If I wanted an MP3 player again, in 2023, and wanted to rip cds to it and put digitally purchased albums on it, as actual owned files (not inside an proprietary ecosystem where I pay to only listen to that track within that service) could I still do that? What would I need? I don’t own, and can’t afford, a “real computer”, but i recall having lots of compatibility issues at the time between my mp3 player and computer os anyway. I’ve got an ipad and a pixel. Is there any feasible, non-ridiculously-difficult way to do this? Do they still sell any mp3 players? Do any of the old ones work with modern tech? I miss hearing my music on a simple, quiet, offline device without ads or streaming services.
Do you need an mp3 player?
Power to you if you’re doing it for giggles and shits, but can’t you load VLC onto that Pixle of yours?
I hadn’t looked into it, as I’d gotten used to assuming that my phones won’t have the memory space for music - but that’s a smart idea. I’ll have to look into that.
4gb of storage is infinite music, just use your phone
Probably is an audiophile with a FLAC collection 😄
Ah yes, FLAC users always eventually accept mp3 as the superior format 😄.
I have at least 70gb of music on my phone
On my phone music takes up 14.95GB for 1,132 songs which on average is around 13.5MB per song. Great majority of it is 320K MP3s, but it is all over the place. The worst one is 32K AAC, and the best one is 24-bit 96kHz FLAC.
Re-encode everything above 192 Kbps to Opus 128 Kbps and thank me later
You’ll have enough room for sure
Most phones ship with at least 64GB of storage and songs aren’t very big files
You’ll probably have like 25+GB free and that’s enough for a lot of songs.
Let’s say the file sizes are 2.5MB per minute (which is pretty close to standard for high quality MP3s) then you could fit 10000 minutes of music on there. So if your songs are on average 5 minutes long then you could fit 2000 songs on there.
Just pirate the music you want as mp3 files directly on your phone. No computer required. And if you only have a small amount of storage on your phone you can download like a hundred songs and then delete the ones you’re tired of to make room for new ones, and if you ever wanna hear the old songs again you can just download them again.
MP3s compress pretty well, depending on the bitrate you rip your CDs at. Your Pixel should be able to easily store upwards of 300 hours of audio without much issue.
MP3s compress down a lot, as low as 1 meg a minute for acceptable quality depending on the content. Newer codecs like Opus and AAC can easily do that with much better quality, and your Pixel will definitely be able to play them.
Oh, hell. Opus is totally awesome.
Opus consistently impresses me with how good audio sounds at ridiculous compression levels, both music and speech. 4 minutes of music not even breaking 900k and it sounds just as good as the ol’ 128kbps mp3s, and that’s stereo. Can’t even imagine how much you could squeeze down mono audiobooks.
Many phones also have an expansion slot for a micro sd card, you could have that card as dedicated music storage area on the device and then just find a music playing app you like.
Even if you’re doing high fidelity files, there are some quite large micro sd cards for cheap (ex. I got a 1Tb one for a security camera I have for $30 or so).
I’m willing to bet there’s possibly even a way to rip music straight from an external cd drive to your phone if you hunt around for an app and the right drive that can do usb-c or whatever your phone has. Cut out the middle man.
Many phones also have an expansion slot for a micro sd card
Hahahaha
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You can simply load up mp3 files into a spare/old phone (or your present phone/iPad) and use vlc media player. Your phone will be your mp3 player. I do the exact same thing with old phones lying at home.
Or a dedicated audio player app like Vinyl
I think you’ll need a “real computer” to act as host device. Having said that, you could use a Raspberry Pi to be your “real computer”. You might be able to fake something out, but an MP3 player will usually act as a storage device, and another device will have to act as host to load it with files. You might find an MP3 player that can connect to some cloud service, but that undermines the whole point.
I’ve currently got 2 functioning MP3 devices. Well, technically 1, since I gave one to my dad.
The one I gave to my dad is this guy, a Sandisk Sansa Clip. It connects as an MTP device via USB cable. Copy files into it’s storage, disconnect, and go. Any computer capable of acting as an MTP host should work.
The one still in my possession is an earlier version of this one, the Mixxtape. They are regularly on sale for around $60 USD IIRC, so not the cheapest, but it can also play back via a tape deck, like my very first MP3 player, the Digisette Duo Aria MP3 player, with a whopping 32MB of storage! I guess my first MP3 player wasn’t the most capable, but the Mixxtape evokes that nostalgia for me, plus is far more capable. Again, it mounts as an MTP storage device, so any other device capable of hosting an MTP connection should work.
As to your comment on OS, I’ve been using Linux primarily for well over a decade, and it supports MTP just fine. The only problem you’ll run into is older MP3 players from before USB Mass Storage Class (MSC), Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) and Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) were widespread. I think some early models had custom file transfer schemes. That hasn’t been a thing for well over a decade. Except maybe for iDevices. Apple (as always) is special. From my experience, plugging any MSC/PTP/ or MTP device into just about any Linux computer will “just work”. It should “just work” for Windows as well.
Finally, a “real computer”. Something like a Raspberry Pi 400 kit should work fine, but there are also lots of perfectly fine ex-office computers for sale refurbished at similar prices. Best Buy also has refurbs. An old laptop would work as well. You might be able to use the Pixel to host. I know the Pixel supports USB-OTG or whatever the successor protocol is, allowing it to act as a USB host for limited power devices. Only way to find out is to try.
As an 80s kid, that Mixxtape just blew me away 🤯😍 Talk about must-own gadgets that I absolutely don’t need! Man, that’s slick!
Analog playback, insane 😳😍
Now I just need Paulthings to make the Mixxtape’s older sister: a digital to analog reel-to-reel tape 😱 Maybe call it the 2real2reel? REELxREEL?
I saw a product mock-up years back of a digital device shaped like a roll of 35mm camera film. The concept was that you insert it into your old analog 35mm camera instead of film, and it turns the camera into a digital one. Basically a universal digital SLR back. Was heartbroken when it turned out it was just a concept with no plans to create it. I’d go and buy an old Pentax 35mm SLR faster than the guy in the Mixxtape video can dish out Yo Mamma jokes.
I’ll see if I can find it. I still think it would be the most revolutionary camera gadget to come out in ages; imagine being able to take any old 35mm camera and turn it digital in an instant 😮❤️ Old cameras on eBay would quadruple in price overnight.
Edit: Found the “digital film” concept, was released back in 2011.
The biggest problem I can see with this digital back idea is that full frame sensors are hella expensive and require a lot more electronics than could fit in that space. This 20MP sensor, for instance, is $4000 by itself.
There are lots of MP3 players on aliexpress for under $20. You just need to get the audio files on a micro sd card.
You will need a PC if you want to rip CDs. You should be able to find an old, used laptop with a CD drive pretty cheaply, possibly even free.You can just buy a usb cd drive. No need to get an old laptop. Spend 20 bucks and use your modern pc.
OP specified that they do not have a PC. They have a Pixel phone and an iPad. I’m not sure if there are any Android or iOS apps that support connecting to a CD drive to rip audio files.
You can connect a usb cd drive to android. Probably depends on your phone and you might need some adapter but android is pretty robust that way. I don’t know what apps they could use to rip music from cd on android though.
As others have suggested you could just your phone as an MP3 player, which I have been doing for multiple years now and works just fine, you just need an app for playback (you could just use something that’s already on the phone, but the experience will definitely be better with something dedicated); I use Poweramp, which is like 5 bucks but it’s definitely worth that much. If you want to use an MP3 player, they definitely still make these, from cheap ones for like 20 bucks to, in my opinion, completely overpriced ones for 300+ bucks for audiophiles. If you also want to rip your CDs, you can try this reddit thread. They used a tablet but I guess it should work an android phone just as well (unless Pixel doesn’t want to…)
The new term is “digital audio player”. http://www.reddit.com/r/digitalaudioplayer is a good community for that. mp3s are out, if you want a really small file size, opus has better quality. If quality is more important than file size, rip to FLAC. I know at least for android, there are music player apps like musicolet and poweramp that will allow you to play songs from your phone if you have the storage space. The old ones work with modern computers. You can buy reconditioned ipods on ebay, but the new ones are better IMO. For ripping music a good community is http://www.reddit.com/r/musichoarder
I haven’t tested, but you should be able to hook up a USB CD drive to an Android phone. No idea if anyone’s bothered to make a CD ripping app for Android, though.
If you’re willing to skip the CD step then they’re are lots of ways, even without SD cards. Lots of cheap MP3 players work as USB drives. You can turn your phone into host mode and just plug them in to your phone and transfer files.
To get the songs, torrent or download or rip your songs with NewPipe or whatever. Lots of ways to get mp3s.
Or rip the CDs at the library and put them directly into your MP3 player. You can borrow the CDs from the library for free, too, as an added bonus.
So then just get a real computer. Go to goodwill or ebay and get yourself one of those $20 HP desktops the size of a book. It will be more than adequate for putting music on an MP3 player.
Here’s a cheap Sandisk one and here’s a cheap Sony one. I’d probably just install foobar2000 on your phone though. They also sell USB CD drives that you can pick up for cheap. I’m sure there’s plenty of Android apps that can rip CDs.
My Sansa Clip mp3 player is still plodding along. I use it daily. Plug it into my computer, drag and drop my music and enjoy ad free music in my worktruck. I can’t stand to listen the crappy radio anymore.
we got an ‘assortment’ of sansa players from old woot bags (pre-amazon days), enough to still have a couple working ones over a decade later. my co-worker uses hers every morning.
Just got a new Sansa Clip to replace my dad’s old Sansa Clip. Solid device.
I bought a first gen Sansa Clip ages ago on Black Friday sale and fell in love with the damn thing. Small but not too small, good controls, good sound, intuitive UI, uses universal drivers (not a sure thing at the time), even has an FM radio built in. I’ve picked up so many more advanced devices over the years but I keep coming back to it. It’s just a solid piece of hardware.
Also you can install Rockbox on it and play DOOM, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Yeah, just get an MP3 player that uses an SD card, and copy your MP3 files to the card.
The question is, where are your files? Are they already on your phone or iPad? If not, you have the challenge of ripping from a USB CD player to the iPad or Pixel. I have no idea what software can do that, but there are apps on the Google Play store that claim to be able to.
Sounds like a great opportunity to dig up an old laptop and use Linux, though. I’ve got a couple of USB DVD readers sitting in a drawer that I pull out for these jobs, they’ve worked fine for years.
You can buy anything from a basic model to a super deluxe audiophile player. But you are going to need some kind of desktop or laptop for transferring files, an ipad probably won’t work.
I use a Sandisk clip, it’s 12 years old and the battery still lasts a few days. Sandisk players are still for sale - they have a few models, their sound quality is quite good and they are less than $50? Though I’m sure a lot of lesser known brands would also be decent at this point also.
Looks like they stopped dev in '21, but RockBox is what I used to use. Amazing software.
Rockbox was awesome. I used it on many iPods. I remember one of my irc friends was the one of the main devs of the clock app that shipped with it.
Development hasn’t stopped, it’s just that they haven’t made new releases. I would suggest you install one of the dev builds instead.
I actually use it again, I accidentally bought a phone without a headphone jack, so I resurrected my Sansa Clip+ and updated (it already had a many years old version on it from back in the day) it to a current one :)
You already have a bunch of answers so I’m gonna go one further and guess your next question “Can I stream these mp3s around the house using free and open source software too?”
Bless you
If you have an Android, use a USB adapter which allows you to connect flash drives and more to your phone. Then a file manager can be used to move music files to an attached MP3 player.
And yes standalone mp3 players still exists
In theory, any MP3 player / DAP that can have music loaded onto it by drag and drop could work with your iPad (assuming you have the means to connect it, of course).
But there are a number of things to consider.
Firstly; storage. Obviously, your iPad doesn’t have expandable storage, so depending on the size of your collection, you might run out of space. Using the same method you’ll need to connect the player to your iPad, you can hook up an external drive of some description. Files should be able to see it (as long as it’s formatted to exFAT or FAT). From there, using Files you can simply drag from one place to another.
However, this doesn’t allow you to change metadata or anything. There are apps you can download that will allow you to do it, but it can be a pain in the ass if you’ve got quite a bit of music.
Finally, there’s where you get the music from.
If you buy from somewhere like Bandcamp, then you can download directly to your iPad, though they don’t make it easy. You can’t buy from iTunes because the app won’t let you open them in Files. Torrents are obviously out, so is CD ripping, as there are no CD drivers for iPad that I’m aware of.
So while it’s entirely possible to run a DAP with just an iPad, it’s kind of a pain in the arse, unless you already have a ready supply of music and it’s either already tagged well, or you don’t really care about that sort of thing. As others have suggested, it might be just as easy for you to pick up a cheap PC. It doesn’t need to have any bells and whistles, just the ability to store music and have some way of managing the library.
