A place to share practical, durable and quality made products that are made to last, with an emphasis on upcycled and sustainable products!
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Things that are well-made and durable (even if they won't last a lifetime) are A-Okay!
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Does anyone here remember Rockbox? I still have my old Sansa player running it.
I have my iPod 5th gen running on RockBox. IMO it's even better than the stock firmware because it can play flacs.
And ogg and m4a and opus and so many more. I have an ipod 6th gen runnung rockbox. Its great. If the harddrive dies I'll replace it with sd-cards and still keep uaing it.
Rockbox is cool, I just wish it was able to replace the base system without touching the UI. Something about it just feels off on an iPod. Even supposedly iPod-accurate themes just feel uncanny.
Same, someone also added a new battery at some point so I have an awesome weeklong working device. And after rockbox, its even better.
It's a shame rockbox doesn't support video playback though.
How is stability for you? My 7th gen with about 750gb is pretty unstable, mostly I have a lot of difficulty transferring since the iPod crashes 15gb in all the time.
Darmok and Jalad, at Tangara?
shaka, when the walls fell
$271,285 raised of $10,000 goal. That's some pretty good odds of success
I bought one. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t work well with large music libraries. The database building step takes several hours, with no progress indicator, and once it’s done, the scroll wheel does not accelerate, meaning that scrolling through a long list of artists/albums will take a long time. Hopefully these will be remedied in a future firmware.
Holy shit......that seems like day 0 issues. By that I mean issues to address before mass production. Certainly before any customer recieves their product.
To be fair, the Fiio MP3 player I bought in the late 2010s also didn’t have acceleration while scrolling, and never got it in firmware upgrades. I suspect that 80% of the market might only carry small music collections with them, and the other 20% may be regarded as not worth bothering with (except by Rockbox and the original Apple iPod)
Not having a progress indicator on the exceedingly long database building application, though, is a bit harder to excuse.
This would be cool to load up with 10s of thousands of songs and to just leave tethered to your home HiFi system
Easier and cheaper to flash mod a Gen5/Gen7 iPod and put Rockbox on it. Looks better too.
Yes, but we desperately need a thriving ecosystem of open source devices. With the way electronics are going - for example, being forced to agree to a new license agreement before being able to use a device I already purchased, and the agreement forces arbitration for disputes? We need more people working on enshittification-proof devices.
Those mods don't look particularly easy. I've seen the results of mods gone awry on a few 7th gens.
Also interesting that they don't add Flac in the supported files for the iPods but mention RockBox.
While I do do electronics, I'm not amazing at it, but, I always wonder how the UIs are so clunky and slow on a processor that outpaces a Pentium 1 ,which would run Windows 95..
ouuuu that looks rly cool! Right in the vein of Pine64.
I like that despite only supporting SBC for now, they are looking to expand the Bluetooth codec support with updates. I think LDAC might be a no-brainer here, since it's royalty free and the encoder is open iirc
Eh.
I'd rather have a touch screen. I don't want retro looks over functionality.
The dedicated digital music player scene is rough right now. A year ago I looked into getting one cuz my iPod finally died and I don't want to use my phone for music. I wanted touch screen and Android so I could download apps from the app store. It was surprisingly hard to find one. Ended up with a Chinese brand that works, but there's no support and the screen is real glass and broke already. I like being able to download whatever apps I want and there's a ton of storage space, but I'd really like some better options.
best bets probably an aliexpress phone that you dont use as a phone
Honestly, you're probably right.
If it's an iPod classic/video, you can repair them all very easily and there is huge aftermarket support.
But if you want touchscreen and android plus am app store, why not just buy an old smart phone?
I don't get the appeal of a single-purpose device like this when smartphones are practically mandatory.
I see the appeal when your music gets constantly interrupted due to every fucking app wanting to send you notifications to remind you of its existence and those constant messages from work flooding whatever communications tool you’re using.
I also see the appeal for something for kids to give them music without giving them a fill on smart device.
Yes, a phone can do almost anything, but single purpose devices can and should be better for that purpose.
oh fuck, right, i got so used to obliterating apps ability to send notifications and ads that I forgot that's kind of the baseline experience, yeah.
I realise this isn't a good solution for everyone, but my phone lives on do not disturb mode and only lets calls through (and even then my phone tends to stay on vibrate). It's nice, generally leaves me uninterrupted when I'm doing other stuff.
I love it. Thanks for sharing, I hadn't heard about this.
Tangara also has basic Bluetooth SBC audio support, with more modern codecs possible via future firmware updates.
Well SBC is basically useless so I hope the development is not too far away in the future. I see it's Bluetooth v4.2 but as far as I know the best codec available compresses down to 1 Mbps but v4.2 supports up to 3Mbps and v5 up to 6 Mbps so still room for improvements but that's up to headphone manufacturers to support these future codec.
$250 ‽!
no, thanks
If you look at the comparison models, it seems pretty competitive for an audiophile.
iPod was 400 or 500 when it came out.
In the early 2000s. Depending on the generation that's around 800-900 dollars in today's dollars.
That's crazy when you put it like that. $900 to be locked into apple's iTunes hellscape.
But we got much better technology in that time, you can get a 512gb sd card for $30-40 nowadays compared to when the iPhone came out that a 1gb thumb drive would have $10-20
What was the thinking behind full sized SDXC cards instead of micro sdxc like damn near every other device made this side of 2011?
I suspect due to them being easier to handle and easy to plugs into laptops that still have an SD card reader. Since most Micro SD cards come with a full size adapter anyway, it doesn't really seem to have any downside to go with fullsize.
You can adapt a micro sd into a full-sized right?
