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
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.
Weren’t those Cowon, or something like that?
Mine was a Samsung IIRC and I remember having to look a while for something with a swappable battery and FLAC support
I used to have one of these to listen to music while walking to school back in the day. It was the first device I hacked the firmware to move the menu options around. It was the perfect size to fit into the breast pocket on school uniforms.
I still have my Sansa Clip+ and Creative Zen and they work great to this day. Very simple to use and the Clip even has custom firmware that does all sorts of cool stuff. It even plays Doom!
deleted by creator
I have an old iPod shuffle. No screen, works as a USB stick, just plug it in, put some songs on, and it works.
Still have a sandisk clip sport. When it dies I’m gonna search for something alike… Sooooo much better than a phone and a app
This makes me want to bust out my first gen iPod shuffle.
Been modding iPods lately. Loaded rock box on an iPod nano 1st gen - love music and podcasts again.
It’s not a perfect solution/alternative, but if you’re on apple hardware you might want to take a look at MiniMoon music player.
I’ve been using it for a good while now on my phone and while it has some quirks, the dev is responsive and its updated regularly. Full version is a one time fee and it supports FLAC audio. Getting your music synced and sorted might take a bit of time but I’m glad I got off subscription-based music services.
If it’s not cross platform I’m barfin
Dankpods is that you
“Arming the nug!”
Aw man I wish I still had my old mp3 players. I had a round Sony one that was awesome, I could navigate songs/albums in my pocket without looking at the screen.
fellow dankpods enjoyer spotted
I miss Creative. Best computer speakers I ever had. Also when everyone at school was rocking a 4gb iPod they got at the mall for hundreds of dollars and had to choose which music they wanted, I was rocking this puppy for like $100 off of eBay with my entire library on it. Notice it’s 30gb! It also doubled as a portable hard drive. This is back when corporations did everything they could to make a good product. Not too sure, given the quality difference, why apple thrived and companies like creative died.
Still have my 120G Zune and 16G Zune HD, both of which still work flawlessly. It’s wild to think what we left behind
I gave my (young) son a 16G Zune HD. It lived through a washer/dryer cycle—I don’t understand how.
I got this for my girlfriend. If I recall it held about 100 CDs worth of music—it had a small hard drive in it. Up until that point she had used a portable CD player in her car. I remember it being a little finicky, but ultimately working well.
I had one of these, they were great devices back then. Really ate through batteries, but 6GB of music on the go was amazing.
You can still get things like this, for example my running setup is the Shanling M0 mp3 player (which is barely larger than that Zen Stone) and pair of Moondrop Chuu II IEMs, total cost about £120
I’m a person who doesn’t like to carry stuff. I often leave my home with nothing but keys: music is on my watch, all my payments are on my watch. I don’t need an MP3 player or a phone. The less I carry, the better.
Sansa running rockbox ftw.
