired headphones but I no longer daily it.
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 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.
