This is a really interesting read. But it doesn't answer one question I have, which is why can't Sony or Apple or anyone else bring back decent MP3 players? None of this technology is lost, and there are plenty of small-time two bit no name players out there still making them, often in a much smaller, much slicker form factor than than the original digital Walkman or iPod.<p>If I want to buy a new MP3 player, I have to buy something from a company I've never heard of with a terrible screen, use an old phone, or buy some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much.<p>Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
> If I want to buy a new MP3 player, I have to buy something from a company I've never heard of with a terrible screen, use an old phone, or buy some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much.<p>Is this surprising?<p>They are a commodity (you can literally build a fairly decent for less than $10 in parts) so therefore are low profit. Brands you have heard of generally don't want to play in commodity markets.<p>The alternative is to move upmarket where prestige or specific features are important:<p>> some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much.<p>There you go.<p>> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?<p>They can and do. Look on Amazon.<p>They call into the two buckets you outline above. Just buy one of the $50 ones from the companies you haven't heard of.
My understanding is there are decent MP3 players by places like Fiio at this point? Haven't used any of em in anger though<p>Though I have a walkman (that kinda sucks cuz it's android.... it's (USB-C AND annoying Android OS) XOR (Proprietary charging cable) from Sony nowadays<p>> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?<p>Sony Walkmans are this, along with a bunch of the random mp3 players you would find on amazon. I don't know why some other people replying to you are acting like this doesn't exist.
IDK I've got some rando Chinese product that looks pretty much exactly like a late-2000s iPod "classic" and has some fairly generic Android interface including a decent music player. I think it cost like $40.
There's an irony here, because Sony do make MP3 Walkmans based on Android: <a href="https://electronics.sony.com/audio/c/walkman-digital-recorders" rel="nofollow">https://electronics.sony.com/audio/c/walkman-digital-recorde...</a>
they do. tons of them. <a href="https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-mp3-player.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-mp3-player.html</a>
<i>Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?</i><p>Because you can do that with any phone and just not use the phone part?
Because I want something half the size of a phone. I don't need a giant screen, I just want a player that can do music or audiobooks and be light enough to run with.<p>I find myself researching, trying to find the smallest lightest old phone that either has decent internal memory or a micro SD slot, but it's not easy. Most phones are massive compared to an iPod shuffle
There are a ton of these and they're all behind your "company I've never heard of" blind spot.
Here's a one in close to the form factor of the last iPod Shuffle: <a href="https://www.fiio.com/m5" rel="nofollow">https://www.fiio.com/m5</a>
you could use a smart watch, not nearly as much storage but for playing music while running it can work well enough.
> If I want to buy a new MP3 player, I have to buy something from a company I've never heard of with a terrible screen, use an old phone, or buy some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much.<p>I recently got the Shanling M0s. It runs its own OS and seems to me completely at parity with what MP3 players used to be back in the day; in fact I think it's the best one I've ever had, and I've been buying those devices since the Diamond Rio. If more people just got one, Shanling would no longer be a company nobody's ever heard of, and the economics would change to further bring down the price too (although I think it's not all that bad right now).
MP3s have been on the way out for a long time, being replaced by music subscriptions. And "MP3 player" is a feature of other devices, not its own device. Both my Apple Watch and Garmin watch can store and play MP3s without a phone; both also support music subscriptions.<p>The only market is in the "enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much", just like it is currently for vinyls and DVD players.
> MP3s have been on the way out for a long time, being replaced by music subscriptions<p>I both have music subscriptions (Spotify for the wife, Qobuz for me: Qobuz streams lossless but sucks for music discovery) and good old files (mostly FLAC files indeed except some very old, impossible-to-find, live recordings I only have in mp3). One does not prevent the other.<p>Also some people self-host or partially self-host things: you stream from a server you own: be it family pictures (I'm Mich / immich), movies and/or music (Plex or Jellyfin). And, well, the stream doesn't spring out of thin air: there are good old files on the server.<p>Lastly: some music streaming services allows you to buy albums and/or individual songs, DRM-free.
Have you looked at fiio? They’ve been doing it a while and aren’t crazy expensive <a href="https://www.fiio.com/player" rel="nofollow">https://www.fiio.com/player</a><p><a href="https://a.co/d/055SGJE1" rel="nofollow">https://a.co/d/055SGJE1</a>
I think you’ll find that is what modern Walkmans are…
The iPod was a product in an interesting time... if you ignore the screen, a modern mp3 player could be made as small as a SD card... as soon as you add the screen, you need a full operating system to manage files and run the screen. Nobody wants to put the effort into something that's going to be as basic as a mp3 player.
> as soon as you add the screen, you need a full operating system to manage files and run the screen<p>More software? Sure. An operating system? No. There were (are?) plenty of cheap MP3 players that had screens but just drive it with some budget microcontroller.
It barely needs a screen. I adored my minidisc players and they were all basically calculator displays
Would you still adore it as much today, though? I know I don't adore my iPod classic as much now as I did in 2006, and that's inclusive of the nostalgia kick. It's just not very practical and usable in today's world.
I still adore the hell out of my 512GB (SD) iPod Classic/Minis<p>You can buy new shells, colors, storage adapters, batteries, etc.<p><a href="https://github.com/jmonster/podhnologic" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jmonster/podhnologic</a>
I don't use it daily, but I enjoyed rediscovering and using my MiniDisc stuff that I was inspired to build a pretty popular website around it :)
I find this seriously underestimates what jackets 6 will undertake for fun, even unpaid.
These companies did everything they could to get people off the "I own files I paid once" model and onto the perpetual "I pay for streaming" model. Of course they dont want to go back to that. It goes against the profit incentive which dictates all business decisions. That's how capitalism works on its most fundamental level.
The demand isn’t that high for so much effort?
My "MP3 player" is a phone with Musicolet. If you really distrust phones, you can buy a cheap phone and use it only for that and nothing else. There are probably other offline MP3 players but this one seems pretty good. (It is hard to find a phone with an SD card slot and a headphone jack but that's a separate issue.)
I don't understand the question, Sony still sells a product line of both premium and cheaper mp3 player devices?<p>Although FiiO is probably the company to look at for these kind of products.
> ... why can't Sony or Apple or anyone else bring back decent MP3 players?<p>I know the late 90s called and want their MP3 straight out of Napster and their 10 GB HDD back but you can safely up the ante to lossless FLAC files.<p>MP3 is, literally, 30+ years old and I traded my 10 GB HDD for a 1 TB NVMe SSD that could read an uncompressed dump of my entire 10 GB HDD in about two seconds.<p>FLAC files are only about 2x the size of 320 kbps mp3.<p>Really, it's 2026. We can do it (I do it).
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