I loved the IPod shuffle but it’s gone now.

I want a high quality portable MP3 player without a screen which doesn’t require a user hostile music ecosystem.

I just want to be able to load and play mp3.

There’s tons of garbage quality devices but I’m wondering if anyone has experience with such a device from a known manufacturer.

While "portable MP3 player" implies "not a cell phone", have you considered use of an old cell phone and an open source music player (i.e. one example here: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/ch.blinkenlights.android.van...).

The "phone" does not even need to work as a "phone" anymore, it just needs to work enough to open the player app and play music.

And with the example player above, it "does not require a user hostile music ecosystem". It simply reads the phone's filesystem and catalogs all mp3 files it finds, and then lets you play those files.

It (using either an old cell phone, or your current one if you have one) will allow you to "just to be able to load and play mp3".

Find a Sansa Clip, Clip+ or similar on ebay and install rockbox on it. Once setup you can just plug it into your computer and drag & drop mp3s like any other USB thumb drive. They're tiny and it's great having physical buttons; you can pause, skip, etc without looking at the device.

There are a bunch more supported players but I've only used Sansa. See: https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/TargetStatus

I've used a number of Philips SA2208 8Gb players, with headphone jack, for this. The simple display seems to get patchy after a while, but the music playing function seems to work quite well for my purposes. I'm not aware of any third-party firmware support though.

> device from a known manufacturer.

See, this is the problem here. You can buy a Walkman technically if you want to cough up $75 for a glorified feature phone: https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders...

If you're dead-set on finding something that checks all your boxes, mainstream manufacturers won't cover it. This is one of those things where I'd search it on Amazon and sort by highest public reviews.