I’m trying to quit Spotify and I think I need some new hardware.
I’ve been using Spotify for ages, which has been great, but every so often albums disappear from Spotify, so I’ve kinda desided to go back to flac and mp3’s.
In my car I had an elaborate setup with a wifi dongle and all sorts of fancy stuff, but I got annoyed with all the pop ups asking if I wanted to share my driving music with people on facebook and telling me about new jam feature and all other kind of crap I don’t need to be bothered with, especially not while driving, so I unloaded the Spotify app and stuck a regular old usb stick with all my flac and mp3 into the car audio system and it has been pure bliss. No loading times, no asking for passwords, it just gives me a folder view and lets me press whatever album I’d like to hear, stupidly easy.
Time to rid myself of Spotify on my home setup too.
I’ve tried a bunch of audio players that works with my Ubuntu desktop without finding the right one. I basically just want to double click an album and listen to it. I don’t need flashing graphics and all that jazz, I don’t need recommendations, I don’t care about cover art, I just want to double click an album and have it play, without any extra fuss..
Essentially I want an Ipod Classic that will play mp3 and flac and be able to feed into my amplifier/dac. A hardware device to be next to my computer with the ability for me to scroll to Pink Floyd and listen to Dark Side of the Moon without any extra hassle. I’m thinking maybe get a cheap two channel mixer so I can deside how much Floyd and how much pc sound I want to listen to.
Basically I want to go back to my days with Winamp, but maybe on a hardware device since I haven’t yet found that no fuss mp3/flac playing linux music player that just plays music without having to fiddle around.
There are still one or two dedicated mp3 players out there being made, I installed rockbox to my Surfan F20, it’s sold under a few different brand names on Amazon but if you look at the rockbox website you can identify which ones are compatible. No Internet to distract you, just load up your files and go. One downside to rockbox over the default firmware is loss of Bluetooth headphone support, but the interface is so much more responsive.
I don’t know about hardware players, but on the desktop I’m using Quod Libet to listen to my local music. I view/queue songs by track, but there’s also an album view if you prefer that.
Hey, so I looked into this a few years ago, here is what I found:
Super DIY route: Raspberry Pi Nano, custom code, some buttons, 3d printed case. Make your own. You only do this if you want a project and like electronics.
Go to rockbox.org and look for any of the MP3 players they list there. I had a sansa Clip Zip and it runs rockbox just fine (don’t be afraid to use the leading edge build; once I moved from stable to a more current build so many bugs went away). My clip zip handles flac and mp3s just fine.
A cheap cell phone. Mint mobile has sales where you can get phones for stupid cheap. Or go into Target/Walmart/etc and buy literally any smartphone for $50. Never bother registering it or buying airtime for it. There is no reason it can’t be an Mp3 player with way too many other features. Note: if you go this route, consider doing even a tiny bit of research into alternative bootloaders because those cheap phones tend to be gutless and slow, but some custom roms are optimized for that low end hardware and run quite fast.
Thank you all for some excellent suggestions. I started out with the Quod Libet but when I use the album mode it insists on playing the tracks on the album alphabetically rather than in the order on the actual album - might be a tweeking issue?
Using a tablet has merit too, except I need to figure out how to pipe the music from the tablet to my stereo. I have an old iphone se in a drawer somewhere, that might do well as an “ipod with bluetooth and all that”.. Finally I’ve found a couple of linux based headless audio players to maybe control from my desktop og the tablet.. So many choices.
Anyway, just wanted to respond with gratitude to your suggestions.