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dankpods reignited nostalgia towards an iconic millenial tech. no need to watch a clown for ten minutes.
Not an iPod (because you need to mod in a new battery, new connector, patch the firmware, play the lottery with local market places, etc)
But I’m back to a dedicated MP3 player with a headphone jack, SD card slot, FLAC files, and it beats streaming every single time.
I tested two modern (and cheap) models, picked my favorite, and found my favorite combo to acquire and sync music. After these initial days of getting everything setup… The experience is frictionless. Music sounds great, battery lasts forever.
I found an old ipod 6th gen at a thrift store. Threw linux on it, and its such an easy device to work with.
I still have my old tape player from when I was a kid.
My wife and I bought a new record player over at target of all places for less than 100.
It makes going to yard sales/thrift stores/etc… fun because you can get so much media for dirt cheap. And though bandcamp I can get anything else.
What kind of mp3 player did you get?
I found an old ipod 6th gen at a thrift store. Threw linux on it, and its such an easy device to work with.
They are amazing indeed, I just avoid them because everything from finding an used one to parts is 10x the price in my country, so I’d end up settling for a beat up unit with a bad battery and no real funds to upgrade it. But where this is not the case, they feel great in the hand and just work.
What kind of mp3 player did you get?
The first one I bought was an Innioasis Y1 - an iPod Classic clone. Super thin, USB-C, a simple OS that can be changed for Rockbox if you so desire, and a functional click wheel. Sounded good, synced just fine with the computer, and was nice and compact. But the screen is very very fragile, changing the SD card requires opening the unit and it never closes the same again, and behind the scenes it’s just a simple Mediatek Android phone without a modem. Tip for anybody buying this one: there’s a very hard to remove screen protector that makes the screen look very grainy… do NOT remove it even if you’re tempted to, the plastic behind the protector is the softest plastic I’ve ever seen and it will scratch if you look at it wrong.
I then tried the Snowsky Echo Mini, which has no click wheel so navigation is harder, but uses an even simpler and directly to the point OS, easy to swap microSD, super nice retro design, a leather case, and two very high quality DACs with both regular and balanced output. Sounds really good, on both headphones and speakers, so I kept this one and it’s my current daily driver.
I bought an open source media player called Tangara and loaded it up with FLAC files.
It’s been buggy and crashes a lot… and feels like it’s going to break if I drop it… but besides that, it’s been good. The battery life is amazing. The UI is fast and snappy. It has a headphone jack. It plays music. It has most things I want. I use it pretty much every day.
I definitely wish it was less buggy, but at least it’s open source and I think it’ll eventually get to a more stable place. I’d probably buy it again.
My guess is that as much as the iPod can’t be used to make calls/text, using it separately for media is a good way to keep from draining your phone for those sometimes critical messages/calls.
I dedicated an old android phone to the same thing.
