recommend me an mp3 player?

at this point I'm mostly using my android phone (a Samgung Galaxy something) with a 400gb SD card. audio quality is finally comparable to my beloved 10-year-old old Cowon iAudio device with the now-badly-cracked screen. if I were richer I'd buy one of the higher-end Plenue models but this is a good solution for now.

but do these things handle 10s of thousands of files? my clip zip takes 5 minutes to rescan a few thousand files if i change anything. and i had another player that said it'd handle sd cards up to 16GB but there was a limit somewhere else so only 500ish tracks were ever available.

(even my pi jukebox takes a few minutes every time i turn it on. can't work out why it's reindexing, no reason it should)

I have 30k tracks (about 280gb or so, not lossless) on my android and it works perfectly well so far

These mammoth micro sd cards are really only feasible for folder based browsing rather than tag database browsing IME. I haven’t had any players that could index that volume of material. But it doesn’t matter for me because I’m all about navigate to album folder and play it

That's been my experience. Does the Walkman allow you to navigate via folder?

I was hoping that Hidizs ap80 would be covered by warranty since I've only had it two months. Technically it is, but that involves me paying to ship the player to China, lying about the value on customs paperwork and hoping that it doesn't get hung up in Chinese customs, hoping that Hidiz doesn't decide that the unit is malfunctioning because of my fault, then them fixing it and sending it back. I'm guessing it will cost around $30 to send something to China and it just seems like throwing good money after bad.

I'm on the fence about it, I hate being without my music for any length of time and I am compelled to say fuck it and get a walkman.

My Walkman experience was v v good, until I dropped it in a lake. I recommend you try to avoid doing that.

I use mediamonkey on my android and it detects + indexes the music on my SD card just fine, no need to browse by folder.

But yes Walkman can do folder navigation

my mother's had a Samsung mp3 player since the dawn of time, one of these with a slide out speaker. it's as chunky as all hell (sliding the speaker out is quite satisfying though)

https://cdn.pocket-lint.com/r/s/970x/assets/images/68981-gadgets-review-samsung-yp-k5-mp3-player-image1-iqbfmtno2l.jpg

and she was asking me to refresh the song collection on it recently, but I'm 100 miles away which makes that difficult. so i bought a new one, with more than 2gb of memory in it but it has interesting quirks:

off button just turns the screen off, keeps playing the songs. you have to pause it first.

it switches between artist, album and track name whilst playing, only it uses the filename for track name rather than the tag. and if that filename is too long it Scrolls slowly and doesn't display the other two bits of info.

you can list by artist or album but it truncates the name seemingly at random - Altered Imag, Augustus Pab (other names are much longer and display in full)

folder view displays directory names in full, which would be nicer but they aren't sorted.

(it's an agptec h9, nice purple colour, and was chosen mostly for the memory and the fact it plays oggs, which saves me having to transcode everything for her)

this thing is annoying.

i have seen *one* image show up when playing a track. the directory has a file in it called 'folder.jpg' so i copy all the 'cover.jpg' files that i've already added to 'folder.jpg' and... nothing. still only that one album showing an image.

and i wonder if it's expecting something other than a TITLE tag for the song name? ARTIST and ALBUM both seem ok.

renamed the working 'folder.jpg' and it stopped showing. renamed it back and it stopped working 8(

some others are now showing though. but the separate 'image viewer' fails to display about 50% of the covers - 'unsupported file format' - despite them all being seemingly identical (the image viewer helpfully doesn't show the directory name whilst viewing, only the filename which is always cover.jpg or folder.jpg)

a bit of investigating using two bowie covers, one of which showed and one whihc didn't suggested that the non-working version was interlaced and the working one wasn't. converting the image to bmp and back to jpg got rid of that so that's something to do today... (i've been collecting images for the raspberry pi jukebox so this won't be too much work)

oo chonky. i can smell the pixels