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this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2026
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Asklemmy
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There's actually a pretty cool community sort of tangentially related to this! !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net
Anyway, my pick is definitely just a GOOD mp3 player. Whether that be an open hardware one you can crack open and repair, a proprietary one that can at least be Rockboxed, or bare minimum a proprietary one with a good iFixit rating.
What's the advantage over a smartphone?
That's everything I can think of right now
well yeah. But most phones w/o a 3.5 mm jack don't have an integrated DAC anyways, so the choice is up to you.
But the storage and the fact that it's all in a light weight bundle, that's indepedent of your phone is pretty convincing.
I remember having on, back in the day, that ran on a single AAA battery for a week an was marginally larger than one of these. Unfortunately I tinkered with trying to run it on an external power supply when I knew to little about electronics and ran a few too may Volts through it. Otherwise this thing would probably still work fine. I kinda never looked back since was content enough with my phone for listening to music. But I do have fond meories of those things, and I miss the 3.5 mm jack on my most recent phone, maybe I should reconsider...
Maybe so! If you do pick one up, you'll have to tell us how it goes, I'm curious
I guess it's not for everybody, but for my specific context it's pretty great. I think if I did have a phone with expandable storage, a 3.5mm jack, and still had an unlockable bootloader I could run Graphene/Lineage/Postmarket/etc on, it could probably replace the music player easily enough. I'd probably still end up eating a lot more battery that way though
Durability I imagine. My 10+ year old MP3 players still work fine. My phones from 5 years ago don't.
Also wondering this, VLC can run so many formats too
For me, the primary benefit is that it's NOT my smartphone. Music is a separate, intentional thing, divorced from the pocket distraction machine. YMMV.