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| ▲ | Aurornis 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > I looked pretty hard - I specifically don’t want an android OS called an mp3 player. I want a dedicated media player that has physical button controls (not touch screen), is very snappy, has a good UI, and has a purpose-built OS There are a lot of DAPs in this style. They're just not popular because the Android-based units are perfectly fine and don't feel like Android phones with an MP3 player app installed. Most buyers don't have arbitrary OS requirements, they just want a device that works well. I'd start by looking at the Rockbox compatible devices list: https://www.rockbox.org/ |
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| ▲ | Retric 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | They likely want to use the device without looking at it, thus the requirement is physical buttons not a specific OS. It’s the same issue with touch screens in cars. Anything that’s a touchscreen simply fails a core MP3 player requirement for many people. | | |
| ▲ | saulpw 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yup. I want to be able to use it to listen to music, start/stop/pause/skip/volume while I'm at the dentist. | | |
| ▲ | Tallain 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think Fiio and Hiby are the closest that exist today. They have dedicated hardware and physical buttons for the things listed in your comment. However, they do still ship with a custom Android OS and you need the touch screen to navigate your library and such. On the upside, this lets you choose your media library app. On the downside, it still isn't as good as the touch wheel on old iPods. I, too, am waiting for something like this to return. The Hiby is good enough until then for me. | | |
| ▲ | blep-arsh 17 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Shanling uses a custom OS although it feels very primitive compared to iPods (e.g. the iPod Nano had VoiceOver for touch navigation). So I'm not really a fan of these dedicated single-function players; modern media player apps can be fast and convenient (more so than a clickwheel, honestly), and Android devices can still have dedicated control buttons. If only these devices weren't so bulky... |
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| ▲ | davidzweig 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've got the first boards on my desk for a media player based around the Sifli 58 chip. 1.8" amoled display and 16 buttons. https://imgur.com/a/45GuaEA https://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,55419.0.html Anyone want to help with porting Rockbox? |
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| ▲ | idibiks 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is a problem with "single-purpose" devices for kids, too. Drawing tablets, music players. They're all actually full Android phones (sans cell modem) and tablets. It sucks. |
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| ▲ | fumar 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why is android bad here? An android launcher can create the illusion of a single purpose device. What difference does it make? Battery life? | | |
| ▲ | idibiks 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | They can do too much stuff, so it’s yet another do-anything device to have to police. |
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| ▲ | NetOpWibby 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Pretty sure I know what music player you're talking about because I have the same requirement. Sony's modern Walkman is an Android device. No thanks. |
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| ▲ | 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I can't vouch for it personally since I don't own one, but I saw a video on YouTube mentioning the Innioasis Y1[0], which supposedly does a decent job of replicating the iPod experience with some modern features like USB-C and Bluetooth at a decent price. Can be flashed with RockBox. No external SD slot, but it can be opened to swap out the SD card it comes with. Reportedly doesn't feel nearly as nice in hand as a real iPod does but that's pretty standard at this price point. [0]: https://www.innioasis.com/products/y1 |
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| ▲ | mwpmaybe 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yes, I want these for my kids so very badly. They have Yotos (similar to Tonie) for bedtime, and iPads for school work, but those are not ideal for a number of reasons. I want them to be able to experience music like I was able to with an FM+cassette walkman clone in the '80s and early '90s, or with my Nomads and iPods in the late '90s and early aughts. Hopefully someone here can suggest something! ETA: OK, there are quite a few highly-rated options on Amazon, so I just need to solve the "putting music on there" problem and the "dropping it and immediately destroying it problem". |
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| ▲ | bloomingeek 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not sure if this would fit the bill for you, but I really like it: 96GB Mp3 Player with Bluetooth 5.0 - Aiworth Portable Digital Lossless Music MP3 MP4 Player for Kids with FM Radio HD Speaker for Sports Running Super Light Metal Shell Touch Buttons (Actual Amazon description) The "touch screen" is only for moving around the menu. The menu is easy to remember. Sound quality is really good and it takes a mini SD card. Right now, $40. |
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| ▲ | kikoreis 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Swofy makes a little media player that has physical buttons; the crowd here at home really likes them: https://a.co/d/9icRCCs |
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| ▲ | RGamma 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Have you looked at Rockbox? |
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| ▲ | matheusmoreira 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | That brought back memories... Used to daily drive Rockbox on my old 80 GB iPod decades ago. Got a lot of use out of the FLAC support. Latest project updates are dated 2025. Blows my mind that this project is still alive. Feels oddly out of place in today's computer industry where chips are locked down to prevent projects like these from existing. |
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| ▲ | kenhwang 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Not sure why you want to have purpose-built OS as the hill to die on since many of those Android-based mp3 players absolutely outclass the old iPod classics in snappiness and compatibility and output quality. Plenty of choices that meet your other criteria once you're OK with it being Android powered. Like a SnowSky is very obviously stripped down Android that can only run the music app it's shipped with, but it's otherwise everything you want. |
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| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Only speaking for myself, but the problem with Android is that it and the hardware needed to make it run acceptably are absurd overkill for the use case, which drives up cost, cuts down on battery life, and adds a layer of unnecessary complexity (suddenly you need to think about what player app to use, for example). Basically part of the charm of a single-purpose device is that it can be built to serve it purpose ridiculously well and do nothing else, and the second general purpose software enters the picture much of that is lost. | | |
| ▲ | kenhwang 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The endless amount of Chinese Android-based single purpose mp3 player devices that are obviously iPod Nano/Classic clones basically cost ~$30 and have 50hr+ of battery life. You don't have to think about what player app to use, they ship with the only one that runs. The rest of the Androidness is stripped out. Then yes, there's obviously the other end of the extreme where the mp3 player is very obviously a phone without a radio with a price tag to match. And everything in-between. I'd say there's actually too many choices cause the silicon and battery cost required to simply play music has gotten so cheap that it doesn't make sense to optimize the OS further than Android. I'm sure the economics of scale means the actual hardware wouldn't be cheaper by any noticeable amount either. | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Only speaking for myself, but the problem with Android is that it and the hardware needed to make it run acceptably are absurd overkill for the use case, which drives up cost, cuts down on battery life, and adds a layer of unnecessary complexity (suddenly you need to think about what player app to use, for example). The battery life is fine on modern DAPs. Excellent, even. I understand why an engineer would want a completely application specific, built-from-scratch OS that does one thing perfectly, but that's a pipe dream for a niche market. A powerful and efficient SoC that runs Android is ultra-cheap these days. Less than $1. Hiring an engineering team to write and maintain a custom OS for a niche product would incur so much R&D cost that it would wipe out any money you'd save by using a smaller microcontroller and drive the final cost up. Just think: How much salary would you have to pay a team of engineers to write the custom OS and maintain it? If you could optimistically sell 500,000 of these devices (good luck) then how much would you have to save in order to pay for the R&D? | | |
| ▲ | vbezhenar 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You don't need "OS" to play some music, drive display and talk via USB/BLE. It's trivial task and could be done with a few event loops. A lot of firmwares is being written without OS. May be FreeRTOS/Zephyr to somewhat simplify the programming, but that's definitely not "OS" in a commonly accepted sense. You don't need team of engineers, one hobbyist could easily do that. I wrote firmware for a device of similar complexity (work with ADC, implements USB, BLE, some UI with buttons and leds) and I'm not even a professional. |
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