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.
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.
I’m not certain, but you might be able to make an iPod Classic talk to an iPad (you might also be able to do it with a raspberry pi + Linux + iTunes running in wine). If it does work, there’s the catch that you’d have to convert your files to aac (also known as m4a, lossy and similar to mp3) or alac (lossless and similar to flac).
If you try an iPod and rip CDs or convert from flac/wav, make sure you convert directly to your desired iPod-compatible format, avoid converting from mp3->aac unless you don’t have the original lossless rip. Doing so is like repeatedly opening and saving a jpg. Each time you do it, you lose some quality.
Neat. Does the playdate even have a headphone jack?
Yep! It’s got mic input on the jack too, a few people have been writing recording tools for it
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.
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.
Double post, but focusing more on the real computer. Do you have access to a library? Sometimes they have computers people can use. You might be able to load a program to rip onto a USB stick and run it portably (that is, without installing it onto the computer.) Not ideal, but if it’s Windows I think Windows Media Player can rip CDs natively.
In that case, bring in the CDs and the MP3 player, rip the CDs, then load them all at the library. There might even be CDs at the library you can check out as well.
Find the cheapest MP3 player possible, maybe one of those built like a USB stick that can plug into a computer.
Here’s one. There might be better options out there. The idea here is no wifi, no Bluetooth, etc. You could presumably load MP3s onto it just like you could a flash drive. Unlike the flash drive, it can play it back.
As far as ripping CDs, I use EAC. It supports ripping compressed to MP3, among other things. The linked player can play FLAC as well. I imagine most can, but the larger files size of FLAC might become an issue. Other programs exist, of course. It can be done!
Maybe not really the cheapest. I’ve got that for fun and it sounds awful. There’s a lot of static noise. But hey, for 60¢ with free shipping…
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?
Or a dedicated audio player app like Vinyl
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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Many phones also have an expansion slot for a micro sd card
Hahahaha
I guess I don’t get the joke. In newer phones they some times put a space for one on the back side of the sim card tray. While I suppose Apple/Pixel do have a habit of reducing features in their flagship phones, there are still plenty of models that have the ability.
All you need is any MP3 player (amazon is full of them) Here is a list of current models
I use a Sansa Sandisc clip, it’s 12 years old and the battery still lasts a few days. The sound quality is quite good and it’s less than $50? (hopefully the quality is still similar) though I’m sure a lot of lesser known brands would still be decent at this point.
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.
A couple years ago I bought a 128GB 2016 iPhone SE for $90 and used it with Evermusic. It worked as a great little music/podcast/audiobook player, and as a viewfinder for some weird analog cameras I built. I gave it a data-only sim for occasional downloads, but it would have been very easy to run it as a wi-fi only device.
In my experience it isn’t if it’ll work, it’s if it’ll have enough space for all my music. I still have a couple old iPods, including the original Touch, but I have way more than 16GB worth of music now.
If you just want something simple for your own music with no ads, check out iBroadcast.
If I wanted to do this today I would use iTunes and an old iPhone as the mp3 player. I would use an old laptop to rip, or iTunes to purchase.
Looks like they stopped dev in '21, but RockBox is what I used to use. Amazing software.
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 :)
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.
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.
You can buy MP3 players on Aliexpress. They still make them and they are not expensive, and you can even get bluetooth compatible ones.
I recently went about trying to do what you’re doing. I have a laptop and it was still pretty hard. Just buying digital music is tricky. I ended up downloading iTunes for some music, and buying others from Bandcamp for the few artists I could find on there.
I can still see problems. Without a computer, how will you transfer the files onto the MP3 player? Without a CD drive, how will you rip CDs?
I think you’re going to need to borrow a computer from a friend, but other than that it’s all feasible if a little annoying.
Yeah…I was hoping by now that maybe they made mp3 players by now that could sync to phones or tablets. I’m not above transferring files slowly and a few at a time - I used to type in the song names manually haha so it can’t be much worse. CDs are trickier. But I’m glad to know it was annoying but feasible. They really have made owning media such a high effort thing. Sigh.
most phones these days are an mp3 player. even my flip phones back to my first cdma one ~ 20 years ago.
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
