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Fedi, who do you know who's the vintage MP3 player expert?
I'm asking Fedi because I have certain expectations and requirements that only Fedi can fill. I'm looking specifically to hear from That One MP3 Player Person, here.
There's definitely an era of Peak MP3 Player, the same way e-ink ereaders peaked in 2007-2008 in the Just Before Touchscreens Ruined Everything era - there's definitely an aluminium-body clicky-buttoned MP3 player that Just Plays MP3s and is tactiley perfect and beautiful in every way and probably unobtainum except with eBay and patience, and I want to know about it from The MP3 Player Expert.
I want the person with a display shelf full of MP3 players to infodump at me about when the buttons disappeared and everything carcinized into a phone and made them sad. I expect this person will tell me to look for something in the late aughts to early teens and know the part number for a replacement battery. If this is you, please give me a link to your website, and feel free to show me your socks as well because I expect they're cool as hell.
No need to tell me you use your phone for music or tell me the MP3 player that you already own is good, I don't care. I want to find The Vintage MP3 Player Person With Heavily Considered Opinions, and ask them questions that only they will be able to answer. I need the MP3 Player Librarian. I feel in my heart that this person is here on the Fediverse somewhere.
UPDATE: it's only been 5 minutes haha, alright here's what I want:
* no apple or apple-wannabe
* plug it in and it shows up as a USB drive, I won't install software
* takes SD or MicroSD
* just plays MP3s
* no touchscreen
* no capacitive controls
* preference: steel or aluminium
UPDATE: ipods are apple, I specifically don't want apple, I already know about ipods thx
UPDATE UPDATE: editing the question to make it more obvious that I'm looking for a person not a thing here, I don't want to know about your MP3 player, I want to know where the Vintage MP3 Player Wizard dwells
UPDATE 4: looking into Sony players around the tail end of the minidisc era, also this wee lad looks like a decent "modern" equivalent: https://binarydigit.city/a-simple-digital-audio-player/
@ifixcoinops Probably the 5th generation iPod Color, right before Apple renamed the hard disk one the iPod Classic and cheaped out instead of using the Wolfson DAC? Really good sound, 80Gb hard drive, and if you don't like iTunes/Apple Music you can install RockBox instead and use it to play FLAC as well as MP3, OGG and a bunch of other codecs.
@cstross @ifixcoinops My choice for the 250 000 km i spent behind the wheel was an iPod Classic with my ripped cd catalogue on shuffle. Fond memories of the machine!
@cstross @ifixcoinops color is 4th gen, 5th gen is video ;)
The ultimate ipod, or at least it used to be until they finally managed to crack the 6th gen and port rockbox to it (I don't know if 6th gen is really better than 5th, I got out of ipods back when you could only use 6th gen with the stock firmware... but iirc some people did complain about its audio output quality)
@IngaLovinde @ifixcoinops I had a 5th gen, bought 6th gen for the bigger hard drive, found the sound quality a DISTINCT step backwards. (iPhone sound was better by far once that was an available alternative. I think that's what killed the old hard disk iPods in the end.)
@cstross @ifixcoinops and iirc it was quite easy to upgrade HDD in 5th gen too, not to 160gb thin one (as the latest 6th gen had), but 120gb per platter (i.e. thin 120gb or thick 240gb)? No problem!
It's a pity that Apple's choices killed hard disk ipods but not before they killed Zune (which basically only flopped because it didn't have that apple logo)
@IngaLovinde @ifixcoinops I still have my old hard disk ipods. They still work and I have high quality earbuds too. But these days I use my iPhone for music (with more flash storage than any hard disk iPod ever got). Going back to 20 year old iPods at this point is excruciating—sound quality is okay but the hard drive is incredibly sluggish, the clickwheel UI is cumbersome, and the iPhone just does so much more. Even a late model iPod Touch is vastly superior.
@cstross @ifixcoinops yeah that's why I moved on from spinning rust too, onto Sony player from 2014 with expandable storage (NWZ-A17 sissy). Of course scrolling through long lists is not as convenient as with touchscreen or Zune pad or clickwheel, but it plays music well, has good audio quality, is very small, and lasts 50 hours on a single charge. Of course I would never even try to play any audio files from the crappy Android phone when I have this player.
(With earbuds (and I don't mean in-ears, I cannot use in-ears), after trying a lot of different stuff over my life I ended up settling on Audio-Technica CM707, which have the perfect sound (for my taste, and considering the limitations of earbud form-factor), and are reasonably priced (last time I paid IIRC around $70 for them on Amazon Japan). While for home use I have electrostatic Stax SR-5 from 1970s, thanks to a lucky purchase on classifieds for way under 100€.)
@jmtd @ifixcoinops @cstross also transparent see-through front plates if that's your thing