Do people still use MP3 players?

[jmlee]

I've never done a side by side of that version of the service. AAC is still a lossy format. I would lean towards Tidal or Qobuz to avoid that.
As a musician I'm unhappy about the royalties streaming services pay, so I still prefer to buy CDs or digital downloads of HiRez flacs.

With you on that. I have a great and growing wall of vinyl and CDs, much transcribed to FLAC or Apple Lossless on my devices. Never been pro myself but my brother was and many of my playing buddies rely on actual media sales to supplement meager incomes.

 

[MultiScaleMale]

I've never done a side by side of that version of the service. AAC is still a lossy format. I would lean towards Tidal or Qobuz to avoid that.
As a musician I'm unhappy about the royalties streaming services pay, so I still prefer to buy CDs or digital downloads of HiRez flacs.

Please tell me you're not listening to Tidal with bluetooth headphones. I've seen people doing that instead of using a DAC and just shook my head.

 

[brianrost]

I still have an older iPod Touch but stopped using it when Spotify would no longer run on it.

I use my iPhone now to listen to music in the car since the CD player died, either iTunes playlists or Spotify playlists. It works just like an iPod Touch with a phone built in

In my living room I have an Onkyo receiver with built in wifi. I use it for Spotify, TuneIn Radio and playing music files off a network disk with my iPhone or my laptop as a remote control.

 

[TrevorR]

When my 160GB iPod died I got an Astell&Kern A&Norma SR-15. Love it! Great quality, huge storage capacity with a micro SD card added and Bluetooth too! My main music source in house as well as out and about.

 

[Polkatronixx]

I used to buy MP3 players up until roughly 10 years ago and I loved them. But after a while they became harder to find. As in, finding them in stores.

Did a better method come along? Such as Spotify or some kind of online storage?

I still like the idea of a smaller device dedicated to music that is light and easy to carry.

To be honest, I've gone back to traditional radio. Yes, for 10 years. But if I could find a good player to hold lots of music, maybe hundreds of albums. Or perhaps a way of selecting a dozen albums at a time, and then switching them out each day. If that's easy to do.

I'd even be open to online options, none of which I have used, with the exception of youtube.

Thanks for any suggestions.

I use my phone, which is an MP3 player I believe, as I am opposed to Spotify and cannot stream under ground.

 

[ElectroVibe]

Why?

An MP3 player is a tiny computer with a Music app. A phone is a not-as-tiny computer with lots of apps, including a phone app. (Actually, if you want to get technical, it's a two-way radio app.)

Both devices play music from a chip, drive, card, etc. I can store thousands of songs on my phone. I can't think of one single advantage of a standalone device for musoc playback.... not a good one anyway.

I meant that you were using it for more than just recreation.

 

[socialleper]

Please tell me you're not listening to Tidal with bluetooth headphones. I've seen people doing that instead of using a DAC and just shook my head.

Only at the gym. My Sennheiser Momentum IE 2 IEMs do aac and apt-x bluetooth codecs.

My phone works well enough with my Tin T2 and Blon Bl03 IEM, but not my CA Polaris v2 IEM. I use those on a Hiby DAP with a pentaconn cable.
At home I have a Schiit DAC and Schiit tube amp. And then HD6xx, He4xx, DT990 Pro, and LCD-X headphones. B&W 607 speakers connected to a Denon amp, which is connected to the Schiit DAC, and then my PC. Most of my music is ripped to the PC, but I use Tidal for things that are too hard to find, or demoing music before I buy it.

 

[ElectroVibe]

10-15 years ago, I had a Creative Zen Nano Plus—what an annoyingly long, up-its-own-ass name—but it was great for working outside. I used it a lot. I also liked that it had a line input for direct recording stereo audio-to-.mp3. That turned out to more useful for recording guitar and bass ideas than loading music.

I just uncovered that thing in a drawer a few weeks ago and realized I couldn’t remember why I stopped using it. I put a new battery in it and it powered up, but the screen was screwy and some of the controls were unresponsive. Oh well, it earned its keep.

Creative Labs Zen was my favorite brand by far.

 

[ElectroVibe]

I don't use my phone for music, camera and texts mostly.

I still have a Zen (from Walmart) that I think I paid $20 for. It's around 10 years old and still chugs along. I use it daily when I walk during my lunch break. It has a radio too. I've been through alot of sets of ear buds. When this one does finally kick off I'll shop hard to find another.

In my job I am constantly interrupted by or using the phone so like to get away from all contact on my break. And the Zen is way smaller than my cell phones.

Another Zen for the win !

 

[bolophonic]

I still have a couple of iPods that I take with me everywhere. This can’t be THAT strange or antiquated.

 

[JamesAG]

Wait! What? MP3 players are still a *thing*?

I have about 30 GB of MP3 music on a microSD card in my Android phone and use that when I'm on my bicycle or motorcycle...

 

[tpaul]

I use a Sony Walkman digital media player for practice. I got it used on Ebay. There are LOTS of these things on Ebay of all makes and models, and used ones are pretty cheap. I did a little research and bought one that got good user reviews. It holds lots of music and it's easy to find things by album or artist. I load it up by downloading songs from my laptop (from ripped CDs or digital music I've bought and downloaded). It's about the size of a credit card. I play it through a little headphone amp so I can practice with it.

 

[Eli_Kyiv]

BTW my son still has this Sansa e280 I bought for him when he was 18. Does not use it often I think, but anyway.

 

[ElectroVibe]

I'm definitely not the norm, but I used my phone, and then when I got a new phone, I converted my old one to a mp3 player.

My personal digital collection is in excess of 3,000 records (I'm not exactly sure how many at this point). I still purchase albums digitally because I want to own them and not be beholden to some streaming service. I backup my audio library to my physical data backup whenever I add new albums to it, and have done so for more than a decade. Streams are typically at lower quality audio than I prefer too, so that's a thing too.

My phone/player is 64 gigs, so I'm carrying 400+ albums with me wherever I drive. I swap stuff out pretty frequently. I have android and use mediamonkey mobile as the player, as I use the desktop version as my music management.

If I had that many in my collection, I might as well just go to streaming radio for the variety.

 

[WI Short Scaler]

Another Zen for the win !

The thing is scratched to crap and a crack in the screen but just keeps chunking.

 

[ElectroVibe]

I'm thinking more seriously about Sirius. Is it really that much better than free internet radio?

My ideal would be a small device dedicated to streaming. No camera. No phone or text. No interruptions on the listening device.

 

[ElectroVibe]

I really like my portable radio as much as anything it seems. Weeks of use on a single AA battery.

 

[thisheregiraffe]

I've gone through a couple Sony USB MP3 players over the last 10+ years or so. My first one lasted a long time! Eventually it had to be replaced a few years ago, but now I seem to have mis-placed the replacement. I stopped listening to music when I was exercising, running, etc. so I don't have as many uses for it anymore. It'll turn up eventually.

I like these because they're so easy to work with. I don't use iTunes, and I don't want to be forced to use some clunky music management software that some other MP3 players might be tied to. Just plug it in, drag and drop to the folder in Explorer, easy peasy.

 

[BassFishingInAmerica]

Just wanted to say that the best sound for a portable music player is with the old Sony MiniDisc players (it now seems to have a cult following). I’m still using the one I purchased about 25 years ago. If I convert a CD to the ATRAC format (Adaptive TRansform Acoustic Coding) that it uses, It somehow ends up sounding better than the CD (I always figured it had something to do with Sony’s digital conversion tech). I would recommend it for any audiophile types.

 

[Tommy V]

for the longest time, i used google locker and uploaded all of my ripped music to it, and streamed it using google music.. that came to a screeching halt when google moved all that to youtube music, and "lost" about 10,000 of my files.. i was freaking livid, to say the least.
since then, i've not trusted cloud storage for anything whatsoever.

i'm back to using my phone as a really expensive mp3 player, and honestly, it works better for me this way.. no 'blackouts' if i'm too far between towers, and the audio quality is exactly as i ripped it, without all the excessive file compression that cloud servers insist on to keep the streams manageable.