I’m not sure which one I’ll be getting yet, as I’ve been sitting on it for a while, but I’m leaning towards green or black! Either way I plan to decorate with stickers though 
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Got lucky last week and came across my father’s long abandoned iPod classic. Though “abandoned” ain’t really the right word cause that ol’ man of mine was never able to let go of his records. Didn’t matter how many songs you could fit in the palm of his hand. The way he listened to music, it was basically a ritual. So more accurately, it was: “rejected”. Both literally AND figuratively.
That’s what I needed too! Was happy to discover Apple is still selling these:
I was so happy to learn about RockBox because iTunes sucks more ****** **** than a ***** in a ********. It’s downright BUSSIN’ yo:
So, yea, I guess I do now. Honestly, I went through with this project cause all it cost me was a cable and very little time, but after seriously giving it a chance, the concept you guys are talkin’ here… It ain’t as crazy as it seems. Everyone wants convenience but… something really was lost in our “ascendance” to that all-in-one magic rectangle. And it’s nuts because you think “They look (practically) the same!” But they’re not. To me it really harks back to that recent commercial of theirs:
Last thing I’ll touch on is file / digital music library management. I really feel like the iPod trained me well in learning about and dealing with, well music files ofc, but files in general. And in what it means to keep a tidy, easily navigable collection. I use a few different tools nowadays but my best friend through it all has been MediaMonkey 3/4. Would love to hear what any of you guys use for music metadata / organization.
This little bit of tech literacy is completely gone now via streaming. Even people who didn’t like computers were willing to dig deeper if it meant the difference for their favorite songs / artists.
Dem changin’ times…
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(most of) My music is organised in the Plex recommended convention Music/ArtistName/AlbumName/TrackNumber - TrackName.ext.
I’m looking at running https://beets.io/ on my home server to start automating the renaming and matching.
for christmas i got myself an ipod classic 5th gen off ebay with a new battery and an 128gb ssd. it’s my daily driver for music. a few months ago i switched from paying for spotify to listening to mp3s on my psp and i’ve not looked back. i love owning my music sm and sending my friends copies of it. as much as i hate apple, itunes is so nice to use and has so much quality of life for sorting music.
i don’t like that i can’t add album art to wavs, so most of my cd rips can’t have album art :(
except for when it does work for some reason
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I used a 3rd Gen iPod nano for a long time, but at some point I was bothered by having to choose what part of my music collection I want to have with me on the go. It’s now the dedicated playback machine for our band practice sessions 
I grumpily considered using my smartphone as a playback device, but the lack of physical buttons and a headphone jack and the comparatively low battery runtime didn’t make it very fun. I got a nice Shanling Q1 which was sadly destroyed by a mix of carelessness and water and now use a HiBy R2-II. Just slotting in a big microSD card once and never worry about what to take with me really makes music on the go much more fun to me. And it just fits into every pocket or pouch I have!
Some downsides in comparison to the iPod are the slightly less clever music management software and the missing support of podcasts – in particular, remembering your last play position when you listen to some music in the meantime. But all in all, I’m very happy with it, even though I admit that I curiously look at a HiBy R4 from time to time. 
I still have my first gen iPod, but it has started overheating.
Right now I keep a lot of music on a 256GB SD card in my phone and use that - I turn off the data/wifi if all I’m doing is music.
I’d honestly love a good dedicated mp3 player. I had one in college that held about ten songs and ran on a single AA battery that lasted forever. I cannot count how many times I fell on it at the rink, too, and it just kept going. It got stolen out of my skate bag in 2009 and I’m still mad at the entire city of Ann Arbor about it.
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Not sure if this Philips D8080 “Le Cube” counts as portable - it’s the kind of thing we used to call “luggable”. Made in Singapore in 1988, picked it up for a song two weeks ago and have been preparing it for the summer - needs some new gears that are currently in the post, has been adapted to take USB power, new antenna with a new yellow topper, some plastic repairs… half the fun of old equipment is the fixup, after all. It has a lid that comes off and an insulated compartment that holds three cans of beer, another compartment for some extra tapes, and a final small compartment to hold headphones. It has it all!
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this thing is so dope. It’s cool that you have the skills to salvage it!
Oh, j’adore Le Cube. What a great name. I think it would be portable if you had one of those collapsible trolleys that people use for grocery shopping.
I was thinking about buying an MP3 player recently, because I want to use my phone less and I’ve had to stop using Spotify anyway. I was scouring adverts.ie for something cheap and off-brand, but in the end I just bought some new batteries for my discman (pictured below). I bought this in a jumble sale for one or two dollars in 2017. It says on the back that it was manufactured in 2002. It still works perfectly well - unlike the brand new discman I bought in the 2010s, which crapped out after a few years. The only drawback is that carrying around all the CDs adds some extra weight to my backpack.
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A photo of a Philips portable CD player. The CD player is sitting on top of a CD and a notebook on a desk. It’s made of shiny silver plastic (a little worn on the sharp corners) and blue translucent plastic. On the lid it says “45 ESP Jogproof. 45 second Electronic Skip Protection. CD Rewritable Compatible”.
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I have always had some form of physical music player my whole life. My Personal MP3 library is about 130 gigs, currently. I’ve got music from as far back as MP3.com back when it used to be a self-publishing music hub, as well as MySpace.
My current device is some no name brand MP3 player. It’s got a microphone and FM tuner, can play OGG and FLAC, and the storage is entirely SD-card based. (it has bluetooth I guess but I refuse to use bluetooth headphones) Surprisingly it also has a speaker built into the device itself, which has been handy.
Before that I used a SanDisk Sansa Fuse 8GB that I used up until the cable got damaged 
curse you late 2000’s and your proprietary cable garbage.
I use it all the time, when I’m walking around doing errands or on my way to work, when I’m doing chores in my house. Having a music device has been very important to me, and a part of my life since I was in my teens, back when I had a walkman with a cassette tape of songs recorded off the radio.
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I’ve got something similar, an Innioasis Y1. It has one of those clicky wheels like a classic iPod, but runs an old version of Android under the hood and comes with 128gb of storage. It bogs down when playing music with embedded album art, so I ripped the covers out of my files. :)