It’s on the agenda to get a dedicated audio device this summer. I’ve been building up a collection of FLAC music to prepare. There’s 3 reasons for this.
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I bought a Remarkable device a few years ago. Yes, they’re over priced compared to a Kindle, but I wanted to avoid Amazon lock-in. As an aside, they’re fairly Linux friendly, you can even ssh into them. Anyway, before that I would read physical books or use a cheap tablet, but the tablet fell out of favor because it was too distracting. Constant notifications, request for updates, etc. I’m so happy with my current ereader. I use it all the time, and when I read, I don’t have any apps trying to grab my attention. I’m hoping an audio player can give me that same experience back for music. I hate mowing the yard and having Siri interrupt my music to tell me about some message.
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My AirPod pros were nice for the two years they worked. I’d probably grab another pair if I was still in so many Zoom meetings. Eventually though they started making a nasty buzzing noise and are now useless. I want to use my nice pair of headphones I’ve owned for a decade to listen to music.
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I’m sick of paying a monthly fee to listen to the same 500 songs (if that) over and over. I’m old. I don’t listen to a lot of new music. The new music I do listen to usually comes from an article I read on NPR, not from the algorithms. I want to depend less on streaming services and have more control over what I consume, and how I consume it.
Yeah, I could probably find workarounds to all these problems on my phone by fiddling with notification settings and buying a cheap headphone adapter, but why should I have to? Why do I have to go out of my way to make something as expensive as my phone less distracting and more capable? I’m just choosing to slowly opt-out of that battle.
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The Innioasis Y1 is one of a growing number of gadgets that seems engineered to take us back to a simpler, less perpetually-connected time. It’s an unabashed iPod Classic clone: click wheel, color screen, and all, with just enough modern concessions (USB-C charging, Bluetooth) to keep it from feeling like a museum piece.
If you’re going to leave your smartphone at home and then take this, and not having the phone with you is your goal, okay, sure.
But if you’re not, you’re just carrying an additional device to do something that the first device is quite capable of handling.
I heard the audio quality wasn’t great on this thing due to the lack of a dedicated DAC chip. The Hifi Walker H2 seems like a better deal.
Also having to open this device to replace the SD card is a bit off putting. I understand that you also have to open a traditional iPod to replace the storage, but this is neither apple nor the early 2000s. My mp3 player has an easily accessible SD card slot on the side and I don’t see why this device could not have one either.
Þis is a neat device, but
high fidelity audio
and
At roughly $65 USD for the base 64GB model
gave me a brain record scratch. Þat’ll fill up fast wiþ flacs.
64gb can fit around 700 hi res flacs if we assume an average length of 4min. That’s more than 40 hours of music before you’d be repeating. I don’t have this device but I have 128gb storage and I only have 1k songs I love so it’s not even full.
I want My Library, because music for me is situational and I do not enjoy shuffling contents. Most of my FLAC tracks are between 50 and 150MB each; my average album lengþ is 330MB. 193 albums. I have 2,595 albums, and 128G would hold a mere 14% of my music, as FLAC.
1TB would do it, þough, and apparently it comes in TB sizes or can be modded since storage is just an SD card accessible wiþ spudgers and some elbow grease.
While I appreciate the sentiment, I’m always a bit skeptical of these dumb devices purported to replace phones. 5 years from now, I bet most people will have returned to their smartphones, either due to necessity or habit
Every smartphone platform has media player apps available that can play locally stored media files. Seems a better idea to me to use the device already there just in a different way.
There’s also plenty of great media player hardware on the used market if people really must have a dedicated device for this.
The purpose for most people is just to use the phone less, not replace it entirely.
I went back to my mp3 player for music because I found that when I was streaming music I would start skipping tracks all the time and basically just listen to the same few songs even though I could have listened to literally anything, which is apparently a quite common thing called choice paralysis.
Plus while I was skipping tracks, I would also start reading the notifications on my phone, and then I would start answering the notifications and basically just use my phone when it wasn’t necessary.Now I have a smaller selection of songs I really like and I don’t skip around on my mp3 player and I also have no incentive to use my phone while listening to music.
I have the same ipod for the last 10 years. My ebook reader is from 12+ years ago. I see young people buying vynals for some reason.
When everything is an app to be streamed, physical goods seem to have an appeal.
I still have an iPad 2 I bought in 2011, and amazingly, the battery still lasts 5+ hours.
It’s got 128GB storage, and that’s used to store a movie or two, 30 hours of music, and a bunch of books and PDFs.
Of course, I’m not going to carry it with me everywhere; that’s what my phone is for. Which also has those things stored on it.
Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to give the impression that I was giving up my phone, or that these devices are designed to replace phones at all. I’m certainly not refusing to use my phone, in the slightest. But I have been taking slight steps to make sure I use it less. I think something like this has been great fun, I own my music, I curate it (which is fun), collect it, transfer it to a device like this one the Snowsky Echo I just had delivered, and I don’t support a streaming company like Spotify!
“…these dumb devices purported to replace phones”
I guess we could make the argument that these dumb devices (like the original Sony Walkman) have existed longer than phones have been the daily carry item, too!
I don’t think digital audio players will disappear in 5 years’ time. It might not be the popular choice, but it is still a choice to use them. This article I wrote is just kinda part why-I-have-decided-to-look-at-music-players, and part review.
I use my phone as a media platform; I rarely stream any content on it unless it’s off my Jellyfin server.
I also have a Sony Walkman I got in 1986, but as I don’t have any audiocassettes anymore, it mostly operates as an AM/FM radio (tell me again why our phones don’t have AM/FM when Japan and S Korea do?).
One thing I HAVE been considering is a LoRA Meshtastic setup; plug in a router with an extender board at home, and carry a handheld unit or two with me. That would mean that I’d have a non-cellular connection to my home network within a 25km radius of my home, and mesh networking connection to the Internet in most densely populated areas outside that range, AND the two devices could link any phones or work as walkie talkies in areas where there’s no available WiFi or cellular signal.
To me, that’s a step forward, where a dedicated digital audio player doesn’t really solve any legacy or current problem.
But if you’ve already got one, why not use it? The batteries last a whole lot longer than a smartphone.
