Asklemmy

One of my kids has one, a little screenless one, specifically because it doesn't have a screen. That one kid in particular gets addicted to screens.

I've specifically gone for a AAA battery powered one so I can just enjoy music while I work on proofs.

Phones are ok, but sometimes it's just nice to be unreachable in a random room on campus where no-one can track you down to attend meetings.

Bonus points if students see you bopping to unknown tunes while you work and think you're crazy.

studying with it in my local library rn

Used to keep about 10 gigs of MP3s on my phone, but my most recent one doesn't have a headphone jack. Really kicking myself for caving on the lack of that feature. Almost looking forward to this phone breaking just so I can find a model with that 3.5mm aux and go back to using it as an MP3 player.

Also fuck bluetooth headphones.

I keep my 160GB iPod Classic on life support.

I think the clickwheel design is, in my view, the single best one-thumb no-looking-required input scheme for an MP3 player I think anyone has ever made. Plug it into, say, my car stereo AUX port and I can pick it up with a free hand to control volume, select tracks, and even navigate mostly by memory without having to look at the thing. I can just tell where I am based on the feel of the control. Infinitely better than a featureless flat slab of a touch screen that gives you no sensory feedback.

I like its solid build quality. Full metal chassis with that sexy anodized aluminum finish. I miss that. Despite having a spinning disk hard drive, it never skips, and I've never had read or write issues. Though I'd probably try to mod it over to some kind of flash NAND storage someday. There's also a USB-C mod available that I'd like to do someday, since Apple 30-pin connectors are an endangered species now, and even then, carrying around an outdated proprietary cable for only one device is something I'm eager to never need to do again.

I'm also pretty heavily conditioned to not have tens of gigabytes of music stored on my phone eating up all the precious space. But that's mostly a holdover from my previous phone, which had a 32 GB onboard memory limit and no SD card expansion slot. I guess now that I have a proper memory expandable phone and, and now that half terabyte microSD cards are relatively inexpensive, that's no longer a huge concern...

Also, Rhythmbox can sync to it. Maybe other software too. So I don't even need iTunes to use it.

Considering moving away from having a smartphone and using an mp3 player and a little dumb phone for privacy reasons.

Does anyone else self-host their music? (I suppose this would also be a thing if you stream from Spotify) but my music device greatly benefits from having some form of Internet connection for when I want to update it.

I self-host, so when I add music to my server my phone sees it automatically. I wouldn't want to copy my music onto my server and onto an mp3 device, nor do I want to pay for separate internet service on an mp3 device.

I have an old SanDisk player with RockBox that I use for exercising outside.

Not having a phone with me is part of the good getting out to exercise does me.

I do. Just fixed an iPod Nano 6G via soldering in a new battery. I love to not have to carry my phone when doing sport and not have to buy an expensive smartwatch, just to be able to listen to music. Also the battery lasts 2 days worth listening to music. You don't have that with Bluetooth earbuds. The new battery will last year's, while wireless earbuds stop working after 1 or two years. It has aux which is just unreplaceable in my eyes.

I hate how we have downgraded to large phones...

Not quite what you're asking, but I still use my minidisc player.

I recently picked up an old LG V30 to use as a dedicated audio player. It’s got a great headphone jack, it’s got a micro-SD slot, and there’s a build of Lineage OS for it too. It’s been nice, I can use some pretty power hungry headphones with it without issues and having a dedicated device for music has been nice for focusing on the music.

I would use one if I was still curating mp3 libraries. Honestly, the lack of tracking and spying makes going back to ripping mp3s and having a stand alone player rather appealing.

I do, they have better battery life, are lighter and smaller and actually have great sound quality (my alliexpress 20 dolar mp3 player have better sound than my desktop pc)

edit: I use it mostly for flac, not having so much going on electronically makes the sound extremely clear even on cheap devices with good headphones

Like some other people here I still use an iPod classic for all the music in my car. Haven't had iTunes installed to change the music on it for 14 years.

I have an Astell & Kern SR25 MKII DAP (digital audio player) and I use it quite frequently. The sound quality far surpasses what my phone can produce when connected to any of my speakers or headphones.

It plays FLAC files and any other audio file type you can think of. And it acts as an offline music library when needed (64 GB of memory plus a 1TB microSD).

The better the headphones/speakers I use, the more it outshines anything coming out of my other electronic devices. I use it almost every day.

They are called DAPs these days. Head over to any chi-fi online shop and you'll find plenty of them. They go from cheap to ultra high-end (thousands of dollars) for their features.

There's also the market for dongles which one can attach to their mobile for the sound quality and extra power and since a lot of mobiles don't have 3.5mm ports anymore.

My sister does. Her phone doesn't play nice with her car, but the player does.

My iPod classic lives permanently on the DAC of my stereo

Any Rockbox fans here? I got it running on my sandisk clip+, and it's still customizablento this day

I still have and use a Sandisk Sansa with Flac files ('cause mp3 sucks).
I had 2 Zunes but they couldn't be reloaded with new music and the batteries finally crashed.

I absolutely hate having my phone. Most people will tell me things in person, or at the very least to check my phone. Plus, I have an amazing music library, which is fantastic but raises the question of how does one properly keep track of so many files. The answer to both of these questions is my trusty iPod, it does the one thing I bought it to do: play music (and sometimes podcasts). I no longer need to worry about my family group chat while out on a walk, and it has a headphone jack (which is the only way that the thing is gonna play music, I do get rather worried that I’m gonna play something embarrassing when I’m using Bluetooth headphones on my phone).

TL;DR: I love my iPod.

I bought a 2 gen iPod Nano 8GB in 2007 and I have used this amazing device almost daily ever since. The original battery somehow still managed to hold a 5-6h charge last spring, but after the summer it can only do 2-3h of continous playback. I already ordered a replacement battery.

The jogwheel can be easily operated through your pocket fabric which makes it far superior to touchscreens.

I intend to keep using it as long as I can and I've already picked up a few spare ones in case it breaks beyond repair.

I still have my old iPod that somehow still works. I don't use it regularly, but it comes in handy if I'm gonna be out some place bored, waiting for a while. I don't like to use my phone for music because I just generally try to rely on my phone as little as possible. Kinda hate how much cellphones are the absolute center of our lives. That thing gives me anxiety

Up until a few years ago, I'd use my ipod almost exclusively hooked up to my car. Eventually I decided I wanted more space, so I swapped out for a USB with all of my music in it

Yes, a waterproof one for swimming. It's life changing, but it means having to scour the seven seas for music as I don't buy CDs or have an mp3 collection any more.

I don't, but there's still relevancy IMO, MP3 players are made for music, so most of them has really nice audio quality

I have one as some work places you can't use your phone. Plus the sound quality is better, especially with FLAC files.

ZUNE HD for life

Yes -- I buy MP3 player modules and make them into things like (otherwise mechanical) music boxes that support multiple songs.

I've also made little boxes that you can plug a headphone in, and press a button to play a single recording repeatedly. This is so a loved one can record a sound clip for someone on the autistic spectrum to play when they are feeling unwell, e.g. a song or just kind words. It has just one large tactile ON switch, and integrated battery rechargeable by USB-C. A phone can work for this too, but many don't have headphone jacks anymore, and the touchscreen is hard to use sometimes -- when things get difficult they may lose some manual dexterity and find the bright screen aggravating (this one was a special request).

Finally, an MP3 player plus an amp is a pretty cheap way to make automated public address systems, and robot horns. I'm partial to the horn noise the big alien machines make in the War of the Worlds film.

Also makes a great doorbell.

I own a digital audio player (DAP), but it’s not limited to MP3s—I play a lot of Ogg, Opus, & FLAC files too. The device I use offers Bluetooth pairing in both directions as well as being a digital audio converter (DAC) via USB on devices where the built-in DAC is poor quality. I like that don’t have to wear down the battery of my phone for music, & while my phone has SD card support, 3.5 mm headphone jack, & a great quality DAC, there may be a future where these audio requirements are removed from all phones, laptops, & other devices on the market. My biggest issue with the device is being Chinese, they’ve made modifications to the Linux kernel which run on the device but don’t publish these modification which is a violation of GPL-2.0 (other smaller complaints are the UI uses flags for languages, the edges of touch screens do action yet the screens not big enough so if not careful you can exit a scrolling view, & it could definitely be lighter weight).

I still use my iPod classic for jogging, and I have an iPod touch as backup. My watch can do emergency calls so I don't need or want a phone with me.

Yes. Lot of apps on phone don't work well together. Watch a YouTube video, while using music player, then a camera video file... one will stop.

Phone is for internet, texting, games. Sometimes just want to listen to music, doing it on phone gets too complicated. My tiny mp3 player fits in pocket, just slide on, click once, music instantly plays. It can hold 100 gigs of music, trying to fit that on my phone, would have to sacrifice other files.

Yeah, I bought a couple of iPods from a thrift store on a lark and restored them back to working condition. I use one of them in my car every day.

The relationship I have work my phone is that I don't have phone I can use to listen to music with - I have a music and entertainment device I can use to call with.

I don't use an mp3 player. It is inconvenient to carry two devices in your pocket at once. But phones tend to lack physical buttons to control music, and that's inconvenient.

I remember the times of push-button phones and special models for music: nokia music, sony walkman.

I use my phone for that but I plan on buying an mp3 player for swimming

Yes, I use it for white noise for sleep, I got it because my phone sucks for that for multiple various reasons.

Sorta-kinda: I have an old launch iPhone that I've held onto so I can use it as an overbuilt iPod Touch. No apps, no phone service, it just works for playing music and does it well. I don't use it super frequently, but every so often I just wanna play some music offline without having to worry about anything else, and it does a great job.

If I went out more not in the car I'd probably get another proper MP3/DAC player. Back in the day I had a Sansa Clip I bought as an impulse Black Friday purchase and that thing was absolute fire. Small, great battery life, showed up in Windows as a standard external storage device, even had an FM tuner built in. Only downside was that it only had 2gigs of storage, but that just made me be a bit more choosy with what I put on it. If the damn thing hadn't wound up going through the wash on accident I might still be using it to this day.

Yeah. I have a shanling m3x.

Phones typically don't have an audio jack or sd slot any more...

I have two that I use to transfer files from one computer to another. I did think about using one of them for actually listening to music again but the device keeps crashing, the battery doesn't last very long anymore and I lost the software required to convert videos and I think it's too old and obscure to find it again.

If I could find mine I would use it.

It has to compete with my portable CD player now tho.

Yes, because it can last a week on a single charge, while being used hours a day. Phones battery life really limits how useful they are as an all in one device.

I’ve had a clickwheel iPod in my car for 20 years. Currently using 2 flash modded 4th gens, 1 flash modded 5th Gen, and an all original 5th Gen.

I still use one. I like having a small device for just that purpose. It doesn't have a touch screen, which is how I prefer it. I despise touchscreens. I like to interact with my phone as little as possible, especially while driving.