I'd still love to get a proper successor to the Sandisk Sansa Fuze, just with USB-C charging instead of its proprietary charging cable.
There's plenty of "luxury" /audiophile MP3 players out there which cost in the hundreds of dollars, but that one was in the sweet spot of bang-for-your-buck music player that I could just use for listening to music on long plane rides etc. without draining my smartphone battery.
Wheels will always be the best way to navigate music libraries.
https://www.amazon.com/JadeAudio-JM21-Snapdragon-Bluetooth-P...
You can replace the hard drive with MicroSD/SD or compact flash cards.
You can buy different color faceplates/backplates, upgrade the batteries, etc.
https://www.idemigods.com/iPod_5th_5_5_Generation_Video_Part...
[0] https://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/c/rockbox/+/6510 [1] https://github.com/amachronic/echoplayer
I don't even need it to be portable. In fact, I'm happy with a "component stereo" look with a VFD display. ;-)
That is something completely different to me, as it limits replaying.
Having access for 14 days lile a boo kwould be something very different and more OK with me. But limiting the act of playing that audio itself has a new quality for me.
The situation for me on Android would be hilarious if it weren't so saddening. Since I purchased a KitKat tablet in 2015, I've more or less stuck to the "Android Files" app to play music files. Yes, that has been the best solution: no app install required, bare bones, no feature demands from me. In fact, rather than making playlists, I would just copy out tracks to a new folder and play them in there. Want to repeat one? Make five copies of it!
On Chromebook I'm using the builtin app, Gallery. It's utterly barebones as well. All I want to do is listen to a track.
This has continued even to the present day, but you know what? Our days are numbered, because apps are staking out moats in terms of file types they will handle. They're looking to reduce generic handling of multiple file types.
I've been trying to conform to this "new normal" by using YouTube Music. With my Premium subscriptions I should be able to download any streamable track, and also listen to files on-device. This is working out poorly. The on-device management is abysmal and makes you want to die. The downloading feature just sort of... fills up my storage, and I don't really even use it. I still fall back on Android Files because Music is such a horrible app, except when I'm using it to stream.
Software for playing audio used to be great even with far fewer engineering resources going into them. That suggests the reason they are getting worse is deliberate and stems from a misalignment between what software users want and what the producers want.
Most music software companies today are two businesses joined together:
1. A software company that makes apps to let people listen to music.
2. A content licensing company that pays artists and record labels to give them access to music and let people listen to it.
If they were only #1 then they would be agnostic to what music people listen to and how much of it. WinAmp didn't give a damn how big your music library was, what songs you listened to, or how often, because that was entirely between you and your MP3 collection.
But, say, Spotify has to pay someone every time you listen to a song and how much they pay depends on what you listen to and how often. That gives them a direct, perverse incentive to build an app that routes you away from expensive audio you might prefer towards cheap stuff that eats up your time but doesn't cost Spotify as much.
That's why every single time I open the fucking Spotify app I see a wall of podcasts even though I have literally never listened to one and never will. They don't put them there for my benefit, but for theirs.
For Spotify, the end game is routing people towards eventually-AI-generated musak that they themselves own the licenses for because it's free for them. This is directly analogous to why Netflix is now constantly pimping their own often-shitty produced shows over movies you might actually prefer.
The reason we aren't saturated with options is that producing a media app without also having deals that give the app direct access to media to play dumps a lot of work back onto users and most users these days simply don't have a local media library or want to maintain one.
And spinning up a new app that does off content directly has huge startup costs. You need an army of lawyers to go out and negotiate deals with every record label out there, and those labels probably hate you out the gate since they are still salty about not making anywhere near as much money as they used to make when they sold CDs.
On both iOS and Android, HTML can play videos and mp3s while the screen is turned off. So maybe it is possible?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/64283711
It works nicely in Chrome on the desktop and on Android. Not sure how the situation is on iOS.
Edit: https://caniuse.com/native-filesystem-api
Edit2: Just a few posts down: https://webamp.org/
That's a pretty big argument to go with an Android phone.
Being able to write your own tools in HTML is so nice.
I just never polished it to publish it, but it is quite easy and I guess ChatGPT can help with the basics as no arcane knowledge is required. (Except maybe the playing while screen is off.)
You also need a small node script, though or something different with system access to scan the media files. I think in browser tools make this now somewhat possible without(beware of security restrictions), but my approach is simply a node script scanning the music folder and generating a list that the media player consumes to find files for the player. I still didn't got around to make it automatic, but I don't add so much music (anymore).
I guess I will give it a try to see, how good it works a mobile player nowdays. I always wanted to upgrade it, so I can connect to spotify from my player as I hate the spotify mobile app.
When I made https://ambiph.one I ended up having to route everything through a MediaStreamAudioDestinationNode to trick Safari into thinking it's a livestream, which is apparently the only type of audio allowed to play in the background
Minimal demo here if it's helpful for anyone: https://codepen.io/matteason/pen/VYwdzVV
My hunch is that they’ve got an actual from-scratch rewrite in the works that’s similar to the all-new WinUI-based Windows version of Music that came out a while back.
Personally, I sync my music via Synctrain (a Syncthing client). [3]
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/foobar2000/id1072807669
[2]: https://imgur.com/a/7GVxB2y
[3]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/synctrain/id6553985316I was unaware foobar2000 existed on iOS too, but the Windows version is my favorite audio player on that platform too.
Does Apple want to face a formal non-compliance judgment under the DMA, or is there another reason for Apple's blatant contempt of court with its refusal to properly and fully implement the mandated sideloading[1]?
[1] The Digital Markets Act (DMA) does mandate sideloading in Article 6(paragraph 4). It requires designated gatekeepers, which includes Apple for its iOS operating system, to allow for the installation and use of third-party apps and app stores. ( https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/1925/oj/eng )
Would love to take a look at your web app if it's available
You can transfer files to the app over wifi or even use files from the Files app.
However, I feel like this is one of the most re-invented wheels I've come across so far. Nobody seems to be happy, everybody seems to fail to build something that fits at least 80% of the requirements most people have.
My personal K.O. criteria is a bit awkward in days of bluetooth and wireless devices: Working cable headphone remote controls like Apple devices had for more than 10 years now - especially useful for audio books.
Years ago I tried to write a cross platform audio player[1] app with C# and Flutter inspired by iPod Nano 7g, but it always failed for the same reason: I could not get the headset controls working properly.
I've also spent some days to submit a PR on audiobookshelf-app[2], but it didn't get merged, although it worked pretty good on my device.
Nowadays I use a combination of my old iPod Nano 7g for music and audiobooks on the go and my Android GrapheneOS Phone as spare device for "streaming" something I don't have with me using Navidrome[3] and Substreamer[4] / DSub[5] for music and audiobookshelf-app[6] and VLC Media Player[7] for audiobooks (the offline support for audiobookshelf regularly breaks on my device) - most of these are available on fdroid or even official app stores.
Btw, if you ever wondered, why Apple EarPods do not support Volume Control on Android devices and vice versa, see this link[8] - it's definitely worth a read
1: https://github.com/sandreas/ToneAudioPlayer
2: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf-app/pull/1218
4: https://substreamerapp.com/
5: https://github.com/daneren2005/Subsonic
6: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf-app/releases
https://github.com/nzoschke/jukelab
It's a web app with the Spotify Web Playback SDK or a good old MP3 HTTP server and API like Internet Archive.
It works crazy well on a ChromeBook, and reasonably well on an iPhone, iPad or Android both through a native app with a webview component or the browser.
I have a theory the pendulum is swinging back and there is a demand for controlling our own music and music interface, and web technology is sufficiently good for implementing players.
Or else a large audio file will be halted on the clientside till it is fully downloaded.
I have to disagree. Async may makes concurrent code easier to write, but also less simple to reason about as it grows. In a complex async codebase, I find it harder to reason about code flow and concurrency.
If the goal is to reduce the cost of executing threaded code, we have a solution in green light weight threads.
If we aim to reduce the cost of maintaining threaded code, I expect async to end up costing more effort in the long run.
Project's Github - https://github.com/nexo-tech/localwave
duxup•8h ago
I will say that I sympathize with the idea that ... I don't like any audio players that I've tried, but in the world of music apps the layout of screens and UI seem almost universal across them and ... I just don't like them / don't "get it".
I feel like I'm boxing with every music app ever...
I appreciate anyone who takes a shot at making something new.