Standalone music player

👉 This project has turned out incredibly expensive and has been put on pause. My current goal is to change my listening habits instead, and repurpose the devices I already own.

I am looking for ways to listen to music as a foreground activity, without being distracted by phone or computer functions. First thing that comes to mind is to get an MP3 player, and surely there's still a few on the market.

It's not a completely dead industry. There are a few niche devices that are marketed as DAPs (digital audio players), and the marketing machinery behind them caters to audiophiles. Truth is, I'm no audiophile. If it sounds on par with an OG iPod, it is good enough for me.

I find the following criteria more important:

• I should be a pre-owned device.
• It should have a battery life of 20+ hours.
• It should provide 80-100 GB of storage.
• It should not have internet access by design.
• Bonus: the device should work well with AirPods Pro.

Used iPod Classic online are priced anything between 10€ and 150€ and they can be customized quite generously. The standard tweaks include jucier batteries, MicroSD instead of the fragile HDD and of course colorful enclosures. Some advanced projects add bluetooth and wireless charging:

I was feeling lucky, so I picked up a 6th gen classic with a broken screen from an online ad for 10€, ignoring some obvious red flags. In hindsight, it was either a mix of a few broken units, or one unit that suffered water damage. It did power up but it didn't produce any sounds and didn't connect to computer.

Anyway, after the first round of tweaks and case manipulations, the device looked likes this:

The error on the screen meant that the ribbon cable connecting the HDD to the motherboard was dead. I had to put in a second order, pay the UPS fee once more, and carefully disassemble the device again to replace it.

After the replacement ribbon was installed, the device was finally functioning but I still couldn't use it. I noticed that it was making a sound similar to what a dead HDD makes, with the only exception that the HDD was replaced with an SD card a while ago.

The sound is coming from the chip next to the audio jack, and it smells burnt electronics in that area. The original audio jack has the same problem, so it must be a faulty motherboard. As it is, the device is dangerous to use – the battery can set on fire.

At this point I give up. The project is 99% complete but getting hold of a new motherboard can be expensive, and I lack the skill to debug it further if anything else goes wrong.

👉 Let me know if you could help me debug the remaining problems either remotely or in Berlin!

Here's what was required for the project:

The total cost of the project is somewhere around 320€ and roughly 1/3 of it was paid to customs and delivery.

Lessons learned:

• You should source a device without issues for your first project.
• The parts are hard to source locally.
  • Online shops ship from North America -> customs and shipping fees add up quickly.
  • Elite Obsolete Electronics is the one I used and can approve.
  • Buying a donor device might be cheaper.
• The 6th/7th generation iPods are abundant BUT the enclosure is really hard to open.
  • Consider 5th gen or earlier.
• The transparent enclosures were made for the 5th gen midframe (the metal part inside of the iPod).
  • You can use most parts of the 6th gen with the 5th gen but the wheel won't be perfectly flush with the front panel.
• HDDs, screens, batteries and ribbon cables are the first parts to die.
  • If unsure why you can't turn your iPod on, consider each of these.

Alternatively, I could consider one of the modern Sony Walkmans. Simply put, these are just bulky Android phones with everything that comes with it. The decent ones are prohibitivly expensive and hard to find used. Most cheap options don't have a good battery life, sufficient storage, and/or Bluetooth.

A middle ground could have been a used iPod Touch but has internet connectivity and the App Store, and I'm afraid it would quickly turn into an all-purpose computer because of that. Also, the device is officially discontinued and disregarded by Apple and there is no aftermarket firmware available for it to my knowledge.

Other links #

• Tangara - an open source, open hardware ESP32-based player reminiscent of iPod.
  • The device is in a pre-production phase and should become available soon
  • Bluetooth, up to 2TB SDXC storage
  • 3D-printable enclosure
• Rockbox - an open source firmware for iPods and other DAPs.
  • I remember installing it on an iPod Nano back in 2006. It looked cool but the battery vanished almost instantly, which may or may not be because of the games that came with it.