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People talk like the dedicated portable music player just doesn’t exist anymore, but you can buy devices like that if you really wanted.
There’s even better ones available now like the Tangara which is open hardware+software and it’s creators are here in the fediverse!
Oh sweet lord it’s beautiful.
fiio has a good one for ~$50
We solved every problem… and somehow created ‘all my stuff is in one device’ as the new problem.
i only miss the device controls. the buttons and clickwheels were so awsome.
CDs and players still exist. Just go buy them and live how you want.
Right? This is confusing.
Go for it. Buy a portable DVD player with a portable screen and head phones to watch movies. Buy a clock, a dumb phone, a little portable game device. Buy a magazine with nudie pictures. Buy a camera and take it to a photo place so get physical copies of your dick pics. Mail them to your friends. Buy a megaphone so you can yell racist things to your neighbors.
All of this is still possible right now. No smart phone needed.
Though not as portable anymore, since the manufacturing capacity (small parts) doesn’t exist anymore. Smae for dvd players, walkman and gramophone btw.
I really do though. I would splice a guitar cable into one and use it as a portable guitar Amp so I could practice wherever
it’s not as much fun if you don’t splice it directly into the tape feed yourself, but cool!
Do you carry your guitar wherever as well?
that was back when i was a student and yes i did. it got stolen about a decade ago. wouldn’t have been stolen if i had it on me.
Oh man, the nostalgia for those days of just carrying my guitar around on campus to play between classes. Having a million tabs of “tabs” for my favorite songs on my laptop.
I miss being able to play a guitar.
Nobody misses fucking walkman.
Idk I have a fiio music player and it’s nice to have a dedicated device that can function as a mini power amp when needed (I acknowledge that this is slightly different from a walkman)
Wait… is that a toasted sandwich maker?
Your phone doesn’t have one? Pssshhht!
I stopped buying new phones come the era of smart phones, and stopped using them entirely after the Snowden confirmation. I’ve not kept up with what they can do. But if they can toast sandwiches now… that’s some sweet sweet pitcher plant juice.
I for one like all of it being in one versatile device. My issue with smartphones isn’t technology, but the corpos that profit from you even after you’ve bought the phone.
That’s the thing, though, if you buy a 1995 walkman, the corpos literally can’t profit from that any further (not in that way, anyway. You’re most likely still going to spend money on tapes). It’s ALSO an issue of technology.
the only answer is self-hosting
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Can I get it all in one device without requiring an internet connection for functionality?
iPod Touch was the peak of technology for this
I remember getting my Nokia N95 nearly twenty years ago, and it was fucking awesome being able to reveal the four media control buttons, and blindly control music in my headphones from my pocket while walking to work or on the bus or train.
As other commenters have said - I look at my old Ixus camera or LG Soul MP3 player or Nokia 3330 with fond nostalgia memories… but thank fuck I’m not lugging all that about now.
Just the other day I was noticing how you don’t see vhs or cassette tape ribbon just littering the ground anymore. It’s better this way
now you don’t even see the lithium batteries leaching into the water supply!
Yup, thank God each device just has one lithium battery, instead of the HUNDREDS UPON HUNDREDS of alkaline batteries you’d go through in the life of a device in the past. You got about 6-8 hours of gameplay in a GameBoy from 2 AA batteries. Kids played these every single day. You have any idea how many we went through?
Or stereos/walkman of the time using even more? Stereos used 4-12 C/D batteries and lasted maybe 2 hours.
You have no idea how incredibly better you have it with lithium batteries and the waste they create. We used to buy alkaline batteries by the 24/48 pack as a regular grocery item.
I’ve used recchargeables for all my life. some of the first ones still work. No idea where they actually end up but I always brought them to the battery section at the recycle depot when they finally died.
While better, even those were terrible at first. The first ones were charged for almost as much time as they were used for. We’ve come a loooooooong way with battery tech, mostly for the better. At this point, battery waste is almost entirely a recycling infrastructure problem(we need more facilities doing it and more people turning them in instead of dumping them).
I still maintain the 4th gen iPod Nano was slick as fuck.
Walkman was crap: very little music, poor quality sound and the batteries are empty after two hours.
I miss iPod. It’s easy to use. Doesn’t spam ads in my face. And the music is my own, I don’t need to pray it doesn’t disappear due to licensing deals.
CDs suck as a portable format but is nice since it’s like MP3s but not proprietary.
Cassettes suck, and I don’t miss them.
Records are a fun novelty. They are the worse format, but the art and the experience is fun especially since I need to be careful what albums I buy. I need to like the whole thing and not just a song or two.
buy a phone with actual expandable storage and just download all your nusic via soulseek
I prefer a MP3 player. But yeah, that’s how I listen to most of my music is on my phone
You can still use an iPod. Pick up a 5th or 6th gen, replace the HDD with an SD card adapter and you can rock out with 500Gb of portable tunes.
And what’s mad is that I can plug mine into my M2 MacBook Air and sync it. Apple, who have enormous Hardon’s for obsoleting anything doesn’t make them any money, have, for some reason, continued to maintain the ability to sync almost any iPod in macOS. The one caveat is that OS 26 no longer supports the FireWire needed to run the first couple of classics.
Oh, and if you want to do it via Linux, you’ll either need to run macOS or Windows in a VM, or flash the iPod with Rockbox.
But it all still works.
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I mean, yes, but OP specifically mentioned iPod. And I have experience with modding them.
Gen z here. I don’t feel like I’ve earned the right to talk about cassettes as a youngster, but a Type II cassette on a well maintained dual capstan deck and a well biased recording sound pretty good. Add a touch of Dolby type b noise cancellation and it’s even better.
Specifically, I’m using a Yamaha k-1020 deck ($350 refurbished), and Maxwell XL-II 90 tapes ($5-10). I’m running a proper audio interface into the cassette deck. Since I’m using my phone, I have the luxury of rapidly skipping around an album on my phone while I’m checking levels for an entire album. And I’m using a 3 head deck, so I can hear exactly what’s being recorded in realtime.
You might read that and be like “that’s too much work”, but that’s kinda the point imo. Why do people still do film photography when it’s more work than digital? (I also shoot film lol)
Admittedly, things fall apart a little when you move to portable cassette players. Modern players are kinda crap. I haven’t gotten my hands on any vintage walkmans yet.
I grew up with cassettes. Type II was a rarity and not what you’d buy from the store. Those were type I tapes.
Plus the whole format was a compromise. CDs almost whipped them out, but when digital came both were gone in a flash.
I think the only benefit of cassette today is making mix tapes, but on a retail and purchasable music standpoint. They weren’t good.
Yeah. Most of the modern prerecorded tapes are still crap. Although maybe like 20% of the pre recorded ones sound decent, surprisingly.
Cassettes were never designed for music, from what I understand. Instead, it was a format that music adopted later. Considering that, cassettes can actually sound really good imo. But I do have the luxury of using type II tapes. Type 1 isn’t bad if you have a really nice deck and a really good recording.
But isn’t there a whole lot more to this story? I believe cassettes were responsible for getting many underground artists started, who record labels would have never signed. I also heard a story where disregarded tapes set for recycling made their way from USA to other countries. Those tapes influenced music in that country, and they never would have been if they were another format.
That last point isn’t about audio quality, but it always seemed like cassettes didn’t get the respect they deserved imo.
Yeah. Daniel Johnston got to be a known musician because the guy was one of those creative souls that couldn’t help but to create music in this case, he released his music in cassettes and one of them somehow got to Kurt Cobain’s hands.
IMO, sound was never really the issue with tapes (at least not for portable use), it was longevity - it doesn’t make a ton of sense to buy pre-recorded tapes when they can break so easily, but it was also kind of a PITA to record them yourself off CD, vinyl or radio.
