I quite like the look of this device. It's blocky, 16:9 screen, lots of buttons. I would definitely buy a phone or PDA in this format. Actually I wonder if this could function as a decent PDA? I guess it doesn't have any cameras or GPS, which would be nice to have.
The $9 headphone adapter is better than most audiophile DACs. Audiophile equipment is a scam (one sign is the "balanced" audio output, which they pretend is better but isn't) and Japan's high res audio brands are also scams.
You might want an external amp for high impedance headphones for electrical compatibility reasons, but an amp and DAC are not the same thing.
basicly any fiio will do. But often a good dongle will be enough if you only got basic in ears. The amps are helpful for headphones with higher impedance rating and therefore need more oomph on the line to make them move.
Apple's own 3.5mm adapter is actually pretty reputable in the audiophile community for being a surprisingly good DAC. If it has enough output power to drive whatever you use, you don't need anything else (the cable is pretty thin and fragile though, might want to get something else if you care about that)
What combination of apps would one need to install on an android phone to pull this off?
I remember being able to copy music onto my Nexus 4 via the usb cable and play it through Google’s music app, ten years ago. But they ripped that out years ago so that you could only stream music from in the app. Now the default way to play music on my phone appears to be “YouTube Music”, which kinda grudgingly let’s you play individual songs from the hard drive, but only after explaining that it’s not going to let you put them in playlists or categorize them by artist and album or search on them.
Does there exist a nice way to play your own mp3s on a phone today?
I use VLC on my Android smartphone whenever I'm on the train or bus and the only reason why I wouldn't give it the highest possible recommendation is that they have implemented stop by having you hold down pause for a bit, rather than having a stop button in the UI. Aside from that I can't think of anything wrong with it, it plays .opus (and a slew of other formats), it has an equalizer with a bunch of presets, it doesn't drain too much battery, it doesn't crash, it doesn't show a bunch of ads,... in short, it's a great media player.
> Rocket Player - paid a few dollars for it near a decade ago and it's still decent.
I would have +1'd that – the combo of iSyncr + Rocket Player was perfect for transitioning from iTunes + iPod to iTunes + Android phone while keeping bi-directional syncing of play counts and ratings intact. Rocket Player also supports smart playlists, which is also nice, even if you cannot sync those directly with iTunes and need to manually re-create them on your phone again.
(iTunes has its foibles, but on the other hand I don't find it that terrible, either, and at that time it was the only workable solution I found for bi-directional syncing of ratings and play counts between computer and phone. Plus while I appreciate that with Android you can just copy files directly to your phone and be done with it, a dedicated syncing solution also has its advantages – I don't have to remember to manually copy a file over each time I edit its metadata in any way, and I don't have to setup a ton of exclusion rules like I would have to if I wanted to sync my computer's Music folder with a regular file syncing software.)
Plus Rocket Player has some dedicated support for podcasts synced over from iTunes – since unlike my former iPod my phone has direct internet access, I'd be happy to just use a separate podcasts app for listening to actual podcasts without having to go through iTunes, however I've also been manually adding files as podcasts in iTunes because I've found that to work quite nicely for managing my collection of radio comedy show episodes scrounged together from all corners of the internet. Rocket Player puts those in a separate Podcasts section apart from the rest of my music library, shows which episodes have been listened to, and remember the playback position (and can even sync that with iTunes).
--------------
Except – the original developer of Rocket Player and iSyncr sold his apps not that long ago, and it seems like the new owners are mostly only interested in extracting as much money as possible (supposedly changing both apps from one-time payments for the non-trial version into ridiculously overpriced monthly subscriptions) while doing as little work as feasible before the whole thing completely crashes and burns. So the whole thing (last app version before the sale) might or might not stop working once I have to switch to a phone with a newer Android version (Google isn't as bad as Apple on backwards compatibility, but it's no Microsoft, either), and I've got no idea what to do then…
Supposedly MusicBee (for your PC) allows play count/ratings syncing with either PowerAmp or Gone Mad Music Player, though I haven't tried it myself yet and with newer Android versions you might have to compile the sync app yourself because it hasn't been rewritten for Google's ridiculously over-complicated new file access permissions system.
Supposedly at least Gone Mad also supports smart playlists, too (PowerAmp on the other hand looks like it doesn't?), so if I had to switch, I suppose that's what I'd switch to.
Unfortunately it seems there is no good replacement for iTunes + Rocket Player's podcast handling – while MusicBee imports your iTunes library (with mixed success as far as podcasts are concerned), it doesn't allow manually adding files as podcasts (and on a Mac even Apple itself has broken things, because post-iTunes-split-up the new separate Podcasts app no longer allows manually adding files, either), and on the Android side I suppose things don't loo much better, either. I suppose I might have to set-up a fake local podcasts server on my computer and switch my collection of radio comedy over to my dedicated podcast player app on my phone…
I can't spend enough good words on Poweramp. Expecially if you use an external DAC, it's the software you're looking for.
It's been thr first app I bought on my first Android phone running 2.1.
The developer behind it kept delivering updates, improving compatibility with the quirky audio stack of some smartphones and introducing actually useful features.
The interface doesn't follow the latest user-hostile trends, having instead its own consistent style. Nonetheless over the years it's been constantly polished. The huge number of features and settings are not limited by the interface which actually provides discoverability for them.
For the audiophiles, the audio pipeline is extremely customizable. For the tinkers the interface is very customizable and APIs for writing plugins with are provided.
let's say you have an organized collection of music on your home computer, laptop, NAS, whatever. An easy way to stream that is with a subsonic server. I prefer Navidrome, but there are lots to choose from.
To get that on to your Android you can use an app called DSub. This app can stream, but more importantly playback from cache. You can flag which songs or albums you want to cache on your Android. You can permanently cache as well.
That works well. But if you want to step it up a notch, you can point Poweramp to the cache folder that DSub uses and use Poweramp for playback.
The benefit of this setup is getting music on to your device is trivial once you have these apps configured. No more shuffling files around. Just open DSub, select which new albums you want, and they will appear on your device.
> Does there exist a nice way to play your own mp3s on a phone today?
Lots, but you do have to venture outside of the app. stores where every app. wants you 'streaming' so they can also monetize the metadata they can collect from you as well.
I use this one on my Android, no fuss, no muss, just plays mp3's from the SDCard:
I can get behind the idea of less fiddling with an expensive flagship phone, avoiding risk of dropping and cracking it, reducing wear and tear on its battery, and avoiding distraction if all you want is music or audiobooks
Dedicated hardware buttons for music functions would also be a plus
If a device separate from phone is desired ...an older android phone that is loaded only with music player app and good SD card and 3.5mm audio jack might suffice?
It may actually make sense for custom ROMs that are optimized for dedicated use cases like these to make great purpose-driven gadgets out of old all-purpose smartphones
I suppose you’re referring to the Neutron Music Player app?
I never heard of it and though it was a hardware player competing with the Walkman, but it’s another android music player from the look of it. I still checked the app page in case they went for completely different playing controls to compensate for the physical buttons and playing widget, but it seems it mainly focuses on EQ tweaking and “high fidelity” playback.
I’m all for alternative players on the market, so more power to them. But I’m probably not their target audience.
It's bizarre to only have 32GB/64GB storage. I remember getting a dedicated music player with 80GB in 2008. Bulk storage seems like it would be one of the few good ways to differentiate these from a smartphone
I think that's not the point. They are making a product seemingly targeted at audiophiles and they don't provide enough storage (for the amount of music an audiophile might have), while showing off some obscure features like the gold plated components
It doesn't "provide enough storage" because it's not supposed to provide storage. You're supposed to provide your own storage, whatever amount you see fit, and you are able to upgrade it at any time.
I know people nowadays are used to not having any control over their storage and simply throwing their device in the trash and buying a new one every few years when it's no longer enough, but it wasn't like this in the past.
In this case storage should be mainly used for music. I don't think an SSD is going to make a big difference, assuming Sony's software supports playing from SD cards.
Sure, loading a large FLAC library onto a microSD will initially take longer, but the thing only needs to be done once, and many audio enthusiastsnwill already have microSD cards with it on.
Who IS the target market for something like this? It's almost as big as a phone, and costs as much as many phones... why would anyone use this instead of their phone? I guess maybe if you have a giant phablet and want something more portable (or more disposable, but it's still $400) for workouts or that kind of thing? Maybe if you're addicted to social media and so the fact that it can't do anything besides play music is a feature?
I finally made the switch to a phone without headphone jack last year. I like the phone, but the pretty expensive bluetooth headphones I tried don't sound as great as my beaten year old wired ones.
There's many places where I don't care about having a dangling wire: at home watching tv/movies, while working at my desk, or in public libraries for instance.
A small audio player that work with my wired headphones would be workable, I l'm seriously thinking about it if moving music in and out is easy enough.
> Who IS the target market for something like this?
Some people work in environments where you can't have "smart" devices. I could see this squeaking by (for example you can have some single purpose devices like Garmin watches, but not Apple watches with wifi and cellular).
It might be good for airplanes too if you want something to drive your headphones without draining your battery, but I guess in-seat power has kinda solved that already.
I don't have this exact model, but I did have two earlier iterations of the Walkman which I liked for three reasons:
1) it's a lot lighter than a phone, so convenient to take running
2) the battery lasts days (if not weeks) rather than a single day
3) it has a wired headphone jack, so I don't have to use Bluetooth earbuds that regularly fall out or disconnect.
I don't recall either model being that expensive though.
Good points. The battery thing seems like a big one for someone who travels a lot especially. Headphone jack is nice, but I find a USB adapter works fine when I want to use wired headphones with my phone. Size/weight probably depends on the size of your phone. I tend to prefer smaller phones, so to me most of what people use today is a giant "phablet".
That thing is running android. The battery usage on android phone is based on network access. If you install as many apps as you do on this walkman than on a regular mobile phone, it won't last better. Also if like me you don't install any social media app or anything that connect on a regular basis to some service and play music stored locally on your sdcard your smartphone will also last for days.
I can understand wanting to use an affordable tiny ipad nano like device instead of a smartphone. But I don't understand this, being 3 times more expensive than a decent entry level smartphone unless you want to use it with high quality over the ears noise cancelling headphones. The physical buttons do not even seem to be ergonomically placed.
> Who IS the target market for something like this? It's almost as big as a phone, and costs as much as many phones...
Me, but I aint paying $800 for it (if I understood the article correctly).
Give me a walkman made specifically for listening to music with 250GB+ and without all the pain to move music onto and off of the device and can last _weeks_ on a single charge with regular use and I would purchase the shit out of it.
I feel like a lot of people don't realize just how leashed they are with modern phones. My favorite phone ever is an old Palm phone that I still have to this day because I refuse to throw it away. It's smaller than the original SE, far lighter, and could last up to two weeks on a single charge. Contrast that with the 3rd gen SE I have now and I'd give it up in a heartbeat if something like that Palm arrived.
But it won't, so moving the music playing experience off of the phone is a good step to loosening that leash.
My criteria is heavy on "do one thing well". I want something without internet, "apps", a convoluted OS, and basically all the other things that make phones a Swiss army knife.
Those things aren't free, they come with a cost which I'm not willing to pay; attention, bugs, distraction-as-a-service. Also, I'm not 100% on this because I haven't tested it, but I think the output I get from FLAC files on my music device is better than my phone.
Yes, I'm also the type who enjoys a separate camera.
There's a piece of mind to dedicated devices I was robbed of for a while with the the phone.
Now having said all this, the real answer to your question is; nobody, because this device seems to be a phone :/
> the real answer to your question is; nobody, because this device seems to be a phone
Well said, that's _exactly_ how I feel. I would 100% purchase a dedicated music device, but it can't be a glorified phone (I don't even like the smartscreen in the article) with a phones problems.
> real answer to your question is; nobody, because this device seems to be a phone :/
The terrible error here is including the Android home screen in the marketing materials.
By all means base it on Android, but I never want to see anything like that on a "stand alone" device. Eliminating any generic UI should have been a priority from the go because it completely changes the sentiment around the device.
> Anyway, back to this $800 model. Unlike regular phone equipment, this has a proper audio amplifier with big, beefy capacitors to power the analog audio output. That makes it much bigger than the A300, at 72.6×132 mm and a whopping 17 mm thick. It also has two audio outs: a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack and a 4.4 mm "balanced" audio jack, which is used by some high-end audio equipment.
It just feels weird to cheap out on storage, of all things, on an $800 device in 2023
Yeah, I get the audiophile one. (I mean, I don't get it really, but I get that there are people who do.) But the cheaper (but still expensive) one didn't seem to offer much. As many people mentioned though, battery life is a compelling one.
The target market is people who want a device with a headphone jack, an SD card slot and a good DAC. The number of phones that include these features nowadays is small.
Is there any scientific evidence that the special hardware found in high-end audio equipment (gold-plated connectors, "large polymer capacitors", expensive DACs etc.) actually produces perceptibly different (and perceptibly better) audio output?
I mean of course assuming hearing abilities that are within 1-2 standard deviations of the human average, not one-in-a-million-people super hearing. Also assuming actual music is being played, not audio tracks specifically engineered to highlight the difference.
I think your real question is wether uncompressed audio from a fine tuned DAC sounds better than compressed AAC converted by current Bluetooth headphones.
The competition to this are mobile phones, and they almost all moved to bluetooth only, so the choice is which Bluetooth headphones gets better sound with a form factor you better like, pitted against the flurry of wired headphones and hybrid that are still on the market.
Its all marketing. Price and performance have a surprisingly low correlation in the hifi market, after going above the threshold of crappyness. Nobody will believe you if you tell them this.
Certainly the gold-plated oxygen free copper hocus pocus would only be relevant after the DAC where the signal is analog. But that doesn't matter if you are just cargo culting. Case in point, the infamous $1650 HDMI cables where people would leave hilarious reviews on Amazon.
That being said, there can be a big difference going from "consumer" level to "basic audiophile". I remember my own surprise when I first got a pair of Grado SR80s, how many details I could hear in music that I never knew existed before.
I get that some equipment is better than others. But is it because of those specific hardware components commonly cited in marketing material, or simply because of better overall engineering?
It's mainly because of tradeoffs and engineering. The Grado's as an example have zero outside noise isolation and the aesthetics of a 1950s ham radio operator.
There is plenty of empirical evidence people will overpay for things they think will enhance their social status. As Woz said at Jobs funeral, "Steve invented some of the greatest tools known to mankind: Apple fanboys."
Speaking about evidence, where you get that quote from? Sounds oddly out of character of Woz, doesn't seem like something he would say about Jobs, even less so at his funeral.
The amplifier can make a big difference because it can allow you to use headphones that you couldn't with a less beefy amp, and the speakers/headphones are the one thing that definitely makes a perceptibly different sound.
Proper capacitors certainly help. Bass is a big dollop of energy being delivered all of a sudden - being why you can see the speaker moving. That energy has to come from somewhere and it's just one of those things that if you shortcut it, you can tell. Similarly you can tell if speakers are in shitty boxes. The combination of the two leads to those "home theatre" things you see in shops that make a loud "splplplplpl" noise when something explodes on screen. Yuck.
Other than that, I think it's mostly bollocks. I think a disappointingly large proportion of it can be summed up as "don't cut corners" which is why hifi gear from the 70's can still sound nice. If you replace the capacitors.
Take a test yourself[1]. Connectors and most of cables probably don't matter, caps do, DACs do. The real problem with cultist audio is people don't close PDCA or OODA loops and resorts to occultic nonsense like gluing pebble stones on circuit breakers to "absorb bad energy", but scientific methodologies do work for what are measurable and actionable.
One thing to note about Sony android players is that the European models have ferocious volume limits; neither having high gain mode, nor the grunt to drive more inefficient headphones in low gain mode.
This appears to be set as a value in a read only database that would require root to remove. A method to acquire root is not known to be available on any of them.
That's odd, AFAIK the EU only requires a warning at a certain volume level. My android phone will give you a warning that you've set the volume to the limit once, but then allows you to increase it further after dismissing the warning anyways.
They certainly do that in Europe too, but they also hard limit the output of the player. Even the balanced output, which should offer more power is limited to the same volume as the 3.5mm output.
I've noticed Sony doing a sort of malicious compliance with European regulations, implementing them in a way that is conformant, yet maximally infuriating. For example, energy usage warnings on their TVs sold in eirope.
So much so, that at some point I made a comparison site for mp3-players. But nobody cared. I made comparison sites for smartphones, laptops and monitors which became quite popular. But for mp3-players, it seemed like I am the only person on planet earth who uses them.
Personally, I still use a Sony Walkman NWZ-E585. For me, that is the best mp3 player ever made. It has a nice form factor, feels very good haptically, the navigation interface is ok, the sound quality is great, the noise cancelling too, and you can access the storage without having to install propriatery software on your computer.
Is that player comparison site still around, or do you have a recommendation for someone who has long had the thought of getting a dedicated music playing device?
The article listed those as $800, which is ridiculous and there's no way I'm paying that much, but if I can find something at a much more reasonable price (preferably a physical headphone jack) I'd be happy as a clam.
I was skimming specifically looking for price and must have missed the earlier, cheaper, listings. And when they said that $818 price tag was "relatively cheap" I took that to mean that's the entry-level fee and decided to nope on out.
I wouldn't even spend that much on my phone (spent less than half of that) so there's no way I'm spending that on another device, lol.
"There's another new Sony Walkman, the NW-ZX700. It's 104,500 yen ($818) in Japan, and while that sounds like a lot for a portable music player, it's actually a relative bargain compare..."
Ok, at that price point (or even a quarter of that) it ceases to be a music player to become a luxury good to be shown by paid influencers on social media.
Nothing to see here, move along...
I used to have one that cost me around £200 and was alright but sounded pretty anaemic. I replaced it with one that cost around £600 and is way better. I love it.
Comments of the form "price X is unreasonable because I'd never pay it" are mildly annoying. You're an individual, not a market, and as such don't get to choose what a "reasonable" price is. DAPs (digital audio players) are available at a wide range of prices. The top result for "MP3 player" on Amazon UK right now is £23.99. Choose a price point you're happy with and you'll find something. I love mine at the price point I went for.
(I've also had one for around £50, bought a couple of ~£20 ones for my small children and owned a couple of different DAC dongles for my phone. Unsurprisingly, the sound quality is very highly correlated with the price, up to the level I've tried. I expect it levels out not far above, though, and if you decide to pay thousands for a DAP they'll make it out of gold-plated copper because there's nothing else left to use the money on. [1])
> Comments of the form "price X is unreasonable because I'd never pay it" are mildly annoying. You're an individual, not a market, and as such don't get to choose what a "reasonable" price is.
When my gf wanted an adjustable standing desk the going rate was roughly $600 for anything that had everything she wanted so I built it myself for maybe $200 and the thing is still being used regularly something like 8 years later.
When I want a physical copy of an older PS2 game and they're all $100+, I pirate it.
If _YOU_ want to outsource personal responsibility for your money, that's on you, don't lecture me because I choose not to.
I can conclude that millions for a painting is unreasonable despite many people doing it because they're involved in money laundering just as well as anyone else.
I seem to have got under your skin. It wasn't my intention and I apologise if I caused offense, but I don't retract what I said. You've described ways you've obtained things for less than market price in exchange for extra effort or legal risk, not reasons the market price should be anything other than what it is, which is determined by what people will pay, collectively.
> Ok, at that price point (or even a quarter of that) it ceases to be a music player to become a luxury good to be shown by paid influencers on social media. Nothing to see here, move along...
> If you think that is bad, check out the Walkman NW-WM1ZM2 (who at Sony thinks that these names are a good idea?) for a cool $3500
Your response is what everyone will sound like once our robot overlords finally take over. It certainly didn't come from an understanding of the human condition.
Further examples of the same attitude. Such comments are common, which is why I find them "mildly annoying".
I suggest you find a healthier pastime than getting upset about what other people are buying. In the meantime, I'll spend my money however I please. Maybe I'll buy a gold plated Walkman. They look shiny.
It's plain I angered you with my first reply, but it wasn't intended and I apologised. You replied rudely, so yes I had a bit of a poke, which I'm not particularly proud of. I don't try to wind people up and it doesn't give me pleasure to do so. It just seems especially easy in your case.
It's possible to disagree with people on the internet without getting emotional about it. It's just a conversation about Walkmans. (Walkmen?)
^this is what it looks like when people have called out dang and are trying to make themselves look good. Or at least I hope so otherwise the lack of self-awareness in your posts is getting even worse.
It would be better to read my posts as amused rather than angry.
What you can do is look at the players supported on https://www.rockbox.org/ (open-source alternative firmware for mp3 players) and check which ones are currently available for purchase somewhere. From the top of my head I know at least Surfans F20 and Xduoo X3II shouldn't be hard to come by.
It warms my heart to see Rockbox still alive and kicking. Most of my experience with it took place around 2005-2007 (wow, we're getting old I guess!). Great project.
I couldn't second that more. Rockbox is a wonderful 100% FOSS operating system for music players, and they're working hard to port it to new devices, almost always with zero help from manufacturers. HNers, please consider donating to the project, and/or if you have a old player collecting dust somewhere, also consider donating it to them so they'll have more hardware available for testing; when working with undocumented platforms the risk of bricking them is high, so it would help a lot.
> which is ridiculous and there's no way I'm paying that much
You forgot "for me" after "ridiculous."
I turned myself into an audiophile without even realizing it, but once you hear the difference, you can't unhear it. I have rediscovered some of my favorite tracks. So if your hearing is good (use an app to check if you can still hear the buzz sound, if not check your response curve) and you enjoy music, why not?
My regular audio setup (walkman, headphones, cable) cost more than the (very good, top of the line) OLED laptop I'm using. Add all the little extras I use time-to-time, like shoulder headphones for use in the morning, or the sunglasses with integrated bluetooth I use when taking a walk, and it's an obscene amount of money.
But music is what moves my soul. You may spend top dollar for your car and consider it a "reasonable" expense because it brings you such happiness everyday? I consider a top-of-the-line NZW Walkman "reasonable" for the same reasons.
I wish I would have some use for an mp3 player but I don't.
I have my Android phone with me all the time. Sometimes even a second one so my mp3s are on there.
The only use I could see would be for a long bike tour where I want to save phone battery time but those are quite rare and the price they call there is ridiculous for that.
You're not alone and neither is the Walkman. Enough people use these things to support a small market that, having not been killed by mobile phones by 2023, isn't going to be. I have an Astell & Kern one.
People may not have been interested in the comparison site because there just aren't that many devices to choose from and the choice comes down more to the sound than features that can be enumerated on a comparison list. Monitors are a mess, with each manufacturer making a zillion variants with cryptic model numbers differing in quantifiable ways. I've actively sought out monitor comparisons, but one for DAPs never occurred to me.
I like to have a separate device for playing audio as well, especially one which is sturdy and waterproof and small enough to fit in one of those small pockets on my sleeve when I'm out in the fields or woods swinging a tractor or an axe.
I also like for that device to be able to receive and make phone calls...
...so I just use an old Android device, to be more specific my old Motorola Defy from 2011. It runs Android (Cyanogenmod, the predecessor to LineageOS) 4.4, does the Wifi thing but also the phone call thing, runs DSub connected to my own Airsonic server. It also takes photos, runs Telegram and when in dire need even a browser although it takes patience to wait for it chewing through a Javascript-burdened "modern" site. I have a 32GB microSD card in the thing which is enough given its connectivity options. The battery, also from 2011, lasts for 2 to 3 days of intense use.
Small Android devices running Google-free AOSP-derived distributions are a good match for the role of "standalone" music players with the added benefit of allowing connectivity. Total costs for the latter are around €10/year with occasional use (Sweden, "pay as you go" SIM), total cost for the device is zero since I've used it for 12 years.
No, a SIM enabled Apple watch sounds like an expensive solution to an already solved problem in this case. Apart from being virtually free the Android-based solution also stands out for being open versus the closed nature of the Apple watch. I use (other instances of) the same device as remote-controlled media player (a Defy running MPD connected to a car stereo in a large-ish wooden rectangular box with beefy speakers, a battery and several power hookups and charging ports (including 20W of solar panels to keep the thing going when there's light to be had)) or a trailer camera (a screen-less Defy in a custom wood+aluminium enclosure mounted in the front of my wife's horse trailer, the thing creates its own "cloud" through its Wifi adapter so she can see her nags on the road, it powers up and down based on the trailer hookup being powered with the battery as backup) and other similar contraptions.
They're still running "iOS" (OK, trimmed down to "watchOS") and with that are far less amenable to running the type of software I want. It might work for those who are in the clutches of the Apple world but for those who live in freedom it is of not much use.
I guess I was basing my recommendation on a restricted device that was waterproof, plays music, and could make phone calls. If you expand your criteria back to general mobile computing device that can run many apps then sure you’ll just have to use Android or full iOS.
Standalone devices like HiBy R2 / Shanling M0 / Fiio M5 make a lot of sense, because they allow to bridge almost anything to almost anything else audio-wise. airplay/usb/bluetooth/dlna in — airplay/usb/bluetooth/dlna out. Too bad they are marketed as a "hifi media player"
Airpods/Earbuds (I use the galaxy buids pro) have filled that need for me. My uses are a little less extreme, granted, but I leave my phone in my bag and just use the buds. In practice the battery life is more than good enough for me to use every day, and it means I have less devices to manage.
I can say the same of my NWZ-S730. More than 10 years of usage and it still works great. I wish I could find replacement noise cancelling headphones for it, they were amazing for public transport. It will probably last 10 more years, maybe even more.
mp3 players are pretty niche. For normal day to day stuff I already have my phone which has all features any mp3 player has and I want to carry it for other reasons as well.
There needs to be a good reason to carry extra device. I could see carrying something that has much better sound quality with amp that can drive some more hobbyist headphones, but I don't know if such devices are made - at least all the mp3 players I've seen are made to be as cheap as possible.
I agree, it is pretty niche and I belong to that niche. As a music nerd myself, it was dedicated storage and just being used to having music offline without the streaming services. The iPod nano was so tiny, that it felt like nothing is in my jacket's pocket. I do have some music on my phone, but it's photos that are mostly taking up its storage. I literally have gigabytes worth of music and also audiobooks that are several hundreds of megabytes each. Though I don't have data to support it, I'm also trying to conserve my phone's battery.
If you listen to music all day, saving phone battery life is a pretty good reason. Plus a non-Android MP3 player can get 40-100 hours on a charge.
> all the mp3 players I've seen are made to be as cheap as possible.
There are plenty of high-end players which prioritise sound quality and provide a better output than phones. The NW-ZX700 in the featured article looks to be one of these. FiiO is another well-known higher-end brand: https://www.fiio.com/m17
I wouldn't call FiiO high-end, they have a pretty wide range in most products (including DAPs) that goes from budget to relatively high-end ($1800). Astell & Kern start about one step down from FiiO's high-end, but can take you much higher (their ULTIMA SP3000 is ~$4300).
> There needs to be a good reason to carry extra device
Funny enough, for me that extra device is the phone: I see no reason to carry a "phone" for normal day-to-day stuff as my walkman has all the features I normally need (email, PDF viewer).
I want to carry it for other reasons as well: due to its smaller screen size, the walkman limits the use of addictive social media.
Main reason to use a standalone mp3 device is: doing excersie (sports, running, etc.). I cannot play, let's say basketball with my phone hanging around. Nor running, nor almost anything that implies excersising.
The best MP3 (and FLAC) player ever made is the Sansa Clip+ with Rockbox firmware.
$50 when new. Size of a matchbox -- not the car, the small thing that restaurants and bars used to hand out as advertising. MicroSD slot for storage. 20+ hours of playtime, recharged via USB. Appears as a USB Mass Storage device, too. 3.5mm headphone jack. Small 2-part monochrome OLED display. Physical buttons: D-pad, OK, Menu, power, and volume up and down. After a day you don't need to look at it to pause/play, skip a track, change the volume or turn it on and off.
With Rockbox installed (ten minute process), you can play FLAC, use a parametric equalizer, customize the display, change playback speed for audiobooks, and generally do a few dozen things more than the factory firmware.
Rockbox lets you do the same on a large number of devices, but the Clip+ is the best.
If I’m reading the specs right it looks like their headphones are required. I’m guessing mic’s are on each side and offloaded to the player? Either way, I wouldn’t want to be forced to use their headphones.
QC20 are not an option for me because of the extra device that is built into the cord close to where you plug it into the mp3-player. It makes handling of the whole system cumbersome.
I guess the noise-cancelling has to be built into the mp3-player to avoid this. I have not seen elegant in-ear headphones with built-in noise-cancelling yet.
I had a Sansa clip of some type and it lasted about as long as the cheap $5 mp3 player I bought next. These days I find it more convenient to use my phone. You can play mp3s just fine on a phone.
Depends. I use my phone to control music when I'm in the gym but when I'm out running or cycling then listening to music is generally a bad idea, IMO, as you lose spatial awareness.
I suppose that's more or less important whether you're running in a busy city or out in the countryside though.
Either way, recent high end smart/sport watches usually have some sort of music playback support for folks who want to exercise with music but don't want to lug around a phone.
You can get good deals on Garmin watches that play music at their factory outlet store. I compress music with AAC Pro on my mac and then upload it, I really can't complain about the sound quality given that the gym or outdoors is usually noisy.
Garmin really undersells their music functionality on their fitness watches. I wasn't expecting the depth of music features on their newer stuff, like being able to automatically sync Spotify playlists to your watch for offline play, or being able to use the watch as a remote for your Bluetooth-connected phone.
As you said, losing spatial awareness is only an issue if you are forced to share space with cars where drivers often don't pay attention and try to murder you. If you are on paths/trails or in the middle of nowhere then its not a big deal. You don't hear the mountain lion stalking you regardless if you are listening to music.
That latter part is important. I live out in the country, and I've had more than a couple of encounters with aggressive dogs. Occasionally other wildlife, but as I like to posit: The forest reveals its secrets if you listen closely enough.
The display on my exercise bike has broken, so it has been useful to have a stopwatch as well as a music player on my phone, I don't have a good way to carry it for any other kind of exercise.
How are phones awful? In the gym I just stick my phone in the corner and the Bluetooth radio has enough range to reach my headphones. For running I just put my phone in my pocket.
I have a Garmin smart watch that supports audio playback but it's a hassle to use because I have to load or sync recordings in advance. Streaming audio on my phone is much more convenient. Plus I have my phone with me anyway in case I want to take a picture due Strava or something.
I am fortunate enough to be a member at a gym where theft isn't a problem. Good Bluetooth headphones aren't ruined by sweat (and I sweat a lot). If you drop a plate on your ear then you have bigger problems than ruining your headphones.
Fair enough! I’ve been a member at some more… high risk gyms, and I’m unusually hard on earbuds and like. Cheap and replaceable may not be optimal for everyone’s use case.
Absolutely the best, I use my phone these days as I have it on me but replaced the Sansa with another as I couldn't find anything as good even after it was discontinued.
I agree. There was something magical about these especially how good the sound quality is for its size and portability. I use mine at the gym and when running since you can barely feel it. It has a nice selection of apps too.
I've collected 3 over the years in case any of them die off. While the battery life is still good I should probably get around to researching replacement batteries/cells while I still can.
I just ordered 2 batteries for each of my Sansa Clips. I'll have to unsolder/solder the wires to the mainboard to replace, but that's a small price to pay for keeping such a great player alive longer.
I second that. I'm a commercial painter and more then once I've had my sansa mp3 player fall into a paint bucket. Fish it out, clean it up and the damn things just kept on working. Instant brand loyalty after that. Shame they stopped making them.
> Sansa Clip Sport / Clip Jam / Clip Sport Go / Clip Sport Plus
> These are based on an Actions Semiconductor ATJ2127 chips, with under 100KB of available memory and all audio decoding happening inside dedicated hardware. A rockbox port to these (and other ATJ2127) targets will not happen, as it would require an immence undertaking and due to resource limitations, the end result would lack most of the features that rockbox users have come to expect.
Yeah, the Clip+ with Rockbox was just incredible. Got me through a lot of workdays in the corporate "no software allowed on your computer" days.
I was using mine in the very early days of Android existing. Some people had them, but I didn't yet. I got my first Android phone, moved my music over, and was ... massively disappointed. My favorite phone incident was sitting on some flight, trying to listen to music, and my phone wouldn't play it through the headphones, speakers only, annoying everyone nearby. I didn't listen to music on that flight and promptly switched back to a device that did not have a physical speaker.
Over time, phones rebuilt trust and I got a lot of use out of that, until Google Play Music got shut down and deleted all my music (no problem, I have it all locally). Now I have no idea what people do and simply go without. I guess people don't have music libraries any more and just listen to the radio for $10/month? No thanks. (I use foobar2000 on my desktop, and don't listen to music away from my home anymore. Thanks technological progress?)
I still have my original Clip+. The OLED display is showing it's age with dimmed pixels but it is still a great -stealth- recording device. It is also still my go to music player for long flights.
The latest Rockbox (3.15, I think) supports Opus on Sansa Clips, and I've loaded mine with transcoded Opus files. (I keep FLAC files in my archive.) I know, Opus is not FLAC, but I'm likely to be listening in noisy environments where it's impossible to tell the difference, and the vastly longer playtime is a good trade.
The "problem" I have is that I bought a Cowon iAudio 7 over a decade ago and the thing still has amazing battery life and sounds fine. By the time I need to replace it, they'll all be gone.
All of the database examples talk about podcasts. Especially the last one that uses play counts to split podcasts into old and new "folders" seems useful.
I used to use my NWZ-A17 every day until the pandemic started. It was small, light, has physical buttons I could press when it was in my parka's inner pocket, I didn't have to recharge it every night.
Now I work from home and I have migrated to my smartphone. I use it infrequently enough that I am not annoyed by what the streaming service tries to get me to listen to.
And owning a dumb mp3 player comes with its own drawbacks. If artist A has released 20 albums, artist B only five and I have both discographies on my player, that doesn't mean I want to listen to artist A four times as often when I ask for a shuffled playlist.
Back when I owned a 256MB mp3 player (and felt like a king among people with floppies) I would hand-pick a playlist that would fit. With dozens of gigabytes of storage I have no desire to do that and I want the player to come up with a good playlist for me.
The wired ones use the DAP for the processing. Special (usually only for the DAP in question) headphones/earbuds with microphonesnare needed. They are usually included though, so it's hardly an issue.
I feel like I'm opening myself up to some abuse by posting this, but I still use my original brown Zune every day. I bought one as soon as they became available and I've always loved it. I've swapped out the original hard drive twice (once early on for a 100 GB HDD until it died, and then for a 128 GB SSD), and I've replaced the battery twice as well. Sometimes I wonder if I just hold onto it out of nostalgia, but I hope it will last a long time to come!
What’s your comparison site for monitors (assuming it’s still up-to-date)? Interested in something that comes close to Retina in PPI, but doesn’t carry Apple’s hefty price tag.
Edit: ah, well that didn’t take much looking. It’s https://www.productchart.com/ for anyone else interested. Looks really nice, thanks!
> So much so, that at some point I made a comparison site for mp3-players. But nobody cared.
Not surprised in the least. People voted long ago, and continue to do so, that a single device that handles communication, entertainment, games, news, photography, etc. is superior to standalone devices you have carry around.
Good enough is good enough for the majority of the market. They don't want to hear Vienna Philharmonic's third violinist breathe, they want to listen to autotuned pop music on a pair of $20 headphones and get on with their day.
I subscribe to Tidal, which has master quality recordings. One’s headphone choice is orthogonal to the music player you use, so if you can pick a very high quality one for a standalone MP3 player you can use that same one with your phone.
>> you can access the storage without having to install propriatery software on your computer.
I was also a fan when they almost all played from a file system, but even 10+ years ago it was harder and harder to find something that didn't require a store or some terrible music management application. Streaming continues to kill this approach as well. My kids don't know what an mp3 is.
This device has all the specs that I want _for a phone_. Seriously, I would love a music player with a phone, not a phone with a music player. They do need to increase the storage, then add a SIM card and this thing would fly off the shelves.
I came across these recently at an electronics store in Japan. These feel really good in my hand; it's not too wide or long, the buttons feel really solid, and its a bit thicker than a phone which makes it easier to hold and makes the buttons bigger. And they are light.
I have no use for an mp3 player, but I would love to have a phone in the same body. It runs android but doing anything other than playing music felt sluggish.
I used the smaller xperia phones for 2 generations and really liked them, but this mp3 player feels even better in my hand.
All phones are migrating towards being portable video watchers and mobile gaming devices with huges screen surface area.
I was hoping it was just a trend and they come back to phones that my thumb can reach the top corner and that actually fit in my jeans back pocket.
Seems like all the marketing people have forgotten about those, or perhaps I am just in the minority and there really is no market for phones as _just_ a PDA device.
Even if cassette tapes become popular again, decent-quality cassette mechanisms aren’t coming back.
If Sony (or anyone else) ever chooses to release another cassette player, brace yourself for a meh listening experience, and a crap mechanism with lots of plastic that’s going to deteriorate and break, with no one around who’d be skilled enough to fix your unit.
Is the knowledge to make good read heads just lost? There's definitely a market for them. You'd think a Chinese manufacturer would have started cranking them out by now.
I don’t know much about read heads. To me, they seem like complex mechanical devices on their own. The head must be able to move vertically, yet end up perfectly flush with the tape material. Its design requires special consideration just so it won’t damage the tape. It needs to take some degree of abuse, mostly in the form of abrasion but also (inappropriate use of) cleaning agents. Then the angle of the head needs to be adjustable, and the head needs to maintain the angle even in the face of vibrations. Even if someone knew how to design a good read head, producing one might turn out difficult in a less-than-mass market.
What worries me even more than that is the art of building a drive. A tape drive must maintain the angular velocity of the capstan(s). If yours varies by more than a few tenths of percent, you’ll be dealing with “wow and flutter”. Not all listeners may care enough, but most do notice.
Drive makers used to have all those issues under control, at least in the higher-end segment – as Sony has shown with their DD series and the D6C.
Trying to mass-produce a decent drive in 2023 would, however, eat up incredible amounts of engineering time just for _designing_ a workable mechanism. Trying to copy and paste one of the old designs may turn out even more laborious. Those designs are tied to a huge stack of specific parts [0], for which there used to be an ecosystem of suppliers but those all long gone of course. I can imagine that they’ve taken their own specific knowledge with them, too.
[0]: If you’re interested, elektrotanya.com has service manuals for a few higher-end Walkmen with exploded-view diagrams and BOMs. Looking at those has been a very humbling experience for me!
One issue, completely independent from manufacturing, is that Dolby no longer licenses their noise reduction algorithm used for tapes encoded with Dolby noise reduction.
It is more the wow and flutter and the quality of the gears and belt. They could either spend the time and money creating quality parts that they might not sell or they could keep pumping out the same crap that is already selling.
It seems that tech world goes in round, we unify devices to only having to take one around, then we split the unique device in multiple devices, and back? Is it what capitalism is about? Manufacture needs back and forth to keep you paying?
I'd pay for a thing that does streaming, is much smaller than my phone, and has good physical buttons. I don't want to run or sit in the gym with my huge iphone. But I also don't want to collect files, it has to support all the streaming services and I need to be confident it supports the ones tomorrow as well.
I don't believe you can download & save Spotify tracks on the watch itself - it still only operates as a companion app to the main iPhone one. So your only option is Apple Music which is a pile of shit.
It is somewhat of a recent addition, but you can now do that as well: download music and play it from Spotify without having your phone. I think they added it earlier last year, I was using it during summer.
Basically, unless you're all in on the Apple ecosystem, most products from Apple suck, compared to the alternatives. Businesses that are active in multiple markets tend to have worse products for each, compared to businesses that focuses on one market.
More concretely, Spotify for me has been a lot better than Apple Music for discovering new music, either via just browsing related artists, public playlists that include what I'm listening to or by following specific people I know have a similar taste to me.
I also like that Spotify includes a EQ that I've found helpful at times, when I cannot control the output device.
Lastly, I frequently change between OSes and devices (iPhone, Android and other hardware) and doing so with Spotify is really easy, it's just the same everyone. Unsurprisingly, it's not as easy with Apple Music. But that use case is probably very low on the priority for Apple, as mentioned before, they prefer to focus on people within their own ecosystem, which makes perfect sense.
Spotify beats Apple Music on performance alone. Search results and playback are instant on Spotify, but have a couple seconds' latency on Apple Music.
The Apple Music client feels like an Electron pile of shit, which is ironic because the Spotify Desktop client is actually Electron and manages to be more performant and feel more native despite that.
It does seem like the perfect device physically, but the article talks a lot about storage space, CPU speed and screen resolutions doesn't include the word "streaming" and only mentions one streaming service in passing in the last paragraph, unrelated to actual features.
Am I supposed to understand that since it's 2023 a music player does indeed mean "something used to listen to streaming services, not files", and that the fact that it's Android means that the regular streaming apps can be used without issue?
It's not obvious to me (And I'm a geek and regular Ars reader) that this thing even plays streaming music!
But again, the target users don’t bother with streaming much, the device just so happens to run android, and that makes running streaming apps possible.
Is there a streaming service in existence that doesn't offer offline playback? It's probably requires a subscription, but a streaming service that can't be used in deadspots or tunnels is kinda useless, don't you think?
The YouTube music app has offline playback, if you have a subscription. It can proactively download recommended tracks to a local cache only when connected to WiFi
For me the streaming part is important - I usually don't choose what to listen to before leaving home.
> a streaming service that can't be used in deadspots or tunnels is kinda useless, don't you think?
I think all of them have buffering to pass any dead spot. Also bad reception is a thing of the past where I live and and 30 GB of data makes it all very seamless.
So click the "Download" button in Tidal/Spotify/Apple Music?
I mean, if you need cellular, then you're better served with your phone and this isn't for you. It also doesn't have to be for you - use your phone and move on.
It's an Android device. It has wifi. I really don't see how Sony could prevent its owner from using Spotify (or any other Android app for that matter) on it.
Mate, it runs Android. Of course you can stream music as you can just download the apps to do so. That's the whole point of it running Android and not some other OS (because Android is a bloated hog, but it has apps).
I find it bizarre that you are into technology yet can't infer that.
If you are on Spotify or Amazon music, then there's Mighty [1]: iPod shuffle form factor, syncs with the aforementioned services, supports bluetooth and wired headphones.
If you insist on the "all the streaming services" part though, you probably won't find anything at all, because... Apple.
That thing looks really nice, and not too expensive either. Too bad it's only IPX4 rated, would have bought it instantly if it was better in that regard.
It seems that the waterproof version is a mod provided by an external company, and currently out of stock [1]. It's a bit more expensive, but also comes with a set of waterproof headphones.
This only partially ticks the box of "physical buttons," but this is what I use and don't regret it. Apple Watch cellular paired with Bluetooth earbuds (I prefer Powerbeats Pro when running) is a delightful and magical experience that I highly recommend.
Can anyone really name a reason why you would need a standalone MP3 player in 2023? With services like Tidal or even just Spotify it seems like there are so many downsides, with little to no benefits. (Other than maybe owning your own physical music as opposed to relying on a streaming service?)
My wife has decades of music downloaded from CDs etc. It's just the music she likes, no ads/distractions/faffing about with networks etc. For her commute it works great to have just an MP3 player.
She doesn't want to listen to other music, she likes what she knows, so the benefit of recommendations etc aren't of interest either.
Some people prefer a device that has real, physical buttons and is not permanently at risk of shattering after being dropped (the use case being to listen to music while on the go...)
You already answered your own question, but it's mostly related to higher audio quality and owning your own music, while not being bothered by availability of internet.
A lot of comments about the internet availability. Living in Northern Europe - never a problem. And as for lets say a flight, you can download spotify music.
Audio quality i do agree that spotify kinda sucks
You don't need special standalone devices for that. Any Android phone has that. Is it impossible to listen to your own audio without internet on iPhones?
Features like auto-playing next song that Spotify/YouTube/whoever "thinks" I "might" like after a playlist finished playing is driving me mad. (Yes, I know it can be turned off, but it's on by default. Which reminds me, despite being a subscriber, I don't really like Spotify's UI on mobile, nor on the desktop.)
I hang on to my old iPod shuffles and nanos with clips on them, and have paid to get them refurbed. It's just so easy to clip them onto my shirt and go. The alternative is... what, to put my gigantic phablet phone in the small pocket of my running shorts?
I shouldn't complain too much, since there actually are a fair number of modern small dedicated mp3 players that can clip on to your shirt (although none of them that I know of are quite as unobtrusive and lightweight as a 2nd gen iPod shuffle).
The very main reason is to have a higher quality audio output. Instead of having a shitty jack a device like this will have a very good DAC & amp, sometimes even a bi-DAC and bi-amp, and also a lot more power to handle bigger headphones.
Globally if you just have a basic pair of headphones / earphones you're better off having a USB-C <=> Jack adapter or a simple bluetooth receiver, but for cases where you want to have a really higher quality source then these will do incredibly well.
For really high quality audio you pretty much need high impedance headphones, and I don’t think these walkmen support those. I’m not convinced the new walkman sounds better than an iphone, but I’d be interested in a blind comparison test.
Pray tell why high impedance makes sound better quality? From what I gather studio headphones have higher impedance due to sharing a signal between lots of people, not for quality reasons.
I don't know how to read specs for these, but this NW-ZX707 model supports up to 50mW/ch for 3.5mm stereo and 230mW/ch @ 16 ohms for balanced output - yes it has both 3.5mm unbalanced and 4.4mm balanced TRRS on the device.
A standalone MP3 player will tend to have a better interface that is much more responsive. Will be much easier to queue up certain kinds of things with a San Disk Clip Sport than an iPhone. Even just unlocking the phone is a whole thing!
The general thing of futzing around with a home screen, switching apps, having notifications?? When sometimes you just want an mp3 player.
This is my main frustration with these Sony walkmans, is that I'll still have to pay the UI friction cost from it running Android. Would love a device that really sticks to playing music... but I get that that is very hard since you lose streaming optionality.
Children. I wanted my daughter to be able to listen to music and audio books, I didn't want to buy her a smart phone. Plus you can buy a good enough one for $30-40, so it's not as big a deal if they lose or break it.
I've also considered getting a cheap one with bluetooth for kayaking, so that I can listen to music without having to worry about my phone getting water damaged.
It might be nice for the office. I don’t want to run personal streaming software or load my personal mp3s on my work laptop, and I don’t want to forget my phone on my desk (again) because I was using it as a media player.
Control. Spotify uses dark UX patterns to prevent me curating and exploring a library of
Music that I love, instead trying to push artists on me that line their own pockets.
which is unfortunately becoming harder and harder with artists only releasing their media through DRM-locked platforms like Spotify/not on physical media that can be ripped/bandcamp.
Indeed - and at some point it is also forced to pass through a literal air gap, vibrating molecules as it does so at various frequencies — another “attack vector”.
Considering this new one has Android on it, your point about not needing security updates doesn't hold. If Sony is as aggressive as Google is, three years you'll have a malware magnet in addition to your smart phone.
If you're legally buying music, not there.
All the apps for mauic playback, streaming, etc. come from the Google Play Store, and there are very few that someone who buys one of these would need anyway.
I'd venture many of these will spend most of their existence with wi-fi turned off, as it's a battery hog.
Mostly power. Phones just don't offer enough to drive demanding headphones or earphones.
There are dongles to address this issue, but they can drain the battery pretty fast. I don't want to drain my phone battery just because I'm listening to music.
If you have an iOS device, having offline music has plenty of limitations. It takes a ton of space that I'd rather save for pictures, videos and apps. And you have to sync your phone with a MacBook which is a hassle if you have more than one.
> It's easier to put my mp3s on there than it is to do that on a phone.
> No crappy software needed, it's just a USB drive as far as my computer is concerned.
I understand that apple device users live in their special world. But every android phone does this.
It does, albeit in a shittier way than the dedicated players do. Instead of presenting itself as a removable drive, it uses the MTP protocol. Slower UX and but mostly similar to handling normal files.
I don't want to be connected to the Internet all the time, yet still listen to music? Is that not a good enough reason?
And contrary to what many seem to think, cellular data is not always available and data caps are still a thing.
If I sound pissed off, that's because I am. I've seen an ever increasing number of comments like yours that just dismiss things because they don't see the value to them. They then phrase their dismissal as an innocent question (which, honestly, comes across as very condescending).
I understand your point, but a question will be why not just loading your smartphone with mp3 files. In this case, you don't need internet connection (if this is the only the reason) and you don't need a separate device.
I got one specifically because I love the offline nature of the device. I don't use streaming, and I don't want ads or my device going out to the internet and giving 3rd parties a list of what I listen to and when either.
I also like the idea of a device that does one thing but does it well, unlike a cell phone that tries to be everything for everyone. With a dedicated music player there's no distraction. No notifications, no texts, no calls, no games, no internet. A good music player does everything you need but stays out of your way. A cell phone is designed to demand your attention as often as possible and hold onto it for as long as possible.
I don't own a smartphone, but I'd like to be able to put on headphones and listen to music (from the vast collection on my computer) when I'm traveling, driving, or doing chores.
I would be hesitant to shell out 400 EUR for a music-player-only device. But this is a very appealing phone form factor, if Sony could also squeeze-in a GSM module, a workable (not necessarily great) camera, and more storage (32GB sounds rather measly these days).
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 324 ms ] threadYou might want an external amp for high impedance headphones for electrical compatibility reasons, but an amp and DAC are not the same thing.
Also 32gb? That's only a handful of highres audio.
I'm assuming the people buying this kind of thing are the same people buying higher than CD quality audio?
But it doesn't come with a memory extension slot. Which, granted, is also not really necessary.
I remember being able to copy music onto my Nexus 4 via the usb cable and play it through Google’s music app, ten years ago. But they ripped that out years ago so that you could only stream music from in the app. Now the default way to play music on my phone appears to be “YouTube Music”, which kinda grudgingly let’s you play individual songs from the hard drive, but only after explaining that it’s not going to let you put them in playlists or categorize them by artist and album or search on them.
Does there exist a nice way to play your own mp3s on a phone today?
There are tons of MP3 player apps for Android:
vlc - has a surprisingly decent UI for music. (Open Source)
Simple Music Player - gets the job done. (Open Source)
Rocket Player - paid a few dollars for it near a decade ago and it's still decent.
Foobar2000 - The familiar old man is still around.
I would have +1'd that – the combo of iSyncr + Rocket Player was perfect for transitioning from iTunes + iPod to iTunes + Android phone while keeping bi-directional syncing of play counts and ratings intact. Rocket Player also supports smart playlists, which is also nice, even if you cannot sync those directly with iTunes and need to manually re-create them on your phone again.
(iTunes has its foibles, but on the other hand I don't find it that terrible, either, and at that time it was the only workable solution I found for bi-directional syncing of ratings and play counts between computer and phone. Plus while I appreciate that with Android you can just copy files directly to your phone and be done with it, a dedicated syncing solution also has its advantages – I don't have to remember to manually copy a file over each time I edit its metadata in any way, and I don't have to setup a ton of exclusion rules like I would have to if I wanted to sync my computer's Music folder with a regular file syncing software.)
Plus Rocket Player has some dedicated support for podcasts synced over from iTunes – since unlike my former iPod my phone has direct internet access, I'd be happy to just use a separate podcasts app for listening to actual podcasts without having to go through iTunes, however I've also been manually adding files as podcasts in iTunes because I've found that to work quite nicely for managing my collection of radio comedy show episodes scrounged together from all corners of the internet. Rocket Player puts those in a separate Podcasts section apart from the rest of my music library, shows which episodes have been listened to, and remember the playback position (and can even sync that with iTunes).
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Except – the original developer of Rocket Player and iSyncr sold his apps not that long ago, and it seems like the new owners are mostly only interested in extracting as much money as possible (supposedly changing both apps from one-time payments for the non-trial version into ridiculously overpriced monthly subscriptions) while doing as little work as feasible before the whole thing completely crashes and burns. So the whole thing (last app version before the sale) might or might not stop working once I have to switch to a phone with a newer Android version (Google isn't as bad as Apple on backwards compatibility, but it's no Microsoft, either), and I've got no idea what to do then…
Supposedly MusicBee (for your PC) allows play count/ratings syncing with either PowerAmp or Gone Mad Music Player, though I haven't tried it myself yet and with newer Android versions you might have to compile the sync app yourself because it hasn't been rewritten for Google's ridiculously over-complicated new file access permissions system.
Supposedly at least Gone Mad also supports smart playlists, too (PowerAmp on the other hand looks like it doesn't?), so if I had to switch, I suppose that's what I'd switch to.
Unfortunately it seems there is no good replacement for iTunes + Rocket Player's podcast handling – while MusicBee imports your iTunes library (with mixed success as far as podcasts are concerned), it doesn't allow manually adding files as podcasts (and on a Mac even Apple itself has broken things, because post-iTunes-split-up the new separate Podcasts app no longer allows manually adding files, either), and on the Android side I suppose things don't loo much better, either. I suppose I might have to set-up a fake local podcasts server on my computer and switch my collection of radio comedy over to my dedicated podcast player app on my phone…
I switched to AIMP and have been gradually moving files over.
It's been thr first app I bought on my first Android phone running 2.1.
The developer behind it kept delivering updates, improving compatibility with the quirky audio stack of some smartphones and introducing actually useful features.
The interface doesn't follow the latest user-hostile trends, having instead its own consistent style. Nonetheless over the years it's been constantly polished. The huge number of features and settings are not limited by the interface which actually provides discoverability for them.
For the audiophiles, the audio pipeline is extremely customizable. For the tinkers the interface is very customizable and APIs for writing plugins with are provided.
To get that on to your Android you can use an app called DSub. This app can stream, but more importantly playback from cache. You can flag which songs or albums you want to cache on your Android. You can permanently cache as well.
That works well. But if you want to step it up a notch, you can point Poweramp to the cache folder that DSub uses and use Poweramp for playback.
The benefit of this setup is getting music on to your device is trivial once you have these apps configured. No more shuffling files around. Just open DSub, select which new albums you want, and they will appear on your device.
Lots, but you do have to venture outside of the app. stores where every app. wants you 'streaming' so they can also monetize the metadata they can collect from you as well.
I use this one on my Android, no fuss, no muss, just plays mp3's from the SDCard:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ch.blinkenlights.android.van...
Fdroid's Multimedia area has a lot of other options as well:
https://f-droid.org/en/categories/multimedia/
Dedicated hardware buttons for music functions would also be a plus
It may actually make sense for custom ROMs that are optimized for dedicated use cases like these to make great purpose-driven gadgets out of old all-purpose smartphones
That old smartphone is not going to have as good of a DAC and certainly no physical media buttons.
RIP LG smartphones :(
A such player is lighter than a phone and has a buttons for everything. Phones just have buttons for volume.
Also if you travel a lot, you can listen to music and don't have to worry about the phone battery and like a junky search for wall plugs all the time.
Won't break your USB port if you drop it the wrong angle.
Sony can be trusted thr sound will be good.
Separate battery from your phone that probably lasts way longer, like days or weeks.
No notifications coming in (feature or not? yours to choose)
People buying this will also buy a SD Card, and I assume they are the same who still bougth the iPod Classic.
I never heard of it and though it was a hardware player competing with the Walkman, but it’s another android music player from the look of it. I still checked the app page in case they went for completely different playing controls to compensate for the physical buttons and playing widget, but it seems it mainly focuses on EQ tweaking and “high fidelity” playback.
I’m all for alternative players on the market, so more power to them. But I’m probably not their target audience.
Even if it has relatively short 16hr battery life, I'm fine, if it can take a 25W charge. A passable camera also feels essential.
Maybe I'm just not the target market. They must be doing something right because Hideo Kojima uses one (and frequently tweets pictures of it): https://twitter.com/hideo_kojima_en/status/16147460932707409...
I know people nowadays are used to not having any control over their storage and simply throwing their device in the trash and buying a new one every few years when it's no longer enough, but it wasn't like this in the past.
Sure, loading a large FLAC library onto a microSD will initially take longer, but the thing only needs to be done once, and many audio enthusiastsnwill already have microSD cards with it on.
It seems to not have a modem but it does have the play store and wi-fi, so...
I finally made the switch to a phone without headphone jack last year. I like the phone, but the pretty expensive bluetooth headphones I tried don't sound as great as my beaten year old wired ones.
There's many places where I don't care about having a dangling wire: at home watching tv/movies, while working at my desk, or in public libraries for instance.
A small audio player that work with my wired headphones would be workable, I l'm seriously thinking about it if moving music in and out is easy enough.
Some people work in environments where you can't have "smart" devices. I could see this squeaking by (for example you can have some single purpose devices like Garmin watches, but not Apple watches with wifi and cellular).
It might be good for airplanes too if you want something to drive your headphones without draining your battery, but I guess in-seat power has kinda solved that already.
I don't recall either model being that expensive though.
I can understand wanting to use an affordable tiny ipad nano like device instead of a smartphone. But I don't understand this, being 3 times more expensive than a decent entry level smartphone unless you want to use it with high quality over the ears noise cancelling headphones. The physical buttons do not even seem to be ergonomically placed.
Hell, for many people why would they even have wi-fi on?
Me, but I aint paying $800 for it (if I understood the article correctly).
Give me a walkman made specifically for listening to music with 250GB+ and without all the pain to move music onto and off of the device and can last _weeks_ on a single charge with regular use and I would purchase the shit out of it.
I feel like a lot of people don't realize just how leashed they are with modern phones. My favorite phone ever is an old Palm phone that I still have to this day because I refuse to throw it away. It's smaller than the original SE, far lighter, and could last up to two weeks on a single charge. Contrast that with the 3rd gen SE I have now and I'd give it up in a heartbeat if something like that Palm arrived.
But it won't, so moving the music playing experience off of the phone is a good step to loosening that leash.
That's the pro model. The consumer version is half that.
My criteria is heavy on "do one thing well". I want something without internet, "apps", a convoluted OS, and basically all the other things that make phones a Swiss army knife.
Those things aren't free, they come with a cost which I'm not willing to pay; attention, bugs, distraction-as-a-service. Also, I'm not 100% on this because I haven't tested it, but I think the output I get from FLAC files on my music device is better than my phone.
Yes, I'm also the type who enjoys a separate camera.
There's a piece of mind to dedicated devices I was robbed of for a while with the the phone.
Now having said all this, the real answer to your question is; nobody, because this device seems to be a phone :/
Well said, that's _exactly_ how I feel. I would 100% purchase a dedicated music device, but it can't be a glorified phone (I don't even like the smartscreen in the article) with a phones problems.
The terrible error here is including the Android home screen in the marketing materials.
By all means base it on Android, but I never want to see anything like that on a "stand alone" device. Eliminating any generic UI should have been a priority from the go because it completely changes the sentiment around the device.
> Anyway, back to this $800 model. Unlike regular phone equipment, this has a proper audio amplifier with big, beefy capacitors to power the analog audio output. That makes it much bigger than the A300, at 72.6×132 mm and a whopping 17 mm thick. It also has two audio outs: a standard 3.5 mm headphone jack and a 4.4 mm "balanced" audio jack, which is used by some high-end audio equipment.
It just feels weird to cheap out on storage, of all things, on an $800 device in 2023
2021 thread on music players, some with Rockbox firmware, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26870648
I think that sums it up pretty well. Who would actually buy one of these?
I mean of course assuming hearing abilities that are within 1-2 standard deviations of the human average, not one-in-a-million-people super hearing. Also assuming actual music is being played, not audio tracks specifically engineered to highlight the difference.
The competition to this are mobile phones, and they almost all moved to bluetooth only, so the choice is which Bluetooth headphones gets better sound with a form factor you better like, pitted against the flurry of wired headphones and hybrid that are still on the market.
That being said, there can be a big difference going from "consumer" level to "basic audiophile". I remember my own surprise when I first got a pair of Grado SR80s, how many details I could hear in music that I never knew existed before.
Other than that, I think it's mostly bollocks. I think a disappointingly large proportion of it can be summed up as "don't cut corners" which is why hifi gear from the 70's can still sound nice. If you replace the capacitors.
1: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/
This appears to be set as a value in a read only database that would require root to remove. A method to acquire root is not known to be available on any of them.
Just plug it in and that is it.
I would even take a case for iPhone which has extra buttons for common tasks on the side. Please steal this idea.
So much so, that at some point I made a comparison site for mp3-players. But nobody cared. I made comparison sites for smartphones, laptops and monitors which became quite popular. But for mp3-players, it seemed like I am the only person on planet earth who uses them.
Personally, I still use a Sony Walkman NWZ-E585. For me, that is the best mp3 player ever made. It has a nice form factor, feels very good haptically, the navigation interface is ok, the sound quality is great, the noise cancelling too, and you can access the storage without having to install propriatery software on your computer.
The article listed those as $800, which is ridiculous and there's no way I'm paying that much, but if I can find something at a much more reasonable price (preferably a physical headphone jack) I'd be happy as a clam.
I wouldn't even spend that much on my phone (spent less than half of that) so there's no way I'm spending that on another device, lol.
Comments of the form "price X is unreasonable because I'd never pay it" are mildly annoying. You're an individual, not a market, and as such don't get to choose what a "reasonable" price is. DAPs (digital audio players) are available at a wide range of prices. The top result for "MP3 player" on Amazon UK right now is £23.99. Choose a price point you're happy with and you'll find something. I love mine at the price point I went for.
(I've also had one for around £50, bought a couple of ~£20 ones for my small children and owned a couple of different DAC dongles for my phone. Unsurprisingly, the sound quality is very highly correlated with the price, up to the level I've tried. I expect it levels out not far above, though, and if you decide to pay thousands for a DAP they'll make it out of gold-plated copper because there's nothing else left to use the money on. [1])
[1] https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/walkman/nw-wm1z
When my gf wanted an adjustable standing desk the going rate was roughly $600 for anything that had everything she wanted so I built it myself for maybe $200 and the thing is still being used regularly something like 8 years later.
When I want a physical copy of an older PS2 game and they're all $100+, I pirate it.
If _YOU_ want to outsource personal responsibility for your money, that's on you, don't lecture me because I choose not to.
I can conclude that millions for a painting is unreasonable despite many people doing it because they're involved in money laundering just as well as anyone else.
> Ok, at that price point (or even a quarter of that) it ceases to be a music player to become a luxury good to be shown by paid influencers on social media. Nothing to see here, move along...
> If you think that is bad, check out the Walkman NW-WM1ZM2 (who at Sony thinks that these names are a good idea?) for a cool $3500
Your response is what everyone will sound like once our robot overlords finally take over. It certainly didn't come from an understanding of the human condition.
I suggest you find a healthier pastime than getting upset about what other people are buying. In the meantime, I'll spend my money however I please. Maybe I'll buy a gold plated Walkman. They look shiny.
And if I tell you that your obvious poking has angered me, will you feel sufficiently positive to walk away from this conversation?
I guess we'll see.
It's possible to disagree with people on the internet without getting emotional about it. It's just a conversation about Walkmans. (Walkmen?)
It would be better to read my posts as amused rather than angry.
Your needless rudeness belies a deeper personal problem.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh it's middle of the line then? Because there are far more expensive Walkman models: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B354TW13/ and https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B45DJ5RQ/
> which is ridiculous and there's no way I'm paying that much
You forgot "for me" after "ridiculous."
I turned myself into an audiophile without even realizing it, but once you hear the difference, you can't unhear it. I have rediscovered some of my favorite tracks. So if your hearing is good (use an app to check if you can still hear the buzz sound, if not check your response curve) and you enjoy music, why not?
My regular audio setup (walkman, headphones, cable) cost more than the (very good, top of the line) OLED laptop I'm using. Add all the little extras I use time-to-time, like shoulder headphones for use in the morning, or the sunglasses with integrated bluetooth I use when taking a walk, and it's an obscene amount of money.
But music is what moves my soul. You may spend top dollar for your car and consider it a "reasonable" expense because it brings you such happiness everyday? I consider a top-of-the-line NZW Walkman "reasonable" for the same reasons.
I have my Android phone with me all the time. Sometimes even a second one so my mp3s are on there.
The only use I could see would be for a long bike tour where I want to save phone battery time but those are quite rare and the price they call there is ridiculous for that.
I use it to listen to audiobooks.
And yes, I use it mainly to listen to audiobooks too.
People may not have been interested in the comparison site because there just aren't that many devices to choose from and the choice comes down more to the sound than features that can be enumerated on a comparison list. Monitors are a mess, with each manufacturer making a zillion variants with cryptic model numbers differing in quantifiable ways. I've actively sought out monitor comparisons, but one for DAPs never occurred to me.
I also like for that device to be able to receive and make phone calls...
...so I just use an old Android device, to be more specific my old Motorola Defy from 2011. It runs Android (Cyanogenmod, the predecessor to LineageOS) 4.4, does the Wifi thing but also the phone call thing, runs DSub connected to my own Airsonic server. It also takes photos, runs Telegram and when in dire need even a browser although it takes patience to wait for it chewing through a Javascript-burdened "modern" site. I have a 32GB microSD card in the thing which is enough given its connectivity options. The battery, also from 2011, lasts for 2 to 3 days of intense use.
Small Android devices running Google-free AOSP-derived distributions are a good match for the role of "standalone" music players with the added benefit of allowing connectivity. Total costs for the latter are around €10/year with occasional use (Sweden, "pay as you go" SIM), total cost for the device is zero since I've used it for 12 years.
There needs to be a good reason to carry extra device. I could see carrying something that has much better sound quality with amp that can drive some more hobbyist headphones, but I don't know if such devices are made - at least all the mp3 players I've seen are made to be as cheap as possible.
> all the mp3 players I've seen are made to be as cheap as possible.
There are plenty of high-end players which prioritise sound quality and provide a better output than phones. The NW-ZX700 in the featured article looks to be one of these. FiiO is another well-known higher-end brand: https://www.fiio.com/m17
Funny enough, for me that extra device is the phone: I see no reason to carry a "phone" for normal day-to-day stuff as my walkman has all the features I normally need (email, PDF viewer).
I want to carry it for other reasons as well: due to its smaller screen size, the walkman limits the use of addictive social media.
$50 when new. Size of a matchbox -- not the car, the small thing that restaurants and bars used to hand out as advertising. MicroSD slot for storage. 20+ hours of playtime, recharged via USB. Appears as a USB Mass Storage device, too. 3.5mm headphone jack. Small 2-part monochrome OLED display. Physical buttons: D-pad, OK, Menu, power, and volume up and down. After a day you don't need to look at it to pause/play, skip a track, change the volume or turn it on and off.
With Rockbox installed (ten minute process), you can play FLAC, use a parametric equalizer, customize the display, change playback speed for audiobooks, and generally do a few dozen things more than the factory firmware.
Rockbox lets you do the same on a large number of devices, but the Clip+ is the best.
Glad to hear its still somewhat alive!
Noise-cancelling is a must-have for me. It significantly increases quality of life to have it with you, wherever you go.
And I like the high-quality look and haptic feeling of the NWZ-E585. It looks like a classy audio device. And it feels really good in your hand.
I assumed it was only possible when on the headset as it needed to be measured and cancelled based on the direction of the sound.
I'm failing how a device in your pocket can cancel any ambiant noise
I assume also there are jack-to-bluetooth adapters for wireless.
I guess the noise-cancelling has to be built into the mp3-player to avoid this. I have not seen elegant in-ear headphones with built-in noise-cancelling yet.
As long as you don't mind over the ear headphones Bose QC35 are wireless but also come with a optional 2.5mm to 3.5mm jack cord.
I imgaine that there's lots of alternatives on the market too.
Very good
I suppose that's more or less important whether you're running in a busy city or out in the countryside though.
Either way, recent high end smart/sport watches usually have some sort of music playback support for folks who want to exercise with music but don't want to lug around a phone.
You may not hear mountain lion, but you may hear stray dog.
I have a Garmin smart watch that supports audio playback but it's a hassle to use because I have to load or sync recordings in advance. Streaming audio on my phone is much more convenient. Plus I have my phone with me anyway in case I want to take a picture due Strava or something.
I will personally attest to the Sansa clip + $10 earbuds being the best workout audio combo available.
I've collected 3 over the years in case any of them die off. While the battery life is still good I should probably get around to researching replacement batteries/cells while I still can.
The only failure I've had with one so far was the front buttons; and I bought a broken one for parts years ago that had the exact same issue...
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sandisk-clip-jam-8gb-mp3-player...
> Sansa Clip Sport / Clip Jam / Clip Sport Go / Clip Sport Plus
> These are based on an Actions Semiconductor ATJ2127 chips, with under 100KB of available memory and all audio decoding happening inside dedicated hardware. A rockbox port to these (and other ATJ2127) targets will not happen, as it would require an immence undertaking and due to resource limitations, the end result would lack most of the features that rockbox users have come to expect.
I was using mine in the very early days of Android existing. Some people had them, but I didn't yet. I got my first Android phone, moved my music over, and was ... massively disappointed. My favorite phone incident was sitting on some flight, trying to listen to music, and my phone wouldn't play it through the headphones, speakers only, annoying everyone nearby. I didn't listen to music on that flight and promptly switched back to a device that did not have a physical speaker.
Over time, phones rebuilt trust and I got a lot of use out of that, until Google Play Music got shut down and deleted all my music (no problem, I have it all locally). Now I have no idea what people do and simply go without. I guess people don't have music libraries any more and just listen to the radio for $10/month? No thanks. (I use foobar2000 on my desktop, and don't listen to music away from my home anymore. Thanks technological progress?)
https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/DataBase#Examples
All of the database examples talk about podcasts. Especially the last one that uses play counts to split podcasts into old and new "folders" seems useful.
(Opinions my own)
Now I work from home and I have migrated to my smartphone. I use it infrequently enough that I am not annoyed by what the streaming service tries to get me to listen to.
And owning a dumb mp3 player comes with its own drawbacks. If artist A has released 20 albums, artist B only five and I have both discographies on my player, that doesn't mean I want to listen to artist A four times as often when I ask for a shuffled playlist.
Back when I owned a 256MB mp3 player (and felt like a king among people with floppies) I would hand-pick a playlist that would fit. With dozens of gigabytes of storage I have no desire to do that and I want the player to come up with a good playlist for me.
Edit: ah, well that didn’t take much looking. It’s https://www.productchart.com/ for anyone else interested. Looks really nice, thanks!
Not surprised in the least. People voted long ago, and continue to do so, that a single device that handles communication, entertainment, games, news, photography, etc. is superior to standalone devices you have carry around.
But now... I can have a cell phone with 512GB of storage and run Foobar2000 [1][2]. Nothing else can compete.
[1][Android] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.foobar2000...
[2] [iOS] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/foobar2000/id1072807669
I was also a fan when they almost all played from a file system, but even 10+ years ago it was harder and harder to find something that didn't require a store or some terrible music management application. Streaming continues to kill this approach as well. My kids don't know what an mp3 is.
I have no use for an mp3 player, but I would love to have a phone in the same body. It runs android but doing anything other than playing music felt sluggish.
I used the smaller xperia phones for 2 generations and really liked them, but this mp3 player feels even better in my hand.
I was hoping it was just a trend and they come back to phones that my thumb can reach the top corner and that actually fit in my jeans back pocket.
Seems like all the marketing people have forgotten about those, or perhaps I am just in the minority and there really is no market for phones as _just_ a PDA device.
Because you can't fit as many ads on a small screen.
If Sony (or anyone else) ever chooses to release another cassette player, brace yourself for a meh listening experience, and a crap mechanism with lots of plastic that’s going to deteriorate and break, with no one around who’d be skilled enough to fix your unit.
What worries me even more than that is the art of building a drive. A tape drive must maintain the angular velocity of the capstan(s). If yours varies by more than a few tenths of percent, you’ll be dealing with “wow and flutter”. Not all listeners may care enough, but most do notice.
Drive makers used to have all those issues under control, at least in the higher-end segment – as Sony has shown with their DD series and the D6C. Trying to mass-produce a decent drive in 2023 would, however, eat up incredible amounts of engineering time just for _designing_ a workable mechanism. Trying to copy and paste one of the old designs may turn out even more laborious. Those designs are tied to a huge stack of specific parts [0], for which there used to be an ecosystem of suppliers but those all long gone of course. I can imagine that they’ve taken their own specific knowledge with them, too.
[0]: If you’re interested, elektrotanya.com has service manuals for a few higher-end Walkmen with exploded-view diagrams and BOMs. Looking at those has been a very humbling experience for me!
https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2023/01/the-cassette-comebac...
---
I don't believe you can download & save Spotify tracks on the watch itself - it still only operates as a companion app to the main iPhone one. So your only option is Apple Music which is a pile of shit.
More concretely, Spotify for me has been a lot better than Apple Music for discovering new music, either via just browsing related artists, public playlists that include what I'm listening to or by following specific people I know have a similar taste to me.
I also like that Spotify includes a EQ that I've found helpful at times, when I cannot control the output device.
Lastly, I frequently change between OSes and devices (iPhone, Android and other hardware) and doing so with Spotify is really easy, it's just the same everyone. Unsurprisingly, it's not as easy with Apple Music. But that use case is probably very low on the priority for Apple, as mentioned before, they prefer to focus on people within their own ecosystem, which makes perfect sense.
The Apple Music client feels like an Electron pile of shit, which is ironic because the Spotify Desktop client is actually Electron and manages to be more performant and feel more native despite that.
Am I supposed to understand that since it's 2023 a music player does indeed mean "something used to listen to streaming services, not files", and that the fact that it's Android means that the regular streaming apps can be used without issue?
It's not obvious to me (And I'm a geek and regular Ars reader) that this thing even plays streaming music!
I think they mention streaming briefly because the target demographic for this device is the kind of people who have their own hi-res files available.
I hope Sony fixed the battery life on those, because the last gen was underwhelming on that front.
But if it has a SIM slot with 4G/5G access then it's nothing more than a repackaged phone.
But again, the target users don’t bother with streaming much, the device just so happens to run android, and that makes running streaming apps possible.
Youtube Music :^]
> a streaming service that can't be used in deadspots or tunnels is kinda useless, don't you think?
I think all of them have buffering to pass any dead spot. Also bad reception is a thing of the past where I live and and 30 GB of data makes it all very seamless.
> For me the streaming part is important - I usually don't choose what to listen to before leaving home.
Pre-downloaded mixes are a compromise of discovery and offline playback
I mean, if you need cellular, then you're better served with your phone and this isn't for you. It also doesn't have to be for you - use your phone and move on.
A repackaged phone with a quality headphone jack and physical buttons? I'd love to buy that (but unfortunately it doesn't seem to have a SIM slot)
I find it bizarre that you are into technology yet can't infer that.
If you insist on the "all the streaming services" part though, you probably won't find anything at all, because... Apple.
[1] https://www.bemighty.com
Maybe it's not certified for the EU yet?
[1] https://www.audioflood.com/waterproof-mighty-spotify-player-...
She doesn't want to listen to other music, she likes what she knows, so the benefit of recommendations etc aren't of interest either.
Just one data point for your question :)
Implying that Germany is not part of Northern Europe.
I shouldn't complain too much, since there actually are a fair number of modern small dedicated mp3 players that can clip on to your shirt (although none of them that I know of are quite as unobtrusive and lightweight as a 2nd gen iPod shuffle).
Globally if you just have a basic pair of headphones / earphones you're better off having a USB-C <=> Jack adapter or a simple bluetooth receiver, but for cases where you want to have a really higher quality source then these will do incredibly well.
The general thing of futzing around with a home screen, switching apps, having notifications?? When sometimes you just want an mp3 player.
This is my main frustration with these Sony walkmans, is that I'll still have to pay the UI friction cost from it running Android. Would love a device that really sticks to playing music... but I get that that is very hard since you lose streaming optionality.
Children. I wanted my daughter to be able to listen to music and audio books, I didn't want to buy her a smart phone. Plus you can buy a good enough one for $30-40, so it's not as big a deal if they lose or break it.
I've also considered getting a cheap one with bluetooth for kayaking, so that I can listen to music without having to worry about my phone getting water damaged.
But $400 is more than I’d want to pay for it.
- Very light and easy to keep in a pocket or backpack so I have it with me when I'm out, or to listen to while I cook / do hardware repairs
- No distractions
- Physical buttons means I can replay or skip tracks without looking at it
- Doesn't drain the battery of my smartphone; doesn't need recharging each week
- Has a real working FM radio in it
- Music on my SD card doesn't disappear
- Doesn't need security updates
- Bought it in 2013 and it still works
If you're legally buying music, not there. All the apps for mauic playback, streaming, etc. come from the Google Play Store, and there are very few that someone who buys one of these would need anyway.
I'd venture many of these will spend most of their existence with wi-fi turned off, as it's a battery hog.
There are dongles to address this issue, but they can drain the battery pretty fast. I don't want to drain my phone battery just because I'm listening to music.
If you have an iOS device, having offline music has plenty of limitations. It takes a ton of space that I'd rather save for pictures, videos and apps. And you have to sync your phone with a MacBook which is a hassle if you have more than one.
These devices are not it.
- I can control it completely without looking at a screen.
- It's easier to put my mp3s on there than it is to do that on a phone.
- The battery lasts a lot longer than a phone
- It has a headphone jack
- No crappy software needed, it's just a USB drive as far as my computer is concerned.
I understand that apple device users live in their special world. But every android phone does this.
And contrary to what many seem to think, cellular data is not always available and data caps are still a thing.
If I sound pissed off, that's because I am. I've seen an ever increasing number of comments like yours that just dismiss things because they don't see the value to them. They then phrase their dismissal as an innocent question (which, honestly, comes across as very condescending).
I also like the idea of a device that does one thing but does it well, unlike a cell phone that tries to be everything for everyone. With a dedicated music player there's no distraction. No notifications, no texts, no calls, no games, no internet. A good music player does everything you need but stays out of your way. A cell phone is designed to demand your attention as often as possible and hold onto it for as long as possible.