In 2026, my favorite music player has no Wi-Fi, no notifications, and no subscription. Here's why I'm using an iPod instead of an Android.
  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
    485·
    2 mesi fa

    Yet, when I want to sit down and actually listen to an album, the phone is often the most frustrating tool in my pocket. Between the constant pings from Slack and the AI-generated discovery feeds that keep trying to shove viral tracks down my throat

    Bruh, what? Just have the songs locally like on your iPod; you don’t have to stream, and it’s easier to put on your phone than your iPod. And what do Slack notifs have to do with this? Just turn it on DnD or whatever. In what universe are Slack notifs distracting you less than your phone while you listen on your iPod? If you give that little of a shit about them, you can turn them off.

    I can leave for a week-long trip with my iPod and not have to think about bringing a charger along.

    ??? But you’re already bringing a phone that needs to remain charged?? Playing audio doesn’t drain the battery that hard, and phone batteries nowadays get enough charge that even an absent-minded dipshit like myself barely has to worry about it.

    This author is either nostalgia-baiting for clicks or an absolute moron. Using an iPod might be a fun novelty; absolutely the fuck is it not “the best way to enjoy music”. You’re carrying around a separate, fairly large device just for music that probably even has worse audio quality; that’s so unnecessarily cumbersome if I just want to listen to music.

    They’re using a ClickWheel with, at most, 40 GB of storage. That’s like ten twenty FLAC albums. Is what I would say, except: “Since I replaced the original spinning hard drive with a microSD adapter, there are no moving parts and significantly less power draw. I am currently running 512GB of storage paired with a significantly larger battery that lasts weeks, not hours.”

    So they wait well into the article to tell the audience that they hardmodded their old iPod and that’s why it’s actually viable. What the actual fuck. Basically nobody is going to do that. Even with that hardmodding, the literal only advantage they have here, then, is the ClickWheel – because again, your phone should be charged and always on you in 2026. The ClickWheel is not that special to warrant hardmodding a 2006 iPod and using it separately for music.

    Then they have a gargantuan segment whining about streaming as though local storage just doesn’t exist on their phone. It’s literally a non-issue. Right now I’m listening to a FLAC album I got off Bandcamp months ago. On my phone. Because I don’t use streaming services. On my phone.

    This piece of shit article could’ve been boiled down to “the haptic feedback on the ClickWheel was cool we should bring that back lol”.

    • Sisyphe@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      41·
      2 mesi fa

      You either get it or you don’t. Using a dedicated music player feels like treating yourself, whereas using your do-it-all smartphone feels austere. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a nice phone, or if your music player is an old iPod or an old garbage mp3 player or one of those modern DAPs (which are basically android phones with fancy DACs and huge batteries).

      I regret selling my old iPod, I would be modding the shit out of it if I’d still had it right now. But alas, it became “obsolete” the moment I got a smartphone with internet connectivity and YouTube and streaming apps.

      …And one last thing™: the click wheel was awesome and it was probably the best input solution for a portable music player ever. It was truly special.

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        2 mesi fa

        Dude, I do get it. I work on PCSX2; I’m around people literally all the time who will use physical hardware for no other reason than that it’s more holistically enjoyable to them. I think it’s super cool. My PS2 console is objectively inferior in every conceivable way that actually matters to me as a player; I will nevertheless sometimes boot it up simply because it’s pleasant and more unique. I buy all of my PS2 games and burn them even though it’s more difficult for mathematically the same outcome. I think it’s cool as hell that the author enjoys using their hardmodded iPod.

        What I don’t get is why the article’s arguments for the iPod are so abysmal. It decides to ditch apples-to-apples (local-to-local) and go straight into apple-and-oranges (local-and-streaming) for an inordinate amount of time, decides to frame the iPod’s inconveniences as a convenience (e.g. “don’t have to bring a charger”), and overall gives exactly one valid argument for why the iPod is nicer, namely the ClickWheel. It doesn’t even mention the potentially different feel of the DAC and just gives that as a straight win to the smartphone in a throwaway line.

  • yesman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    2 mesi fa

    Apple products are great. The Apple ecosystem is not. If you like FOSS, you’re going to have a bad time.

    Putting music on my iPhone sucks because iTunes won’t recognize or transfer .FLAC format. File sharing on iPhone is really inconstant and buggy. And I need a whole 3rd party app to get the data moved. Or I can upload things to iCloud 5GB at a time.

    • Sisyphe@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      4·
      2 mesi fa

      The only Apple product I ever had was a 5th gen iPod. I remember having to “sync” it to my iTunes library. The concept of syncing was alien to me at the time, it seemed unnecessarily complicated (and it was!). Of course, I didn’t put up with that crap for long so I installed Rockbox on it. That let me copy files directly. It supported .flac and a whole lot of other formats and it ran DOOM and a Gameboy emulator.

      • Raiderkev@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 mesi fa

        Yeah, I remember hating the syncing. Just fucking let me select the files and drag it over! Then every software company decided that they needed to idiot proof every fucking thing to the same extent over the next 20 years. I fucking hate Apple’s devs for that.

    • Jason2357@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      2 mesi fa

      Flac would be a waste of the limited storage on an IPhone that doesn’t even have the ability to play such high fidelity audio. You are limited to what? Bluetooth or the crappy DAC in the USB-C port with an adapter?

      I always kept flac as an archival format, and transcoded when transferring to any device into the best format for that device.

    • flameleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 mesi fa

      I use LocalSend to transfer the files and play them on the iPhone with VLC. Only issue I have is the iOS file browser doesn’t like filenames or folders with special characters like é or ö.

  • FireWire400@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 mesi fa

    I see someone is late to the nostalgia-bait articles party… You know that dedicated music players are still a thing now? You don’t have to always use a fucking iPod.

    I do like iPods mind you but there are better modern alternatives if you want a daily driver. It’s nice that they want to talk about solutions for people who want to get away from their phone I guess, but a 20-year-old device is not the solution for most people.

  • brzrd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 mesi fa

    Use a retired phone with no apps other than your music and the players (New Pipe, Archive Tune, etc) you want. Give your old phones a 2nd life without having to purchase another thing. Connect via WiFi and have a ball.

  • pryre@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 mesi fa

    Interesting, but I’d have to say that I’ve been contempt just using an app that doesn’t suck (musicolet). The comments about battery could hold a point to me if I were going on a week long trip, or something of the like, but anywhere that would happen for me is somewhere that I wouldn’t be taking music/phone for distractions anyway.

    I think the finer point I agree with is being able to just have a copy of your own music and play it without being belt-fed opinions or ads. Managing it is always a bit of a pain, but I’ve got a system that works for me, and MTP on android works better than trying to deal with iTunes in my books.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.caEnglish
    3·
    2 mesi fa

    I use an old MP3 player I got for 5 bucks at a clearance sale and some headbuds from the dollar store. Converted all of my old records, tapes, and CD’s to mp3’s. Any new music I add comes from the public library on CD, and then converted to MP3 when I get home. I also use “youtube” to discover new (old) music, so I know what to get from the library. I also grab a CD I’ve never heard of, from time to time, hoping to trip and stumble onto something great.

  • jordanlund@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 mesi fa

    My phone has a 1TB SD card just for music, I’m currently using (checks notes) 88GB.

    But I only really listen to music when I’m driving and that cuts the temptation to check other things.

  • moonburster@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 mesi fa

    Just stop using random playlists of people and start playing albums. Works regardless of the platform, works on local and cloud stored music and makes you appreciate artists again.

    And best of all, buy albums you listen to very often on Bandcamp

  • ropatrick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    2 mesi fa

    This person just needs to manage their notifications and phone control better.

    Also, while streaming (in my case Spotify) subs may seem expensive, it would be horrendously expensive to use an iPod and buy the amount of music I listen to (and three family members for that matter) instead. Considering the monthly sub, its fantastic value.

    Personally, and without having made much effort, the issues mentioned in the article are a non-issue for me. And did I read that the HD and battery need to be modded?

    Seems like a classic case of finding a problem for a solution.