recommend me an mp3 player?

....and I am v much enjoying my Shanling in almost all respects, but: is there some kind of hack to just add a few tracks/files at a time, or do I need to perform a full rescan every time? cause with the volume of stuff I already have on there this takes about an hour or so and can't be interrupted, which is a pain in the ass.

no getting around that, I've checked!

booooo

too bad cause other than that and the ennh battery life, it's basically a perfect little machine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NykWxk2UgAA

almost bumped the youtuber thread cuz i find this guy "dankpods", i noticed this week, generally hilarious. This thread especially should appreciate.

I'd picked up a Fiio M3K earlier this year and I agree with other posters that although it sounds good and has a very solid build, the UI isn't great. Sort by genre is useless as it doesn't subsort by artist, only by song. WTF?

I also had to drop a 32GB card in it to update the firmware (it wouldn't update with my 64GB card) but was able to swap the cards after.

the UI was awful, sometimes even the wind seemed to have a surer control over it than my finger.

I did have one small victory when I realized that I could trigger play/pause by tapping the middle of the scroll bar, which alleviates much of the need to use the awkward side button.

Also noticed how the ordering of artists has suddenly become alphabetical after I loaded the last batch of albums. Up until now, it's always been kind-of-alphabetical. So erratic.

Anyone using a high end DAP? If so, what's your motivation for doing so?

I'm drawn to the idea but the convenience and my phone and Bluetooth earbuds (Senn MTW2) makes it hard to justify. I do have a nice pair of Thinksound On2's which sound very nice but, wires, you know...

What's good nowadays? I had a Shanling Mofi that I loved, but it stopped working a little after a year.

Now I have a Hidizs ap80 which has stopped working after a few months.

I'd like something small with a lot of storage. The two devices above used a microcard thingy with a 500gb card.

Amazon have about 1000 no-name mp3 players, it seems. don't have any recommendations though. my clip zip is approaching end of life and the new models drop ogg support so I'm curious too. (the mofi does look nice, but i saw your comment)

I've got a 10 year old sansa clip that still works, they don't make cheap mp3 players like they used to.

I still really like my FiiO X1 - has lasted well - though I'm certain there were people up thread who didn't.

Strangely, having just looked at what they sell these days, their latest player makes a virtue of using a chip that isn't made any more.

I wished I'd bought a score of sansa clip+ mp3 players 10 years ago and put them in storage. They sell for a few hundred now if they are still boxed.

the Cowon Plenue D3 looks a very nice small one, but not at all cheap unfortunately.

jesus, looking at some reviews and some people are rich enough to spend 2 grand on a Astell & Kern Kann Alpha high res mp3 player... that's madness.

I'm on my second Zune 1st gen 30GB player. This one I've had for almost 7 years. I bought it used, but its still going strong.

Still very happy with my cowon plenue D - plays hires flacs, great equalizer options, 180 Gb SD card as well, ridiculous battery life (have gone weeks of day long listening without having to charge). Newer generations have even better (twin?) DACs but shorter battery life.

180 = 128, sorry

i've been lusting after a standalone portable audio player for years but never bit the bullet on a cowon or w/e. i would really like something that is water- and sweat-resistant for runs but also sounds great w/ hi-res audio. i tried the $39 sandisk sportclip or whatever it's called and quickly lost it, lol. it was also a little too flimsy and lightweight. you wouldn't think so but a bit of counterweight at the end of a headphone cord is really useful. ipod touch? cowon? under $200 would be nice. don't care about more than 64gb. playlists and interfacing with itunes is a must. flac would be nice though i'm in the habit of transcoding to aiff for my iphone 6 that has somehow survived for 3 years.

Some discussion in the last couple of days over on the digital music thread.

I like the look of the Sony NW-A105 but I'm having a hard time getting my head round why I would need a separate device for playing music rather than using my phone as I do at the moment. What's the point of having two devices rather than one?

two batteries

phone/bluetooth pods for when I'm on the move or at work, player/better earphones for when it's quiet/late and I want to really focus on the music

If I had an android phone instead of an iPhone there’s a chance I’d just use my phone because you can stick a micro sd card in those. I need my activities to be based on a 1TB or 500gb micro sd which I can stick in whatever player I want.

I was one of the Walkman boosters on the other thread. Also the cheap fiio M3K because you can rockbox it now, and it’s got good battery life.

I have I think 6 of the sansa clip+ and 1 clip zip, god I loved them, but the battery life is pretty shot on all of them now.

Phone vs dedicated music device: I like to have a player that I can hook up to a speaker and leave the room with the speaker still playing and I still have my phone (I work in huge museum/warehouse spaces). I don't want to hear a phone ringing or messaging through the music that I'm playing, but I need to hear my phone if it rings. I have a work iphone that is my only phone and I have no interest in bluetooth stuff and all dongles I have tried have been glitchy. I don't like the incessant intrusion of the Phone Computer Thing into all aspects of my life. I dream of being able to have all my digital music on one device, and eventually 1 tb microcard things will be affordable.

I've got a 10 year old sansa clip that still works

i still use one of these regularly after 10+ years.

I paid less than 200 for my 1TB micro sd
Xpost

it blows my mind that 1tb can fit on something so small

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