Hello fellow lemmings <3
I have been struggling with how to listen to music in a while now. I am on spotify but I don’t want to be. I despise the app for being inefficient, battery hog bloated crap that I don’t need in my phone and that’s not even beginning with my issues with the company.
So I have been looking into other solutions for my music needs.
I tried setting up my own server for streaming music, but it’s too much manual work, that still uses a lot of resources for a subpar experience. Going through the albums and sorting them and fixing the metadata and all that because musicbrainz insists this live track is the same as the studio one is not fun and I’m just over it.
So I’m going back to the roots, physical music player. I am looking into buying a device just like those old mp3 players but I’m not sure which way to go.
For me the most important feature (other than quality ofc) is it having FOSS software. I won’t be tweaking with the hardware but being able to modify the software, at least to a degree, for me is the main attraction. If it already has an active community then even better.
Do you guys have similar experiences or anecdotes? Perhaps device recommendations? Other solutions are also welcome I am still shopping for ideas
Thanks y’all!
On that level, maybe invert your mindset and look in Maker spaces. Search by hardware like ESP32. You will likely get better (different) results if you search for devices that target EE students instead of those that target Makers in general. Like it is well known that Texas Instruments will send free samples of most common chips requested, to anyone with a .edu email. Projects on hardware like a Beagle Bone tend to be more advanced than more common Maker hardware. While a BB is like half of a Rπ in terms of hardware architecture, if a purpose made device is created without all of the extra overhead fluff, it is pretty good. The STM32 H7 stuff tends to have advanced projects at the handheld gaming level. The Nordic BT BLE chips are usually more popular with the advanced crowd.
You might look at the hardware commits for Micropython or Circuit Python for people adding DACs or other peripherals. These are likely to lead to their project spaces.
I’ve seen someone doing a drive swap on an old iPod to SSD and a software chain, but I think that was still only doing the Apple compatibility thing.
OpenWRT is not a bad place to look either. Any small embedded Linux device is likely to run on OpenWRT, so you may find something interesting just by shopping their hardware support and commit history.
Hmm… right
Tuckerm also suggested an interesting device. It looks to be open hardware as well. I’m not that knowledgeable with hardware but I guess I could try to build something myself.
Thanks for all the tips ( ദ്ദി ˙ᗜ˙ )