This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
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.
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 ~~ten~~ twenty 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".
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.
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.
40GB is over 50 uncompressed CDs. Where are you getting your FLACs?
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(TM).
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!
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.
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.
For camping out of signal range or Halloween I still rock a SanDisk sansa with a rockbox rom.
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.
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.
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.
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 individual needs to download foobar2000 and learn to manage his notifications. rather than writing superfluous articles about his inability to operate his own device.
Interesting, but I'd have to say that I've been contempt just using an app that doesn't suck (musicolet). The comments about battery could hold a point to me if I were going on a week long trip, or something of the like, but anywhere that would happen for me is somewhere that I wouldn't be taking music/phone for distractions anyway.
I think the finer point I agree with is being able to just have a copy of your own music and play it without being belt-fed opinions or ads. Managing it is always a bit of a pain, but I've got a system that works for me, and MTP on android works better than trying to deal with iTunes in my books.
Musicolet is great. Just dont like how it handles external playlists.
Inuse syncthing to sync music from my NAS to the SD card on my phone.
Pretty much the same setup. I don't really use playlists often though, and currently using syncthing to a NAS.
