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
I am pretty impressed that it can power 80ohm Beyers (DT770?). I finally had my old phone die and I was forced to get one without a headphone jack. I listen to music on a little MP3 player called a Mixxtape now. It definitely can’t power my Beyers properly.
I have a Rio Volt SP-250. A CD-MP3 player I’ve had since 2001. The in-line remote died somehow but the unit itself works flawlessly and is in excellent condition. It runs on AA batteries; originally they were rechargeable but they were Ni-MH cells. I don’t know where its charger went, but I can run the thing on Alkaline batteries or charge Eneloops in a separate charger.
It long outlasted the iPod it replaced and is still serviceable to this day.
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
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.
+1 on dedicated music players. I can listen to music for hours without worrying that my phone is gonna die.
+1 000 000 on A Lifetime Of Adventure. Fantastic song.
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.
My Creative mp3 fit in my pocket and had a joystick to control the music through my jeans. No voice commands, no touch screen, no touching my headphones, just sitting on the bus and fast forwarding or skipping as I desired.
I had one of these. Used it for running until it stopped holding charge. Perfect size and weight, and you could drag and drop mp3s without any hassle.
perfect for gym workouts or jogging in the wilderness. no need for access to internet and highly likely sealed against moisure/sweat and extremely light and with aux cords to prevent your earphones from falling. you only have uoload your playlist first 1GB is enough for maybe 50-200 tracks so yeah
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.
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
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.
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.
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
It’s how small things can be when they don’t need a screen
If you google for mp3-players without touchscreen and you open a link like “12 best mp3-players without touchscreen 2025”, you may find maybe one in this list without touchscreen.
I bought a Fiio Snowsky Echo Mini recently that is similarly old school - no Wi-Fi, just USB file transfer upload. I started buying music on indie sites and I have a closer relationship with my music. I keep listening to the same things since my library is still small. Because of that I remember the lyrics, know the names of favorite tracks or hum the songs during the day. Listening to music on a smartphone is mentally draining in comparison.
The player Is not such a good deal as it was before the Fiio tariff-related price hike, when it was around 40€, but eh.
There are MP3 players which are simple and Digital Audio Players (DAPs) which are supposed to be more hi-fi. In Europe, AGPTEK is available (can’t vouch, but see A52PL, C2S, U5PL) too. In the US, a simple modern MP-3 player-ish iPod clone seems to be the Innioasis Y1.
There’s also a custom firmware for some DAPs/MP3 players called rockbox, here’s the supported device list https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/TargetStatus
