I couldn’t imagine. What a pain in the ass. I run my own server and stream my own music, so having to copy to an ipod would suck. It always sucked. Can you just copy files over with linux? syncthing? anything convenient?
Hard pass. Your own server is streaming all your music to all your devices.
I’ve got my own server but I wanted to give this a try for fun anyway. iTunes seems to have no problem using a library that lives on a local server and syncing it to an iPod. I’m guessing you need a windows computer or mac to run iTunes though, it’s been over a decade since I last tried to get it to work on a Linux machine
And Itunes on windows is just a marvel of shitty design. I hate itunes so much.
On a mac I dislike it as well, but itunes on windows is just awful.
In any case, how is the syncing? does it seem slow or fast by todays standards? I cant recall what the connectors were on the ipods back in the day.
Congrats, I use a DAP instead so im not stuck in 2005 with a 5lb brick
My DAP takes microsd cards so I have 1tb of storage in there, it weighs like 100g and it doubles as a DAC for my pc
It also has physical buttons that I can press without taking it out of my pocket
Can you recommend it specifically?
Oh sure, im using a FIIO jm21 with a pair of wired IEMs called Salnotes 7hz zero
The DAP (and 1tb microsd) were expensive, especially since the jm21 was just released, but the IEMs were $35 CAD because im listening a lot at work and the headphones are likely to get wrecked.
That said the audio quality is still great
Can also recommend the JM21. I just wish the battery life was better.
Same, definitely a weaker side of the device. I leave bluetooth and wifi off (never turned on either) and I can get a couple days from it that way
Use a retired phone with no apps other than your music and the players (New Pipe, Archive Tune, etc) you want. Give your old phones a 2nd life without having to purchase another thing. Connect via WiFi and have a ball.
I prefer hosting navidrome and using Nautilus on my modern iphone while still enjoying some technology, also because mp3<FLAC
I use an old MP3 player I got for 5 bucks at a clearance sale and some headbuds from the dollar store. Converted all of my old records, tapes, and CD’s to mp3’s. Any new music I add comes from the public library on CD, and then converted to MP3 when I get home. I also use “youtube” to discover new (old) music, so I know what to get from the library. I also grab a CD I’ve never heard of, from time to time, hoping to trip and stumble onto something great.
Stupid!
The iPod was revolutionary, sure. But I wouldn’t go back to it. I selfhost my music and I’m happy with that.
Seriously. I listen to my music from multiple devices. Having to keep all of them in sync (lol) when obtaining new music would be a chore.
Selfhosting implies streaming from your own server, so no syncing required.
Yeah, I was agreeing with them. I also selfhost my music.
Yet, when I want to sit down and actually listen to an album, the phone is often the most frustrating tool in my pocket. Between the constant pings from Slack and the AI-generated discovery feeds that keep trying to shove viral tracks down my throat
Bruh, what? Just have the songs locally like on your iPod; you don’t have to stream, and it’s easier to put on your phone than your iPod. And what do Slack notifs have to do with this? Just turn it on DnD or whatever. In what universe are Slack notifs distracting you less than your phone while you listen on your iPod? If you give that little of a shit about them, you can turn them off.
I can leave for a week-long trip with my iPod and not have to think about bringing a charger along.
??? But you’re already bringing a phone that needs to remain charged?? Playing audio doesn’t drain the battery that hard, and phone batteries nowadays get enough charge that even an absent-minded dipshit like myself barely has to worry about it.
This author is either nostalgia-baiting for clicks or an absolute moron. Using an iPod might be a fun novelty; absolutely the fuck is it not “the best way to enjoy music”. You’re carrying around a separate, fairly large device just for music that probably even has worse audio quality; that’s so unnecessarily cumbersome if I just want to listen to music.
They’re using a ClickWheel with, at most, 40 GB of storage. That’s like
tentwenty FLAC albums. Is what I would say, except: “Since I replaced the original spinning hard drive with a microSD adapter, there are no moving parts and significantly less power draw. I am currently running 512GB of storage paired with a significantly larger battery that lasts weeks, not hours.”So they wait well into the article to tell the audience that they hardmodded their old iPod and that’s why it’s actually viable. What the actual fuck. Basically nobody is going to do that. Even with that hardmodding, the literal only advantage they have here, then, is the ClickWheel – because again, your phone should be charged and always on you in 2026. The ClickWheel is not that special to warrant hardmodding a 2006 iPod and using it separately for music.
Then they have a gargantuan segment whining about streaming as though local storage just doesn’t exist on their phone. It’s literally a non-issue. Right now I’m listening to a FLAC album I got off Bandcamp months ago. On my phone. Because I don’t use streaming services. On my phone.
This piece of shit article could’ve been boiled down to “the haptic feedback on the ClickWheel was cool we should bring that back lol”.
This sounds like blizzard “dont you guys have phones” ngl
You’re not considering the iPod DAC which is higher quality than most cellphone DACs. Also, thinking 40GB fits 10 FLAC albums is stupid. This isn’t correct even for uncompressed WAV files.
I can’t imagine putting this much effort into complaining about someone using their media player of choice. People like vinyl and even cassettes because they’re a different experience, do you write up paragraphs about that too?
Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine, DACs don’t/shouldn’t affect sound quality, they are just chips that convert a digital signal into the correct analog signal and even dirt cheap ones can do that far better than human hearing is capable of discerning. It is the amp circuit that can have different audio qualities depending on how well or poorly it is implemented.
Also, thinking 40GB fits 10 FLAC albums is stupid.
Sorry, you’re right; it’s more like around 20 of mine.
I can’t imagine putting this much effort into complaining about someone using their media player of choice.
I’m not complaining about their media player of choice; I’m remarking that the way they chose to discuss it in this article – especially being so focused on streaming – is stupid as fuck. Like 50% of this article is spent bitching about non-issues with phones. I don’t even mean “non-issues” in the sense that they don’t annoy me personally; I mean “non-issues” in the sense that this devolves into a comparison not of iPod versus smartphone but of iPod versus streaming, or that they’re talking about it being so convenient not to have to worry about charging a second device. They can enjoy what they want to; the reasons they describe are, for the most part, asinine.
You’re not considering the iPod DAC which is higher quality than most cellphone DACs.
The author of this article certainly did consider DACs: [Modern smartphones have] got […] a DAC chip that is by all measures transparent, near-lossless wireless streaming […]" and that’s the last they mention of the DAC, so they clearly don’t give a shit about the Wolfson.
The fact they chose to wait until the middle of the article to say “yeah btw this thing is hardmodded for the battery and the storage” is so telling. That’d be the first thing I’d mention about a technological comparison.
40GB is over 50 uncompressed CDs. Where are you getting your FLACs?
Ain’t no way your FLAC albums are larger than uncompressed WAV. The only >2GB FLAC albums I have are massive compilations with 50+ tracks. They’re smaller than WAV, and that’s at max 700MB per CD. Spot checking, it looks like most of mine are ~500MB per album.
it’s Nostalgia bait. I don’t know why this is suddenly a new trend online. Like the articles recently that for whatever reason are about how great Zip disks were. no…they weren’t. no…you weren’t there.
Next thing you know there’s going to be articles about how great a 28.8 dial modem was or digital cameras that used floppy disks were peak for storage. No Julia, they weren’t.
I had a Zip drive with a 386 and it was really good for backups. 100 MB instead of 1.44 MB! But it was painful to setup and slow as hell. It was only good for serious companies or pirates I guess.
I recently got into vinyl, and what I found was that convenience is antithetical to my music listening experience. The less I have to think about the process of turning on music, the less I think about the music at all, leaving me without any real memories about it. The more deliberate I have to be about my music, the better.
Like, yeah, I can listen to a full album on a streaming site, but I don’t. It just doesn’t happen, and I can’t get myself to change, so I change the medium instead. Might not be the solution for everyone, but I can understand how having a dedicated box for music on the go would be preferable, not just in spite of the inconvenience, but because of it.
This fits my experience as well. Lately I’ve been listening to music as a main activity, not as background noise. I use my laptop, an external DAC and a pair or nice open back headphones. The whole setup keeps me tied to my couch, I can’t go wandering around and doing other stuff, I don’t keep my phone in reach, I just lay and listen. I’d say good music deserves the foreground.
I don’t think the vinyl analogy holds up here, because even though I don’t use vinyl, I recognize it’s a very different way to experience music. Vinyls you have to physically go out and buy, physically retrieve, physically place into your player, and then listen to in one static location. The iPod, meanwhile, is damn-near the same thing: you have 1) a portable electronic device 2) of a similar size and form factor 3) holding the mathematically exact same digital recordings of songs 4) which you listen back to through nearly the same medium (same speakers; different DAC) and 5) can see displayed on a screen. Navigating through the music is very slightly, near-meaninglessly different. As noted: the ClickWheel™.
Nevertheless, even under the premise that it’s highly analogous to vinyl, this would be like if you had a comparison of vinyl versus digital audio and spent half of it ranting about streaming services while basically ignoring local digital playback. That’d be fine if you set out with “vinyl versus streaming”, but you started on the premise “vinyl versus digital”. “Here’s my comparison of CRTs and OLEDs. But first, a rant about Netflix.”
My point was never about the exact traits of the media itself, it was about the relationship between convenience and experience. With your phone you can get any music you want at any time - essentially 100% convenience. My example was with the inconvenience of vinyl and its subsequent increase in experience because that’s what I’m familiar with, but an ipod is also significantly less convenient than a phone, requiring you to pick only what music it can store, and having to manually and deliberately put it onto the machine. It serves as a sort of middle ground between the two examples I’m familiar with, which is why I said I could understand why it would give a better experience when compared to a phone.
With your phone you can get any music you want at any time - essentially 100% convenience.
With streaming you can, but again, that’s a “streaming versus local playback” argument. I have to buy and download the songs I play. Even piracy would be jumping through some kind of hoop to find a good copy (purchasing being arguably more convenient). I download them to my PC and make a copy to my phone so I can easily listen on both (and stream via Jellyfin on LAN if I want).
The iPod is barely an inconvenience by comparison, even if I directly downloaded to my phone. It’s such a minimal step to physically transfer the digital audio to the iPod. The actual inconvenience is having a second electronic device taking up valuable pocket space, and that’s not a quaint little spice-of-life inconvenience like a retro console taking up shelf space; that’s just fucking annoying.
Sounds like you’ve already started using your phone in a less convenient way, sacrificing the ease of streaming, and instead having to collect and manage your own music, but improving your experience in the process. That’s definitely another alternative, if having a completely separate form of listening isn’t your style. Nice!
It’s not something I’d be able to do - if I’m thinking about music on my phone, I can’t help but click the spotify button and leave it at that. I need to get my phone out of the equation, and I assume the author of the article is the same way, but if you’re able to do it all on one machine, good on you!
This author is either nostalgia-baiting for clicks or an absolute moron.
Correct
Same answer. You now have 2 devices, 2 batteries to charge, twice the volume in your pocket. iPod = Android + VLC. Nostalgia is stupid sometimes.
I compress everything from FLAC to Opus, and I have way more content than an iPod. Also the iPod cannot read the Opus format unless you’re prepared to install an alternative OS.
it’s cause vinyl is too old now
You either get it or you don’t. Using a dedicated music player feels like treating yourself, whereas using your do-it-all smartphone feels austere. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a nice phone, or if your music player is an old iPod or an old garbage mp3 player or one of those modern DAPs (which are basically android phones with fancy DACs and huge batteries).
I regret selling my old iPod, I would be modding the shit out of it if I’d still had it right now. But alas, it became “obsolete” the moment I got a smartphone with internet connectivity and YouTube and streaming apps.
…And one last thing™: the click wheel was awesome and it was probably the best input solution for a portable music player ever. It was truly special.
Dude, I do get it. I work on PCSX2; I’m around people literally all the time who will use physical hardware for no other reason than that it’s more holistically enjoyable to them. I think it’s super cool. My PS2 console is objectively inferior in every conceivable way that actually matters to me as a player; I will nevertheless sometimes boot it up simply because it’s pleasant and more unique. I buy all of my PS2 games and burn them even though it’s more difficult for mathematically the same outcome. I think it’s cool as hell that the author enjoys using their hardmodded iPod.
What I don’t get is why the article’s arguments for the iPod are so abysmal. It decides to ditch apples-to-apples (local-to-local) and go straight into apple-and-oranges (local-and-streaming) for an inordinate amount of time, decides to frame the iPod’s inconveniences as a convenience (e.g. “don’t have to bring a charger”), and overall gives exactly one valid argument for why the iPod is nicer, namely the ClickWheel. It doesn’t even mention the potentially different feel of the DAC and just gives that as a straight win to the smartphone in a throwaway line.
Apple products are great. The Apple ecosystem is not. If you like FOSS, you’re going to have a bad time.
Putting music on my iPhone sucks because iTunes won’t recognize or transfer .FLAC format. File sharing on iPhone is really inconstant and buggy. And I need a whole 3rd party app to get the data moved. Or I can upload things to iCloud 5GB at a time.
Flac would be a waste of the limited storage on an IPhone that doesn’t even have the ability to play such high fidelity audio. You are limited to what? Bluetooth or the crappy DAC in the USB-C port with an adapter?
I always kept flac as an archival format, and transcoded when transferring to any device into the best format for that device.
The only Apple product I ever had was a 5th gen iPod. I remember having to “sync” it to my iTunes library. The concept of syncing was alien to me at the time, it seemed unnecessarily complicated (and it was!). Of course, I didn’t put up with that crap for long so I installed Rockbox on it. That let me copy files directly. It supported .flac and a whole lot of other formats and it ran DOOM and a Gameboy emulator.
Yeah, I remember hating the syncing. Just fucking let me select the files and drag it over! Then every software company decided that they needed to idiot proof every fucking thing to the same extent over the next 20 years. I fucking hate Apple’s devs for that.
I use LocalSend to transfer the files and play them on the iPhone with VLC. Only issue I have is the iOS file browser doesn’t like filenames or folders with special characters like é or ö.
Okay. I read a bit of the article. By a bit I mean I made it to the part where the iPod HDD and battery have been modded. This dude is leaving out half his side of the story.
You need to get MP3s for the iPod. Did the dude even try to put those same MP3s on their phone? Who knows. They spent a lot whinging about streaming apps and their enshittification, really funny. Local music apps are set up and forget affairs, I use Retro Music from F-Droid - zero enshittification, no subscription fees, and that version is free. The author can use it too.
I’m certainly no iPod modder, but I’m pretty sure you needed to install iTunes to get it to play literally anything. Android lets me play whatever from the SD card root, phone memory root, Download folder, or even if it’s lost in my screenshot gallery for an absurd example.
Heck, you can’t watch videos unless they’re encoded/converted in a way that the Pod can play them. Any modern phone can play anything with the system video app or VLC or something.
Not a concern to me at all, but the pod doesn’t have Bluetooth, so you’re practically required to use something with the 3.5mm jack. A decent phone should have both.
If you don’t want to receive a LinkedIn notification, turn off LinkedIn notifications. Android’s notification system has matured tremendously, no app will send anything unless YOU have allowed it in the first place. Or turn on Do Not Disturb, which the author says they did, but I don’t believe them. Bedtime Mode is an even stronger option, as it can hide your notifications. For the nuclear option, just turn off WiFi/mobile data - of course streaming apps will be unable to do anything in this case, but… Local music players will keep trucking on.
TL;DR Just download and use a LOCAL music player you’re comfy with and play the MP3s you already put on your iPod.
The iPod isn’t something you’re gonna hold constantly in your hands, like a classic handheld console where you can argue that you prefer playing GBA, PSP or Vita games on their original hardware, screen, buttons and all. You will most likely pocket it and only interact with it using your wired earphones. Your phone is still the best option here.
What you’re saying is so important to say out loud, because I don’t know if it’s easy or even in some cases, possible, for average Joe to find that information.
I do think that the whole rebellion from enshitification, is valuable in whatever format, so the whole crowd going for old tech, because they don’t know how to use new avenues, other than the ones they’re familiar with, still achieves the same task.
I don’t have a lot of time to deep dive, I don’t have a lot of expertise, those muscles have become flabby from no use for so many years, I used to download my music, then had Spotify for so long, then qobuz because Spotify turned evil, but I genuinely tried to download music again and I couldn’t figure it out. I just feel like, I wish there were more tutorials on how to do the things you talk about. (If anyone knows any, I’d be so grateful for the help). I feel like theres not a lot out there? I see this so often, Lemmy has some amazing talents and minds, who know all this stuff, but talk about it like it’s common knowledge. It’s not. You guys are magicians. I just wish I knew how to do all your tricks.
It only sounds like magic because all of you succeeded at speedrunning “you will own nothing and you’ll be happy” into coming true, music, videos, games, books and even OSes (reminder for keepandroidopen.org). But it’s not magic. If you can download cat photos and memes, you can save and play MP3s. I’ve taken this feature for granted, and so can you.
Bandcamp lets you download music in several formats. I think Apple Music and Amazon are still viable for MP3s (but eugh supporting US oligarchs, Bandcamp is also US). Some people graciously offer MP3s on SoundCloud. When all else fails, use NewPipe or an app to convert YouTube videos into local MP3 files - in fact you may find links to buy and/or free download music albums in the description. Nothing about this is magic, and shouldn’t be.
The author is unnecessarily making the rebellion against enshittification harder, and neglecting to mention you can start now with current hardware to achieve the same desired results. You don’t need an iPod.
Tbf, there is a slightly janky iPod mod to give it Bluetooth.
But now I’m thinking about using my PSP as a music player again.
I went ahead and read the rest. It’s like the author is pretending Android only has Spotify and clones, and nothing to do the iPod’s thing. If you don’t have a system music player, go find one on Google Play or F-Droid. I had PowerAmp and ditched it because of its online activation DRM scheme, and for a while I had Musicolet before it had a subscription tier attached to it, and jumped apps until I settled on Retro Music, for now. A better app might dethrone it. Come to think of it, that’s a pro over the iPod, it’s stuck with Apple’s idea of the music player back then, but Android lets you choose upcoming and past players.
The intentionality of putting gigabytes of tracks and curating them after the fact is definitely way easier with Android, too.
Between the constant pings from Slack and the AI-generated discovery feeds that keep trying to shove viral tracks down my throat, the simple act of listening has become a chore
Ya know what would make way more sense? Learning to manage the notifications on your phone. Not just while listening to music but, like, always.
If you don’t need Slack notifs, put them on silent. And I can’t imagine any reason you would need any notifications at all from Spotify, so just turn them off altogether.
Right? “Android authority” but hasnt fine tuned their notifications to not interrupt their music?
I agree though many people have on-call work positions and turning off notifications is a risk to their job security
I’m not sure that ignoring them to listen on an iPod is any better.
It’s not necessarily that. It’s more like, if I configure my phone to silence notifications for an hour on the weekend, there’s a chance either through my own fuckup or the settings being so complicated that come Monday morning I will miss something from work.
I don’t know why people are losing their minds over the concept that someone might want to get away from their phone for a while.
You can configure it to allow those notifications
Yeah, I have gigabytes of music on my phone and just keep it all locally and use VLC. Problem solved.
Since I don’t have Google or Google Play services and only use open-source apps, I get very few notifications. And those I do get, I actually care about.
Same here. Moved away from Spotify and store the music straight on my phone. I use Poweramp to play and manage the library, which has excellent Android Auto support as well. And I use the Seeker app to use Soulseek straight on the phone. I also convert to Opus using Ffmpegme to save space as I don’t need lossless on my phone and a 128 kbps Opus file sounds just as good as a 192+ kbps mp3.
I see someone is late to the nostalgia-bait articles party… You know that dedicated music players are still a thing now? You don’t have to always use a fucking iPod.
I do like iPods mind you but there are better modern alternatives if you want a daily driver. It’s nice that they want to talk about solutions for people who want to get away from their phone I guess, but a 20-year-old device is not the solution for most people.
Are there modern alternatives without a touchscreen? I bought a FiiO M11 a long time ago and I do light it but I would much prefer a no frills, purely button (or wheel) control player. Ideally, I could put Rockbox on it.
No touchscreen is tough I’ll admit. I’m sure you’ve already looked at the FiiO M3K, that one even has a Rockbox port.
I can recommend the FiiO X5II as a no-thrills modern-ish player (it’s basically a hi-res iPod). It’s 10 years old but you can change the battery pretty easily and there are options to mod the firmware yourself.
This person just needs to manage their notifications and phone control better.
Also, while streaming (in my case Spotify) subs may seem expensive, it would be horrendously expensive to use an iPod and buy the amount of music I listen to (and three family members for that matter) instead. Considering the monthly sub, its fantastic value.
Personally, and without having made much effort, the issues mentioned in the article are a non-issue for me. And did I read that the HD and battery need to be modded?
Seems like a classic case of finding a problem for a solution.
As a musician comments like this make me sad. Everyone really does expect music to be basically free these days don’t they?
Some years ago I decided to take my music streaming budget and make it my bandcamp budget. Now I have a moderately sized music collection that suits me, that I can listen to online or offline, and that makes me very happy!
For anyone else considering this: The best time to make a switch like this is (always) years ago. But the second-best time is now! In three years, it will be three years from now, and you can either be stuck in the same trap, or have made some real progress.
Fair point. Admittedly, I wasn’t thinking about my response from a musician’s point of view.
Can you expand on your comment so I can understand the context a bit? I’m assuming from what you said that paid streaming services are not a positive thing for artists (or maybe smaller artists), and that it would be preferable if people were buying albums and singles outright? I’d like to understand it better.
Not the person you replied to, but I did work in the music industry for a little while. The short version is that streaming services and especially Spotify pay artists like shit. They work on a revenue share model based on the number of streams an artist gets per month so there isn’t really a fixed number, but it hashes out to fractions of a cent per stream typically. Even the more “generous” services like Tidal or Apple pay just over a cent per stream on average if you’re pulling in serious numbers of streams. I did the math once, and to make the minimum wage from streaming alone in my country, an artist would need to be pulling in over 600k streams per month on Spotify. Most artists will get a fraction of that. This is also assuming that the artist is entirely independent with no labels and distributors to cut in too, so the true number will be much higher for most.
If you purchase an album from an artist on Bandcamp once, that’s almost certainly going to be orders of magnitude the amount they make from streaming that same album over and over again.
this individual needs to download foobar2000 and learn to manage his notifications. rather than writing superfluous articles about his inability to operate his own device.
