Do you any of you use a portable media player for music listening that isn't your phone? There are many reasons that I need to move away from my ancient 160GB iPod classic, does anyone have any direct experience of alternative players they'd recommend?
Pic taken from a site called "anythingbutipod" which seemed fitting.
The Sadisk Sansa Clip+ is the main alternative that is used. It has an sd card reader so storage isn't a problem, it can play most file types (including lossless), it's small light and too my knowledge the battery life isn't bad either.
That being said, on forums the iPod Classic is regarded as the 'creme de la creme' of portable music players but tbh I think i'd prefer the Sansa Clip+
>>25672 I've had this for years, it's perfect. But Sansa went and replaced it with something worse called the Clip Sport and the Clip Jam. Which both have terrible reviews.
I don't actually have much to add, but I've heard from multiple people that hard drive/high capacity media players simply don't exist any longer.
Surely it's a niche somebody has catered to? Or is it more of the tech market conspiracy going on, like how they keep making software licenses sitting and shutter so we no longer own any software, they don't want us having storage anymore because they'd rather collude to force us into using cloud storage?
It's annoying either way because there are plenty of cases I can think k of where a standalone, high capacity media player would be preferable over a phone or tablet or streaming device or whatever crap we're supposed to want to use these days. Somebody who knows about these things make one of those long informative posts please.
I'm currently using a cowon J3. I've owned it since around 2010 and it's still going pretty well, but the brand seems to be winding down now, and the only mp3 player they still sell doesn't seem that great.
>>25675 Part of the problem with the HDD mp3 players was that the drives weren't particularly reliable.
Luckily, many MP3 players have micro-SD slots. The newest Fiio ones can take SD cards up to 256GB.
Standalone MP3 players now fall into two categories - cheap, small players for the gym and ludicrously expensive audiophile players. There just isn't a profitable market between those two extremes. All-you-can-eat data plans and lossless streaming have squeezed standalone media players into an ever-shrinking niche.
128gb MicroSD cards are readily available, so you can have plenty of storage on your phone. There are even 200gb and 256gb cards available, although they're still quite pricey. Western manufacturers have started dropping MicroSD slots from their phones, but they're still standard equipment on Chinaphones.
Some enthusiasts are refurbishing old iPod Classics with a new battery and an SD card adapter. The bits are readily available and it's not a difficult job. They make a quad MicroSD adapter, so you could have a full terabyte of storage if you so desired and had a sufficiently large budget.
All good points I suppose, but it's still a bit of a silly situation. My music folder is presently somewhere close to 800gb. I simply can't believe that it's 2016, and I can pick up a 4tb hard drive for roughly a day's wages; but it's still an out of reach pipe dream to be able to easily take all that music with me.
"But Anon, you'll never need to listen to all that music on the go, why would you need to?"
Because I WANT to. Maybe I'm going to be somewhere with no 4G, maybe I'm just at a mates houser and just want to be able to whip out my MP3 player to quickly show them a certain song, maybe I just want the freedom of choice. But no. I cannot have these things, because people are plebs and would rather just have fucking Spotify.
A player with a 2.5" hard drive would be absolutely massive. The iPod Classic used a 1.8" hard drive, which is no longer in production. I don't see anything particularly plebby about using a streaming service - all the music ever for a tenner a month is a pretty good deal, IMO.
I have my gripes about the way that Spotify catalogues jazz and classical music, but it's a good service at a very reasonable price. I remember when CDs cost £18, which works out to about £30 in today's money. Having your favourite music on local storage makes sense if you're on a capped data plan or live in an area with poor signal, but I'm not sure if many people feel the need to have a vast library of music in their pocket. You could also use a personal cloud product to store your own music on your own hard drives, but stream it from anywhere via the internet.
But again. What if I'm somewhere that I can't get spotify? There are vast swathes of the country, nevermind other countries, that don't get 4G. Or even any G, actually, ever been camping in Wales or somewhere like that?
I mean obviously it's a good deal for your average consumer, why should I pay a tenner a month when the pirate bay exists and if you never leave the city or travel at all, then it's all good and dandy I suppose. I just dislike in principle how nowadays all our portable devices are so reliant on the internet. It fundamentally restricts their portability.
>>25682 Quite, and as the OP I'd just like to highlight:
>all the music ever
Er, yeah maybe for you mate, but I have shittons of scene releases and rips I've sourced that most definitely are not on Spotify. And yes, being independent of an Internet connection is, to me, the definition of portability. And I don't want to use my phone battery for music, because I need it for looking at pictures of cats. Also, if my phone is also my audio player and it bricks I'm shit out of two distractions; at least with a portable media player either one or the other will be available to me if one breaks. I've had this method since I was rocking an mp3 capable CD walkman, so you're not going to come into a thread about media players and successfully tell me to switch to my phone.
>>25677 Thanks, I've been looking at a couple of FiiO's, good to know someone here recommends them.
>>25682 That's what offline storage is for - Spotify, Google Play etc. all let you store music offline for when you're without internet. With affordable modern 128GB micro SD cards that corresponds to ~40 days continuous playback - clearly battery life will be the bottleneck and not the amount of storage. Mini HDDs like used in the classic iPod were rightly phased out as unreliable and prone to shock damage.
>>25683 >I don't want to use my phone battery for music, because I need it for looking at pictures of cats.
That's what powerbanks are for. Aside from that I'm not sure how you expect to be regularly 'bricking' your phone.
>>25685 No, you can't store all of recorded music on a single device you can carry around with you. You can only have access to a large fraction of it in most of the places in the UK that aren't in the middle of nowhere, and store a subset of it for when you are in the middle of nowhere. Awfully sorry if that isn't good enough for you.
Not him but I'd honestly rather have the fraction I choose with me all of the time with or without a viable phone signal. Just call me old fashioned.
Wasn't there some liar lad on here recently saying that the Chinese were coming out with affordable 1Tb NAND storage any time now? I'd have to dig up the thread but surely a tera has to be enough for any bugger's music collection.
You're talking about an edge case of an edge case. The market of "people who need >128gb of music in a handheld device in a place with no internet connection" is a rounding error away from zero. Most people simply won't compromise cost, bulk and battery life just in case they're trapped in a faraday cage and urgently need to listen to a Prefab Sprout bootleg. The consumer electronics business is rabidly competitive - if there was demand, someone would be meeting it.
If you really want a portable music player with 1tb of storage, you can have it, although you'll have to assemble it yourself. Buy a refurb iPod Classic, fit an iFlash board and an mSATA SSD. It'll cost you the thick end of £400, but it's an option.