I love coming back to the iPod. It's great having almost all of my music on one device that only does one thing: playing music.
My listening habits are much better when I listen to downloaded music than when streaming. On streaming services I tend to listen to lots of lists and I end listening to the same songs for long periods of time. On my computer and the iPod I usually listen to full albums, in order. It's a different experience. I listen to the songs as the artist intended when publishing the album.
It's an iPod gen 7 with the the HD replaced by a 128gb microSD. The firmware is the holy rockbox.
I bought a FiiO M3K a couple months ago to have a Rockbox machine again, and I'm so happy. Rockbox is just such a great piece of software.
Only issue I'm having is that the SD card seems to slowly get corrupted after a while, upon which Rockbox doesn't boot anymore until I copy it to the SD card afresh and repair the file system.
Not sure what's causing that... Might be the SD card itself, I suppose. I should probably reformat it and try again, but it's 512gb and copying all my music takes such a long time.
Wow that's a lot of space!
I don't know if it might be related but I also have problems with the rockbox disk mode. To copy files I load the stock firmware. I don't know how your device works but maybe if you have an easy way of copying files directly into the SD without rockbox disk mode you can avoid the problem...
That's what I've always done in fact, so I'm afraid that's not it... The FiiO has an SD slot that's very easy to reach, fortunately. I had an IPod Photo before, which I also modded to use an SD card, and getting to that was quite a hassle 😅 The card was also getting corrupted in that thing, plus the battery was not impressive.
(That was with the same SD card, in fact, which of course might actually be the issue. I formatted it since the transfer, but maybe it's just inherently corrupted...)