This MP3 nugget is humiliating modern tech.
It's a Creative Zen Stone that I got as a Christmas gift in 2008. I just found it in a drawer, and it's still holding charge. The last thing I put on it was The Life And Times Of Scrooge by Tuomas Holopainen, in 2015 -- I don't know why, at that time I definitely had a smartphone.
It has a headphone jack, which immediately makes it better than every smartphone produced in the last several years, and it can easily drive my 80-ohm Beyerdynamic. The audio quality is as good as one can expect. The only drawback is that it only holds 1GB... my old CD rips had to be compressed to hell and back.
Let me reiterate that this has been sitting untouched for a decade and was immediately ready for action. No login, no annoying software updates, expired subscription, or remote bricking by the manufacturer. Eat my shorts, Spotify Car Thing.
P.s. A Lifetime Of Adventure is a banger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWwSVOo5K_k
Enshitification has been a long slow burn, boiling the frog so we don't notice.
we've noticed every step of the way
That sad truth is that most people don't care
lol, what a bad chain of takes. Most people care but what can anyone do against a trillion dollar company
Not continue to demand. Not purchase the unethical Google, the low value Apple and the enshittified Samsung. By purchasing products from corrupt capital-obsessed corporations, people are signifying that they don't care. The good news is that the amount of people choosing ethics over greed is increasing.
*capital as in monetary value, capitalism
Of course, the most problematic companies have income from so many integral sources that it's impossible to fully boycott unless everyone along the chain does the same. Google' primary income is advertising, so block all ads. Amazon's is AWS, that serves internet for millions of systems, and the hardest to avoid.
Then get a bad phone from who?
Fairphone is a solid first choice, anything secondhand and Nothing are suitable also. GSG Mobile Brand Ratings
hit up amazon, search mp3 players
There's probably a hundred options. With Screens, without screens, can play video, 60GB, 80GB, 128GB.
You can EASILY still buy what we used to have (mostly even better) for $20-$40
You can still buy phones with headphone jacks.
At a point, collectively, we cared. We all bought at least a few things that eschewed enshittification. But eventually, for most, wireless headphones and not spending time curating our music won out for most.
I still have all my shit downloaded. Playlists on fleek. I stream it to myself now but could easily copy it to my phone.
But I don't have an itch to have a stand-alone MP3 player anymore. Nor a pocket camera.
If pressed, i'd consider making an mp3 player out of an ESP32, but there'd have to be a compelling reason for me to do it.
I get it, I used to love standalone MP3 players too, but streaming from my phone is just easier now. I still have all my music saved. Unless there’s a real need, like fixing a white screen issue or something unique, building one with an ESP32 doesn’t feel worth it.
Controversial opinion: while enshittification does exist (from ‘value engineering’ or feature regression) because the profit motive, this imo is more a case of the userbase getting what they ask for. Normies who aren’t super tech literate and know how to navigate a PC, weren’t buying early mp3 players like iRivers, because it wasn’t accessible. You had to:
Until the iPod hit the scene, nobody had solved #2 (iTunes store), #3 (iTunes), and #4 (Apple marketing) at the same time. #1 was a timing issue, as digitization increased and home PC prices dropped the userbase wasn’t as large yet. The devices downgraded because the broader userbase doesn’t ask/use the extra features, they want convenience and to not have to think. And as they are the demand segment for industry, so goes the product - dumb it down and mass market it.
I feel like my opinion is more controversial. I knew how to do all those things. I helped orchestrate a gigantic CD rip and swap using “lab” work computer equipment at a time when hard drive space was very expensive. I knew how to download files before Napster. When subscription music arrived and then the family plan followed, I subscribed and deleted everything. If I didn’t like new music but just relied on a catalog of older music maybe I wouldn’t have gone that route—but even then I think my kids would have wanted access to new music.
Honestly, I like subscription music—I listen to hundreds of new songs every month. I love wireless headphones for exercise. I don’t care about the lack of headphone jack. To me it isn’t enshittification, it is a wonderful product suite that I much prefer to the one I used to use.
I’d much rather own it and the storage requirements (‘till HDD death do we part), than rely on a web of licensing and exclusivity arrangements between streaming platforms and labels, which can - and have - been capriciously revoked in a moment. That’s also assuming the service offers the kind of music you like, or has good fidelity. And there’s platform agnostic issues like data connection - when we head up into the mountains I still have my files to play, but my wife is fully dependent upon Spotify and good cell signal.
And there’s your radically different use case. I value having my music collection and archive, I follow artists throughout their career, and seek out entire albums vs individual tracks. Someone who may not care so deeply or develops a different relationship with music based on playlists or radio hits won’t value the archival aspect as much, because music’s value is temporal.
I think in a different life I might have ended up on your path and I appreciate how much it is the right one for many. I’ll toss out a few more comments (mainly cause I am trying to contribute to Lemmy both monetarily and by not just lurking).
I love the fidelity of Apple Music which is what I use—it is certainly much better than my CD collection ever was. I don’t even bother using the lossless option as I cannot tell the difference. I usually have about 50GB of music sync’d to my devices and my wife and I camp without cell service often.
I carefully curate my music collection. I have about 5000 songs I love neatly sorted into decade playlists plus specialty playlists. I keep a textual backup of my playlists in addition to exported playlist backups to allow me to recover from pretty much any issue including apple account loss.
I rarely see removed songs, but do occasionally see them. Since my library is well curated it is easy to see which tracks are unavailable. I would guess I have been impacted on less than 0.1%.
It is extremely rare for me to not find the songs I want on Apple Music, but I have uploaded many tracks to Apple Music that I had to procure from other locations. The most common ones have been live tracks, soundtracks and mixes. At that point they work just like any other music in my library.
It’s been a pretty good experience—not one I would have predicted 20 years ago.
I wasn’t trying to say streaming is wrong, I definitely use it from time to time, and though I trend heavily towards BandCamp and Soulseek I’ll cop to fidelity rarely being important for me outside of certain genres with heavier bass or effects that make flac worthwhile. Generally it’s very diminished returns for bloated file size - especially so on mobile devices and Bluetooth/car playback
I have both fringe and mainstream taste, so I do semi-regularly encounter outright missing artists/groups, or occasionally entire genres, especially so in electronic - that alone is worth the effort of building and managing a collection to me. It is very disappointing to find an artist available via streaming, but not their self released/indie albums because of licensing agreements
You can upload your tracks to the cloud storage for later streaming? That’s actually pretty neat, and solves a lot of the ‘wrong’ live version/acoustic rendition/etc problems nicely.
Tbh same! Looking at the music industry after the vinyl era where pressing was cheaper but albums weren’t, it’s nice that they eventually were dragged kicking and screaming to digital distribution - “piracy is a service problem” and they refused to learn for decades while disruptive competition grew online
Damn I love music! Thanks for sharing your passion with me!
i was explaining to a college student about mp3 players and they thought they sounded like some amazing new product coming down the pipeline. it made me feel super old and super sad for all that tech companies have robbed from us
What were they so impressed by?
thousands of songs on your device with no internet connection and days without recharging
At first I was gonna say you can have thousands of songs on your smartphone regardless, but I guess those kids probably aren't too acquainted with file browsers.
Not in the slightest, no
I hate that so many devices try hard to obscure filesystems even though they are right there, right under the hood. I remember how ridiculous it was to try and browse an iPod as the hard drive it was. They copied your files into an indecipherable file tree with weird names. If companies aren't trying to keep you from copying shit then they're thinking you're too dumb to understand files and folders and putting some other weird UI on top of them to make them "user friendly".
And thusly, they made kids unable to understand file browsers/systems :'(
I think at this point it's a concerted effort to make sure we're all consumers, not users
👨🚀🔫👨🚀
Back in the day, I had one that looked like this and was essentially built around an AA battery, which was great since you could always carry a spare.
I loved this thing. Bought like three of them in a decade rather than join the iPod universe.
Weren't those Cowon, or something like that?
Mine was a Samsung IIRC and I remember having to look a while for something with a swappable battery and FLAC support
I have this one.
Nice. Didn't remember Samsung making some. Mine were Cowon or iRiver (which might actually also be Cowon).
I used to have one of these to listen to music while walking to school back in the day. It was the first device I hacked the firmware to move the menu options around. It was the perfect size to fit into the breast pocket on school uniforms.
Sony phones have headphones jacks.
Tmobile stopped supporting my XA2 Ultra and I couldn't use it with Verizon. F them carriers man.
Don't use cell service, now it's just an android mp3 player with wifi.
Any budget phone has them, xiaomi, samsung, oppo, really only "high end" phones dont.
I wanted a Samsung for my most recent phone purchase but I ended up going with Sony because it's the only one on the market with a jack. Samsung hasn't had jacks for years, which is a bummer because I miss my Samsung phone. They're just somehow more responsive and easier to use.
Which Samsung model are you claiming had a jack? I could be wrong.
Galaxy A series, now im doing some research and am not 100% sure, but up to last gen (a 24), they did have them.
I was turned off Sony products somewhere around 1998.
Have the same in black, doesn't even need any special software to load songs on it, unlike some other creative products.
I think it started with Apple requiring iTunes for their shitty DRM. The first few could still connect via USB regularly, but all file names were garbled and ID3 tags stripped, so you could technically copy the songs over, but had to manually restore them. From there it just went downhill.
Still have my 120G Zune and 16G Zune HD, both of which still work flawlessly. It's wild to think what we left behind
I gave my (young) son a 16G Zune HD. It lived through a washer/dryer cycle—I don’t understand how.
Dankpods is that you
"Arming the nug!"
I think people are forgetting you can still buy players like this. -With a mini jack, lots of space, drag and drop to transfer music....
https://amazon.de/dp/B0CJFRSGKH
The old Creative MuVo would pull apart, exposing a male USB connector for easy drag & drop loading of MP3s. Such a great design.
How does Scarlet Fire sound on it?
Absolutely cromulent.
Embiggening statement.
Dammit, I was gonna make this joke!
Well holy shit, I just thought that was some royalty free loop dankpods used when murdering cheap buds
That's where I know it from, too. It's a nice song.
It's how small things can be when they don't need a screen
If you google for mp3-players without touchscreen and you open a link like "12 best mp3-players without touchscreen 2025", you may find maybe one in this list without touchscreen.
You may be able to crack it open and upgrade that storage. I have a similar little MP3 player with 16GB on an internal microSD card. It's possbile to swap out the internals.
Aw man I wish I still had my old mp3 players. I had a round Sony one that was awesome, I could navigate songs/albums in my pocket without looking at the screen.
I started using something similar recently. I started buying music on indie sites and I have a closer relationship with my music. I keep listening to the same things since my library is still small. Because of that I remember the lyrics, know the names of favorite tracks or hum the songs during the day.
With phones not having the 3.5mm jack these days it sort of makes sense to have a separate 3.5mm jack device even.
The one I got is a Fiio Snowsky Echo Mini (2025) that is similarly old school - no Wi-Fi, just USB file transfer upload. Listening to music on a smartphone is mentally draining in comparison.
The player Is not such a good deal as it was before the Fiio tariff-related price hike, when it was around 40€, but eh. The battery is soldered on despite the case having a "stylistic" battery cover on the case. Supposedly on the inside it's still a standardized battery cell, so if you unscrew the case it should still be serviceable.
There are MP3 players which are simple and Digital Audio Players (DAPs) which are supposed to be more hi-fi. In Europe, AGPTEK is available (can't vouch, but see A52PL, C2S, U5PL) too. In the US, a simple modern iPod clone seems to be the Innioasis Y1. SanDisk (Western Digital) seems to have stopped making their Clip line and they're hard to find used where I'm from.
There's also a custom firmware for some DAPs/MP3 players called rockbox, here's the supported device list https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/TargetStatus
fellow dankpods enjoyer spotted
I miss Creative. Best computer speakers I ever had. Also when everyone at school was rocking a 4gb iPod they got at the mall for hundreds of dollars and had to choose which music they wanted, I was rocking this puppy for like $100 off of eBay with my entire library on it. Notice it's 30gb! It also doubled as a portable hard drive. This is back when corporations did everything they could to make a good product. Not too sure, given the quality difference, why apple thrived and companies like creative died.
Check out the Vanatoo t0+ speakers for your PC if you want to be amazed. A little pricey but oh are they absolutely fantastic for music and games.
I've got an iPod Classic 160Gb, from 2007 I think. Still runs fine, synchs and everything. I hate everything Apple about it - the weird 12-pin connection, having to use iTunes, the fact that it's been discontinued - but otherwise it's grand. I got it a wee Bluetooth dongle that fits into the headphone jack so I can listen on my hearing aids.
I'm almost scared to use it, because it would be hard to replace. I'm often out of phone signal range, and it's good to have all my music, audio books, podcasts etc still available. What else can do this? The Cloud is useless without a phone signal.
Look into rockbox. Custom firmware for the iPod.
Thanks, I'll look at that.
Do early ipods not show up as mass storage devices at all?
All files are stored separately so even if you do load media manually without iTunes, they won't show up or have any metadata or art. Source - have the iPod Touch 1st, 2nd and 7th gen
This one doesn't.
I got this for my girlfriend. If I recall it held about 100 CDs worth of music—it had a small hard drive in it. Up until that point she had used a portable CD player in her car. I remember it being a little finicky, but ultimately working well.
I had one of these, they were great devices back then. Really ate through batteries, but 6GB of music on the go was amazing.
I've been thinking of picking up something I can install rockbox on for a while, but I've been getting a lot of mileage out of Youtube Music Revanced (hacked yt music app with no ads without paying for premium).
That said,I've been putting off replacing my phone (screen is held on with tape) because I can't easily get a new one with a headphone jack. So maybe new phone without, use bluetooth and ytmusic vanced in the car, then a dedicated old school mp3 player for non-car listening.
That pisses me off to no end. Not just the fact that Apple took a steaming dump and every other company decided to eat it, that's just natural. But it would be So. Fucking. Easy. to capture an entire niche by just slapping a minimal DAC circuit and a TRRS socket on a phone. And nobody does it! Fairphone doesn't. Pinephone doesn't. "Nothing", which is supposed to be this quirky unique thing, doesn't, but what it does do is shove an AI in the camera where all it does is crank up the fucking saturation!
Rant over, I have to go seethe alone for a bit.
Sony, but they fucking charge for it.
I really like my xperia 5 v. The 1 is too expensive and the 10 was kinda meh but the 5 was Just right They have not made a new version of it though.
Every Sony product I've ever bought has shit the bed in one way or another. The design is so nice, but argh!
Should really tell y'all something, huh? It's way more niche than you think for people to give the first shit about 3.5mm, and those of us who do are satisfied with a cheap aftermarket adapter with a passive DAC so good I have to turn my volume down to half if I don't wanna go deaf
I legitimately do not understand the aversion headphone makers have to replacing the 3.5mm with USB-C, at least as an option (IEMs actually do offer this now, it's reeeeally nice)
That is a horrid idea from so many perspectives and I hope it never sees the light of the heavens. I would elaborate, but my reply would surely contain an excess of profanities and I fear the moderators' wrath.
Awww, I wish the mods would sanction that expletive filled rant. It'll be both dull and passionate. Not seeing a downside.
Maybe I'll put it in another community. Audiophile Circlejerk if it exists.
But my main points boil down to:
I rep their products so much I've been accused of being a shill, but I switched to Chinese brand smartphones years ago and will never look back. While US manufacturers were deleting features, Chinese manufacturers were adding them.
My current phone is an Ulefone Armor 18t, which features a 3.5mm jack, sd card slot, notification led, 6x led array flashlight, microscope, thermal camera, and a battery that lasts 3 days. And this is one of their older models, most of their newer phones come with floodlights, night vision cameras, and screens on both sides. There are dozens of other Chinese phone brands that are compatible with US 5g networks to chose from.
Good news: midrange phones are also taking out headphone jacks and memory card slot more and more :D
Is there a Chines phone that is as small as a Pixel 5 (or smaller?), with decent hardware/ram?
I don't even need a great processor, just good enough. I don't play games (other than things like Solitaire or Backgammon), but I multi-task like mad, so ram is more important than anything.
I've been looking at one of the Unihertz Jelly phones. I'm a bit concerned about the mediatek, but they're well priced so it' s not a bad gamble.
I actually just switched from a Pixel 5 to the Jelly Max last week and I've been pretty happy with it so far. My Pixel 5 was starting to have problems and I hate that it's considered a "small" phone now.
My only real complaints about the Jelly Max are that the touchscreen is less sensitive, the camera is not as good, and there's no 3.5mm jack, but they're far from dealbreakers IMO. I haven't noticed that it's any worse at multitasking and I've read you can get better performance out of the camera with 3rd party camera apps but haven't gotten around to figuring that out yet. It is about as heavy and twice as thick as the Pixel 5, but I personally feel like the thickness makes it a little more ergonomic to hold one-handed.
Oh, cool, thanks for the insight.
Interesting that it's thicker, does it have a bigger battery?
The battery is about the same size (~4000mAh), it's just thicker because they had to cram it into a smaller area :)
Not sure, I like the rugged phones so I couldnt recommend a smaller model offhand, though I know they exist.
+1 on dedicated music players. I can listen to music for hours without worrying that my phone is gonna die.
+1 000 000 on A Lifetime Of Adventure. Fantastic song.
I still have my Sansa Clip+ and Creative Zen and they work great to this day. Very simple to use and the Clip even has custom firmware that does all sorts of cool stuff. It even plays Doom!
I've got a 1GB Insignia Sport mp3 player from 2006 or 2007 that I check every few years and still worked last time I used it. Good for audiobooks or maybe 80 songs on shuffle. I got a lot of mileage out of it over the years, lovely little bit of electronics.
You determine what’s acceptable but what you accept, and people keep buying things that are objectively worse.
Is this dull? My interest is way too piqued right now. I wonder where my ~Y2K MP3 player is.
No AI, no blockchain, no subscriptions, no streaming, no SaaS... By every modern metric, it's so dull it might not even exist.
Sansa running rockbox ftw.
This makes me want to bust out my first gen iPod shuffle.
Been modding iPods lately. Loaded rock box on an iPod nano 1st gen - love music and podcasts again.
I am finally this weekend sending my old Creative Zen Vision:M to the recyclers as it will no longer charge. It was one of the last players to have a mini-hard-disc before solid state became the norm. It carried me through many a bike ride, that thing. They made cool gear.
I've just done a search and you can get a new battery for those for about £12.
And there's a 6 minute tutorial on yt showing how to replace the batteries. I've had a quick watch of it and it looks very easy, it's only the battery that is very lightly glued in. The rest is just screws and clips. It looks like you just need a small screwdriver and a thin plastic prying thing.
I wish you hadn't told me that, because I'm sorely tempted. I've rarely used in in the last few years, though, so it'd merely be for nostalgia purposes, and that's not enough reason.
Damn I forgot about that album. It's so awesome. Thanks.
I was trying to move to Finland back when that came out and just got an overflow of memories.
I am pretty impressed that it can power 80ohm Beyers (DT770?). I finally had my old phone die and I was forced to get one without a headphone jack. I listen to music on a little MP3 player called a Mixxtape now. It definitely can't power my Beyers properly.
I have a Rio Volt SP-250. A CD-MP3 player I've had since 2001. The in-line remote died somehow but the unit itself works flawlessly and is in excellent condition. It runs on AA batteries; originally they were rechargeable but they were Ni-MH cells. I don't know where its charger went, but I can run the thing on Alkaline batteries or charge Eneloops in a separate charger.
It long outlasted the iPod it replaced and is still serviceable to this day.
The remote was awesome, when you had a hundred mp3s on a cd it was so easy to navigate. Upgraded to the Rio Volt and then Rio Karma after that, always wished they would use those expansion ports for another remote.
Karma is still one of the best mp3 players ever made. Flac, gapless playback, parametric equalizer, dock, etc. Made the iPhone look like junk except for the control wheel being a bit too easy to break.
I still have the Volt and a couple of Karmas. 128gb compact flash cards are drop in replacements for the HDD so you get even more space and better battery life. Unfortunately the phone is just too convenient to use so they collect dust now.
I pretty much only ever used the remote; I have to keep remembering how to use the main controls.
Fortunately, you can do everything you need to do with just a headset plugged into the device. They didn't ONLY put the controls on the remote. I've seen iPods and a lot of televisions do that.
I do end up using my phone with a set of ANR headphones most of the time, but the time may be rapidly coming when I do away with smart phone life and return to tradition.
I have an old iPod shuffle. No screen, works as a USB stick, just plug it in, put some songs on, and it works.
My Creative mp3 fit in my pocket and had a joystick to control the music through my jeans. No voice commands, no touch screen, no touching my headphones, just sitting on the bus and fast forwarding or skipping as I desired.
Honestly why the fuck is simplicity avoided now? Every product wants to be the most complicated shit ever, and therefore fails constantly. This device illustrates that simplicity means less failure. Awesome post.
I think so it can mine your data and keep on paying the manufacturer.
It's been a while, but I was deep into SanDisk Sansa mp3 players. The Fuse was my favorite. uSD, FM radio, up to 8gb.
We really have gone backwards.
I had one of these. Used it for running until it stopped holding charge. Perfect size and weight, and you could drag and drop mp3s without any hassle.
I like music players with an interface and I hate using my phone. I've had a fiio Ive used since 2015 or something. Love everything about it.
I hate that apps like Spotify show album art. I don't care for album art or little animations. The fact that this is not customizable at all reeks of incompetence.
Don't get me started on playlists or how "liking" stuff works. I'm shocked there really isn't anything else out there that's toppling Spotify over like the garbage can of a service it is.
Still have a sandisk clip sport. When it dies I'm gonna search for something alike..... Sooooo much better than a phone and a app
You can still get things like this, for example my running setup is the Shanling M0 mp3 player (which is barely larger than that Zen Stone) and pair of Moondrop Chuu II IEMs, total cost about £120
Gen 1 iPod Shuffles are like that too. I have one that still works fine and you don't need crappy iTunes to manage music, it mounts like a regular USB drive.
It’s not a perfect solution/alternative, but if you’re on apple hardware you might want to take a look at MiniMoon music player.
I’ve been using it for a good while now on my phone and while it has some quirks, the dev is responsive and its updated regularly. Full version is a one time fee and it supports FLAC audio. Getting your music synced and sorted might take a bit of time but I’m glad I got off subscription-based music services.
https://www.plastaq.com/minimoon
If it's not cross platform I'm barfin
The phone is terrible for listening to music while riding a motorcycle or bicycle.
Impossible to use a touchscreen without looking at it.
Over the years I've used a series of cheap players. For the past few years sandisc clip, last I checked discontinued, replaced with something 4 times the price. I have a few different makes & models. I like to give them away as sort of a digital mix tape of a few 1000 songs I need tactile buttons, which I augment with stick on jewels so I can operate with gloves for the pause/play & next song. Ideally single click for either function. My helmets either have headphone pockets or I add them. Wired headphones, no BT disconnect, no dead batteries.
I clip the player to my right lapel so I can change songs without taking my hand off the throttle :D.
The random on everything including ipods sucks, I usually do a bunch of folders with 200-500 files each
Hah, just took my 2006 sansa e280 (similar device to yours, similar decade on the sideline) away with me on a trip.
I didn't want to be contactable but was hiking so wanted to listen to music. Loved connecting back with my old music too
This is rather interesting
I had one of those. Maybe it's still in the basement somewhere.
reformatting that thing is a massive pain without windows
I'd like some ear protection headphones that can play opus files from SSD.
It would also be cool if they had a microphone to work as a headset and a radio and walkie talkie function build in. Now that I think about it, it would also be cool if they'd also pick up speech and filter it from the ambient noise so I can listen to people yelling at me while still being protected from ambient noise. Maybe it could also work as a hearing aid that gives you super human hearing? Obviously it should have HRTF virtual surround sound and orientation tracking. Wait, it should be integrated into a bicycle helmet. Adding some eye protection would be nice too, and breathing mask that just clips on. And a head-up display for 1-2 lines of text to read eBooks while we're at it.
perfect for gym workouts or jogging in the wilderness. no need for access to internet and highly likely sealed against moisure/sweat and extremely light and with aux cords to prevent your earphones from falling. you only have uoload your playlist first 1GB is enough for maybe 50-200 tracks so yeah
I'm a person who doesn't like to carry stuff. I often leave my home with nothing but keys: music is on my watch, all my payments are on my watch. I don't need an MP3 player or a phone. The less I carry, the better.