Yet, when I want to sit down and actually listen to an album, the phone is often the most frustrating tool in my pocket. Between the constant pings from Slack and the AI-generated discovery feeds that keep trying to shove viral tracks down my throat
Bruh, what? Just have the songs locally like on your iPod; you don’t have to stream, and it’s easier to put on your phone than your iPod. And what do Slack notifs have to do with this? Just turn it on DnD or whatever. In what universe are Slack notifs distracting you less than your phone while you listen on your iPod? If you give that little of a shit about them, you can turn them off.
I can leave for a week-long trip with my iPod and not have to think about bringing a charger along.
??? But you’re already bringing a phone that needs to remain charged?? Playing audio doesn’t drain the battery that hard, and phone batteries nowadays get enough charge that even an absent-minded dipshit like myself barely has to worry about it.
This author is either nostalgia-baiting for clicks or an absolute moron. Using an iPod might be a fun novelty; absolutely the fuck is it not “the best way to enjoy music”. You’re carrying around a separate, fairly large device just for music that probably even has worse audio quality; that’s so unnecessarily cumbersome if I just want to listen to music.
They’re using a ClickWheel with, at most, 40 GB of storage. That’s like
tentwenty FLAC albums. Is what I would say, except: “Since I replaced the original spinning hard drive with a microSD adapter, there are no moving parts and significantly less power draw. I am currently running 512GB of storage paired with a significantly larger battery that lasts weeks, not hours.”So they wait well into the article to tell the audience that they hardmodded their old iPod and that’s why it’s actually viable. What the actual fuck. Basically nobody is going to do that. Even with that hardmodding, the literal only advantage they have here, then, is the ClickWheel – because again, your phone should be charged and always on you in 2026. The ClickWheel is not that special to warrant hardmodding a 2006 iPod and using it separately for music.
Then they have a gargantuan segment whining about streaming as though local storage just doesn’t exist on their phone. It’s literally a non-issue. Right now I’m listening to a FLAC album I got off Bandcamp months ago. On my phone. Because I don’t use streaming services. On my phone.
This piece of shit article could’ve been boiled down to “the haptic feedback on the ClickWheel was cool we should bring that back lol”.
You’re not considering the iPod DAC which is higher quality than most cellphone DACs. Also, thinking 40GB fits 10 FLAC albums is stupid. This isn’t correct even for uncompressed WAV files.
I can’t imagine putting this much effort into complaining about someone using their media player of choice. People like vinyl and even cassettes because they’re a different experience, do you write up paragraphs about that too?
Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine, DACs don’t/shouldn’t affect sound quality, they are just chips that convert a digital signal into the correct analog signal and even dirt cheap ones can do that far better than human hearing is capable of discerning. It is the amp circuit that can have different audio qualities depending on how well or poorly it is implemented.
Also, thinking 40GB fits 10 FLAC albums is stupid.
Sorry, you’re right; it’s more like around 20 of mine.
I can’t imagine putting this much effort into complaining about someone using their media player of choice.
I’m not complaining about their media player of choice; I’m remarking that the way they chose to discuss it in this article – especially being so focused on streaming – is stupid as fuck. Like 50% of this article is spent bitching about non-issues with phones. I don’t even mean “non-issues” in the sense that they don’t annoy me personally; I mean “non-issues” in the sense that this devolves into a comparison not of iPod versus smartphone but of iPod versus streaming, or that they’re talking about it being so convenient not to have to worry about charging a second device. They can enjoy what they want to; the reasons they describe are, for the most part, asinine.
You’re not considering the iPod DAC which is higher quality than most cellphone DACs.
The author of this article certainly did consider DACs: [Modern smartphones have] got […] a DAC chip that is by all measures transparent, near-lossless wireless streaming […]" and that’s the last they mention of the DAC, so they clearly don’t give a shit about the Wolfson.
The fact they chose to wait until the middle of the article to say “yeah btw this thing is hardmodded for the battery and the storage” is so telling. That’d be the first thing I’d mention about a technological comparison.
40GB is over 50 uncompressed CDs. Where are you getting your FLACs?
Ain’t no way your FLAC albums are larger than uncompressed WAV. The only >2GB FLAC albums I have are massive compilations with 50+ tracks. They’re smaller than WAV, and that’s at max 700MB per CD. Spot checking, it looks like most of mine are ~500MB per album.
You either get it or you don’t. Using a dedicated music player feels like treating yourself, whereas using your do-it-all smartphone feels austere. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a nice phone, or if your music player is an old iPod or an old garbage mp3 player or one of those modern DAPs (which are basically android phones with fancy DACs and huge batteries).
I regret selling my old iPod, I would be modding the shit out of it if I’d still had it right now. But alas, it became “obsolete” the moment I got a smartphone with internet connectivity and YouTube and streaming apps.
…And one last thing™: the click wheel was awesome and it was probably the best input solution for a portable music player ever. It was truly special.
Dude, I do get it. I work on PCSX2; I’m around people literally all the time who will use physical hardware for no other reason than that it’s more holistically enjoyable to them. I think it’s super cool. My PS2 console is objectively inferior in every conceivable way that actually matters to me as a player; I will nevertheless sometimes boot it up simply because it’s pleasant and more unique. I buy all of my PS2 games and burn them even though it’s more difficult for mathematically the same outcome. I think it’s cool as hell that the author enjoys using their hardmodded iPod.
What I don’t get is why the article’s arguments for the iPod are so abysmal. It decides to ditch apples-to-apples (local-to-local) and go straight into apple-and-oranges (local-and-streaming) for an inordinate amount of time, decides to frame the iPod’s inconveniences as a convenience (e.g. “don’t have to bring a charger”), and overall gives exactly one valid argument for why the iPod is nicer, namely the ClickWheel. It doesn’t even mention the potentially different feel of the DAC and just gives that as a straight win to the smartphone in a throwaway line.
This sounds like blizzard “dont you guys have phones” ngl
Apple products are great. The Apple ecosystem is not. If you like FOSS, you’re going to have a bad time.
Putting music on my iPhone sucks because iTunes won’t recognize or transfer .FLAC format. File sharing on iPhone is really inconstant and buggy. And I need a whole 3rd party app to get the data moved. Or I can upload things to iCloud 5GB at a time.
The only Apple product I ever had was a 5th gen iPod. I remember having to “sync” it to my iTunes library. The concept of syncing was alien to me at the time, it seemed unnecessarily complicated (and it was!). Of course, I didn’t put up with that crap for long so I installed Rockbox on it. That let me copy files directly. It supported .flac and a whole lot of other formats and it ran DOOM and a Gameboy emulator.
Yeah, I remember hating the syncing. Just fucking let me select the files and drag it over! Then every software company decided that they needed to idiot proof every fucking thing to the same extent over the next 20 years. I fucking hate Apple’s devs for that.
I use LocalSend to transfer the files and play them on the iPhone with VLC. Only issue I have is the iOS file browser doesn’t like filenames or folders with special characters like é or ö.
Flac would be a waste of the limited storage on an IPhone that doesn’t even have the ability to play such high fidelity audio. You are limited to what? Bluetooth or the crappy DAC in the USB-C port with an adapter?
I always kept flac as an archival format, and transcoded when transferring to any device into the best format for that device.
Congrats, I use a DAP instead so im not stuck in 2005 with a 5lb brick
My DAP takes microsd cards so I have 1tb of storage in there, it weighs like 100g and it doubles as a DAC for my pc
It also has physical buttons that I can press without taking it out of my pocket
I see someone is late to the nostalgia-bait articles party… You know that dedicated music players are still a thing now? You don’t have to always use a fucking iPod.
I do like iPods mind you but there are better modern alternatives if you want a daily driver. It’s nice that they want to talk about solutions for people who want to get away from their phone I guess, but a 20-year-old device is not the solution for most people.
For camping out of signal range or Halloween I still rock a SanDisk sansa with a rockbox rom.
Interesting, but I’d have to say that I’ve been contempt just using an app that doesn’t suck (musicolet). The comments about battery could hold a point to me if I were going on a week long trip, or something of the like, but anywhere that would happen for me is somewhere that I wouldn’t be taking music/phone for distractions anyway.
I think the finer point I agree with is being able to just have a copy of your own music and play it without being belt-fed opinions or ads. Managing it is always a bit of a pain, but I’ve got a system that works for me, and MTP on android works better than trying to deal with iTunes in my books.
Use a retired phone with no apps other than your music and the players (New Pipe, Archive Tune, etc) you want. Give your old phones a 2nd life without having to purchase another thing. Connect via WiFi and have a ball.
I use an old MP3 player I got for 5 bucks at a clearance sale and some headbuds from the dollar store. Converted all of my old records, tapes, and CD’s to mp3’s. Any new music I add comes from the public library on CD, and then converted to MP3 when I get home. I also use “youtube” to discover new (old) music, so I know what to get from the library. I also grab a CD I’ve never heard of, from time to time, hoping to trip and stumble onto something great.
I’ll stick with streaming from my Plex server/Plexamp. However, if you’re going to go local just grab a super cheap usb MP3 player and just copy the music to it. No need for iTunes. Simple and quick.
https://www.amazon.ca/Bluetooth-Extension-Multifunctional-Inlcuding-Earphones/dp/B0DHRPF4X6
You actually don’t need iTunes for syncing an iPod. There are many alternatives that can sync to an iPod now. Only firmware reinstalls require it.
Still easier to just copy/paste.
I prefer hosting navidrome and using Nautilus on my modern iphone while still enjoying some technology, also because mp3<FLAC
My phone has a 1TB SD card just for music, I’m currently using (checks notes) 88GB.
But I only really listen to music when I’m driving and that cuts the temptation to check other things.
I can’t put my music on my phone
I have between 4 and 5 terabytes of mostly lossless music.
Navidrome to the rescue!
Couldn’t you convert those to mp3s? Heck I even have a program on my MacBook that lets me convert mp3s to AAC so I can put them on my iPhone via iTunes/Apple Music.
Tf is the point of sourcing lossless music just to compress it down to crap quality so you can carry it around?
We have good enough internet to stream lossless music and the point of owning lossless is to listen to it at lossless quality
Why do you care about having lossless when you are probably just going to listen to it over Bluetooth most of the time on a phone??
USB-C to aux, connected to a good head unit.
Wired > Bluetooth.
Wrong, I use wired IEMs with my phone or digital audio player
I can’t tell the difference between lossless or a high bit rate mp3 unless I got it playing out of high end headphones or speakers that a little phone can’t power lol.
Perish the thought.
Just stop using random playlists of people and start playing albums. Works regardless of the platform, works on local and cloud stored music and makes you appreciate artists again.
And best of all, buy albums you listen to very often on Bandcamp
Stupid!
This person just needs to manage their notifications and phone control better.
Also, while streaming (in my case Spotify) subs may seem expensive, it would be horrendously expensive to use an iPod and buy the amount of music I listen to (and three family members for that matter) instead. Considering the monthly sub, its fantastic value.
Personally, and without having made much effort, the issues mentioned in the article are a non-issue for me. And did I read that the HD and battery need to be modded?
Seems like a classic case of finding a problem for a solution.
