Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

ipod classics are rockboxable. sansa clip plus and clip zip too and you can slot a 256gb microsd in them

Hiby R3 has a micro SD slot, got a 128GB card in mine, they say it'll take up to 2TB...not that those exist yet

It also has some physical controls. One rocker button alters volume, the other deals with fast-forward/back, stop/pause, moving between songs

does it have an airplane mode to shut off the wifi / bluetooth? (i'm assuming the screen turns off when not being used, like a phone)

it actually looks a lot like my previous phone, which also has sd slot and (removeable) battery and isn't that much bigger. i wonder how well that would work...

The wi-fi & Bluetooth isn't continually on (unless you want it to be). There's a 'Wireless settings' screen with 4 sliders to turn wireless, Bluetooth, DLNA & AirPlay on/off.

ipod classics are rockboxable. sansa clip plus and clip zip too and you can slot a 256gb microsd in them

― chihuahuau, Friday, December 14, 2018 9:01 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sansa clip w/rockbox can also take a 400GB microsd as I can now confirm.

Had a Clip Zip before the R3, still got it in fact. Not sure how easy they are to find now, got replaced by the Sport & some other model, which people don't seem to like as much (not sure if the new ones are Rockboxable)

Sport and whatever they call the one after that are not rockboxable and never will be because of the kind of chip they use. IIRC the type of chip the Zip and Plus used is no longer made by anyone. I have a Sport and it is pretty terrible. Longer battery life though, I'll grant it that.

clip Zip is currently my everyday player, i hear more music on that than anything else.

the Sport uses a different chip (xp) and they didn't have a rockbox build for it the last time i locked. the other one (Jam) does away with the colour screen and just has a tiny bw screen instead. did toy with buying a new one and rockboxing the Zip but i haven't yet.

the 16GB sd card i had in my Zip would take 10 minutes to index if you added anything to it. not ideal. but the 24GB total was enough for everything i've bought since 2011 so it's handy.

just looked up the Sport, it's the only mp3 player I've hung onto.. and it's still for sale! Good battery life beats having Rockbox for me. What do you find so bad about the interface? I may be in for trouble with navigating when I put an SD card in there, which this thread has me thinking to do. Though I keep a bunch of mp3s on my phone, my usage of it always gravitates towards Spotify/newness.

I just bought this Sony NW-A45/B Walkman (and a 200GB micro SD card to go with it) to replace my dying 160GB iPod classic.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0765ZVM6Y/

^^^I am using an NWZ-A17 with my new 400gb card in it (had been using it with a 200gb for a couple of years before that). It's great. Nothing has beaten the iPod classic but this comes in second for sure. Great SQ, really long battery life, solid build. I have it on a lanyard which makes me look like a total fucking moron.

> sansa clip w/rockbox can also take a 400GB microsd as I can now confirm.

yes, the limits come from the fat32 filesystem, not the hardware nor rockbox. up to 2tb you're good to go

there aren't even hints of a 1TB yet are there?

that Sony blurb is heading into snakeoil territory 8)

"New solder maximizes clarity

High-quality, lead-free solder creates a more efficient electronic connection between components, including the S-Master HX amp. Enjoy purer audio playback with enhanced vocal clarity, every time you press play.

New circuit board for pure, solid bass

The circuit board has been optimized to improve electricity flow, making the power supply stable. That means you experience clearer sound and pure, solid bass in your music."

also, no ogg support = a deal killer for me

Oh, you're the guy who listens to ogg.

i'm the guy old enough to remember the mp3 patent mess, yes. linux laptop with oggenc installed by default (and better quality for given bitrate) and a portable player that supported the same, it wasn't a hard decision and now everything i own is ripped as flac and ogg 8)

I favor 256kbps AACs myself.

lame

it perturbs me that lame went from version 3.99 to 3.100

8)

(lame wasn't always an option, certainly i remember having to compile it from source)

i was going to say that the clip zip lacked support for aac but apparently it's ok. it does have trouble with m4a files from iplayer so i generally transcode them, but if aac is supported and i can just change the container format then that would be better (and faster and smaller). will try tonight.

again, decent, available aac encoders were hen's-teeth rare (for linux) when i started doing this. oggenc was just there.

I hear ya koogs. I'm a Linux guy myself and was on the OGG train for a while. Now only hearing it from Spotify though.

I've read that the Clip Sport has a strange 2,000 file limit. Rockbox would've been nice after all. Oh well, I'll experiment with this limitation. I don't think I have that much use for an mp3 player in my life really.

Sony used to make some real nice little mid-market players, before going either real cheap or this extreme HiFi stuff. I remember they forced you into using "Sonicstage" though, which was just the worst. anyhow. thanks!

The Sony nwz I have was not ridiculously expensive - around 270 iirc. iPod Classic-ish.

just found out that my automatic monthly archiving process has not been picking up 30% of my digital archive.
I think/hope it was due to folder permissions.
so have changed them, and kicked off a new archive process.
by the end of this weekend, I may be glad to still have my cds.

the "ffmpeg -i file.m4a -acodec copy file.aac" didn't work - the zip doesn't even seem to see the file. but at least it doesn't choke on it and require a reset like some other files do. i'll try it again with a music file rather than speech but 8(

The big problem with clip sport and clip jam is that in folder view they show you the folders or files IN THE ORDER THEY WERE PUT INTO THE DIRECTORY rather than in alphanumerical order. Which at the folder level is maybe kind of useful if you want to see what you most recently loaded into your player today but at the file level is a nightmare.

There is a nice little free utility in windows called DriveSort that can fix this, but you do have to run it on your micro sd card every time you change its contents. But, there is nothing on OSX that can fix this.

(The fiio M3 also has this trait and that’s where I first encountered it)

I'm still just using my iPhone as a portable music player, I like just having one device to carry around... but newer models have no headphone jack, and I've gotta say the music app interface just gets worse and worse. Using it in the car makes me think Apple purposely designed it to cause car accidents, it takes so much fiddling to do anything.

koogs, file.aac is just the raw stream, i think. it'd be more likely to work with .m4a or .mp4 than .aac

maybe you have a he-aac file and the zip only decodes aac-lc?

anyway, if you have a zip you should just rockbox it, it supports both aac codecs

Shanling M0 is the new tiny cheap MP3 player of the moment.
Amazon link

Yeah, most of the discussion on what rivals the R3 centres on the M0

...although the link you gave is just for a case, the M0 isn't *that* cheap

?? It goes to the Amazon listing, it's $109 and includes aptx, LDAC, Bluetooth, hi-res support, functions as a DAC and a microSD card slot. About as small as a Nano, too. Makes me think twice about using my phone for music.

using Dopamine on windows, lovely bit of software that fits in with the UI.

http://www.digimezzo.com/software/dopamine/

Apple’s pushing their CarPlay thing.

I’m now using an app called Mega Play in the car, which has huge controls.

My phone takes a 256GB SD card. They aren't cheap, but it's worth it.

using Dopamine on windows, lovely bit of software that fits in with the UI.

http://www.digimezzo.com/software/dopamine/

― meaulnes, Saturday, 15 December 2018 11:11 (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

THANK YOU. Loving how I can manipulate the various bits of functionality. The minimalist now playing view + lyrics is lush - a perfect background and it is Handling my 1.5 TB collection with no issues.

Probably still continue tagging in iTunes but it's hard to break 12 year habits.

I just bought this Sony NW-A45/B Walkman (and a 200GB micro SD card to go with it) to replace my dying 160GB iPod classic.

― grawlix (unperson), Friday, December 14, 2018 11:50 AM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

May I ask what software you use to organize your music? I still use my Ipod 160gb classic, but I know it's on its last legs. I'm intrigued with this player, but I'm dreading trying to switch my decade-long curated itunes playlists over to a new software platform.

May I ask what software you use to organize your music?

I...don't. When I was using my iPod, I used iTunes, obviously. But the software Sony recommends you use with this Walkman - Content Transfer - doesn't work on my MacBook Pro. So I just import albums onto the microSD card, and I no longer listen to playlists, just albums. Sorry - wish I could be of more help.

it does keep an onboard database which refreshes each time you update the contents of the card. I listen like unperson though, just playin' folders, so I haven't really used the DB much. But I would think if your files were all tagged using MP3Tag or whatever, the Sony would be able to show them to you that way.

Also, you can make on the fly playlists from folder view using the Bookmark feature.

Just got my first 12TB drive the other day, upgrading from a 6 TB -- thank you, continually dropping prices over time. Taking advantage of the extra space to rerip a lot of stuff from 320 to lossless at last.

Hard drives keep getting bigger and faster. Same project I started about 5 years back is still going. I have got my digital collection up to about 2TB of wav file rips. It is probably about 4000 albums or so. I still have lots to rip.

https://9to5mac.com/2019/04/10/macos-10-15-itunes-standalone-apps/

"...it’s natural to keep iTunes around a little longer."

Gosh, thanks.

I mean that not in a "fuck iTunes" way, more in a "fuck figuring out how to migrate all my iTunes playlists and metadata to some scary new alternative"

^ I really just need to make the plunge into using MediaMonkey's software for my ipod.

I think Apple keeping the hard drives so f-ing tiny on their laptops and crazy expensive to expand is trying to force their users to use the streaming services and not have all their files on the same box.

£1.59/month for 100GB on google drive
upload ~200 carefully curated FLAC albums and a few mp3s otherwise
sync to PC
stream on phone
backup on HDD
maybe even backup to microSD since they're so big now

Hahah well HERE'S your fucking nightmare fuel...but this whole setup sounds so WTF to start with.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/13/21019565/murfie-madison-wisconsin-store-stream-cd-vinyl-collection-closed

"the company acted like everything was fine." lol, unprecedented!

I'd come across them a couple of times and was fascinated some investor(s) saw a feasible business here...welp

The real nightmare is "imagine waking up one morning so dumb that you mail your CD collection to a company to rip and stream for you."

Yeah, I know it was ten years ago, but I can't imagine ever thinking this was a good idea