It’s a Creative Zen Stone that I got as a Christmas gift in 2008. I just found it in a drawer, and it’s still holding charge. The last thing I put on it was The Life And Times Of Scrooge by Tuomas Holopainen, in 2015 – I don’t know why, at that time I definitely had a smartphone.

It has a headphone jack, which immediately makes it better than every smartphone produced in the last several years, and it can easily drive my 80-ohm Beyerdynamic. The audio quality is as good as one can expect. The only drawback is that it only holds 1GB… my old CD rips had to be compressed to hell and back.

Let me reiterate that this has been sitting untouched for a decade and was immediately ready for action. No login, no annoying software updates, expired subscription, or remote bricking by the manufacturer. Eat my shorts, Spotify Car Thing.

P.s. A Lifetime Of Adventure is a banger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWwSVOo5K_k

  • The D Quuuuuill@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    i was explaining to a college student about mp3 players and they thought they sounded like some amazing new product coming down the pipeline. it made me feel super old and super sad for all that tech companies have robbed from us

        • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          At first I was gonna say you can have thousands of songs on your smartphone regardless, but I guess those kids probably aren’t too acquainted with file browsers.

            • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
              1·
              1 year ago

              I hate that so many devices try hard to obscure filesystems even though they are right there, right under the hood. I remember how ridiculous it was to try and browse an iPod as the hard drive it was. They copied your files into an indecipherable file tree with weird names. If companies aren’t trying to keep you from copying shit then they’re thinking you’re too dumb to understand files and folders and putting some other weird UI on top of them to make them “user friendly”.

              And thusly, they made kids unable to understand file browsers/systems :'(

  • AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml
    1·
    10 months ago

    I’d like some ear protection headphones that can play opus files from SSD.

    It would also be cool if they had a microphone to work as a headset and a radio and walkie talkie function build in. Now that I think about it, it would also be cool if they’d also pick up speech and filter it from the ambient noise so I can listen to people yelling at me while still being protected from ambient noise. Maybe it could also work as a hearing aid that gives you super human hearing? Obviously it should have HRTF virtual surround sound and orientation tracking. Wait, it should be integrated into a bicycle helmet. Adding some eye protection would be nice too, and breathing mask that just clips on. And a head-up display for 1-2 lines of text to read eBooks while we’re at it.

  • Hupf@feddit.org
    0·
    1 year ago

    Back in the day, I had one that looked like this and was essentially built around an AA battery, which was great since you could always carry a spare.