I have a large music library that I don’t have much storage left for on my phone. There are of course other ways of solving this problem, but are there any good dedicated music players like iPods still around?
Ideally I’d like it to have Bluetooth functionality for wireless headphones, at least 512GB of storage, and an SD card slot. Possibly physical buttons as well.
I’m pretty happy with my FIIO Snowsky Mini.
It mimics a miniature Walkman and looks really great, and has a cassette playing interface that lets you totally ignore obtaining / managing album artwork. I really don’t care about seeing album art when I play music, but equally I hate seeing a ? or something when an interface expects you to have artwork. This solves that perfectly.
It’s only up to 256GB, and it only lets you scroll through all artists or all albums so navigation isn’t the quickest.
It sounds amazing. People go on about how good certain iPod classics sounded, but this is audibly better than any iPod ever was.
Doesn’t do gapless playback.
Can get them for £40-£50.
I still have a FiiO X1 (not sold anymore) it has very robust navigation for a device without a keyboard, and does gapless playback.
The newer budget offerings kinda feel like a downgrade.
Sounds ideal!
To be honest I’ve been half-looking at audio players for 2-3 years but never pulls the trigger as all I had to go on was Amazon and Reddit reviews of how things sounded, which is so subjective as to be almost useless.
I saw the Echo Mini in the Guardian for an article about DAPs and trusted that a little more and finally bit the bullet.
Apparently someone from FIIO in the forums said the Echo Mini wasn’t capable of gapless, which feels unlikely when iPods from about 2006 could.
Your device definitely sounds like it addresses my biggest “wants” for mine.
It doesn’t solve the album art issue, which also really annoys me. I spent a lot of time adding art back in the days of using that thing…
It probably also feels less premium than the newer offerings. It’s pretty old, irc I bought it in 2014 or thereabouts.
i was coming in here to recommend exactly that!
Do you ever have the issue where FLAC files play at a slower speed than they’re supposed to? Maybe I just need to update firmware or something (though I haven’t been able to access the fiio forum to download it in a couple days which is super frustrating)Whoops. It was an adblocker issue. I updated and it’s all good now. 😅
I find every firmware update fixes something but also breaks something.
Great they’re working on it but super annoying also.
Some updates crash the mini refreshing my library, and since about 2.7 a lot of multi-CD albums don’t show the tracks in the right order anymore.
Still a fan, but definitely not the easy ride that iTunes + iPod was on that front.
Oh, and cool you can use it as a nifty HQ external DAC also.