$271,285 raised of $10,000 goal. That’s some pretty good odds of success
Darmok and Jalad, at Tangara?
shaka, when the walls fell
I just received mine a few days ago!
I am excited to have it and start using it but I would also caution people interested in it. It is currently a little rough around the edges software wise but I’m optimistic it will continue to improve with time.
I am personally glad I opted to support this project and while I don’t think I’ll be able to contribute to code I do hope to at least provide beneficial feedback and end user diagnostics.
I also got mine recently! Definitely agree with the rough around the edges part. This is definitely an artisanal, hand-rolled, music player. It… doesn’t seem very durable. Mine rattles when I move it…
I bought it to support open source and because I’m hoping it’ll last a long time. (As long as I don’t move it too much.)
Does anyone here remember Rockbox? I still have my old Sansa player running it.
Mine is also a Sansa! 😁👍
I used to use Sansa clip+ with Rockbox back when the audio quality on my phone was terrible.
I have my iPod 5th gen running on RockBox. IMO it’s even better than the stock firmware because it can play flacs.
It’s a shame rockbox doesn’t support video playback though.
How is stability for you? My 7th gen with about 750gb is pretty unstable, mostly I have a lot of difficulty transferring since the iPod crashes 15gb in all the time.
And ogg and m4a and opus and so many more. I have an ipod 6th gen runnung rockbox. Its great. If the harddrive dies I’ll replace it with sd-cards and still keep uaing it.
I even had Doom running on it. The controls were difficult though
Rockbox is cool, I just wish it was able to replace the base system without touching the UI. Something about it just feels off on an iPod. Even supposedly iPod-accurate themes just feel uncanny.
Same, someone also added a new battery at some point so I have an awesome weeklong working device. And after rockbox, its even better.
I don’t get the appeal of a single-purpose device like this when smartphones are practically mandatory.
As someone who owns a digital audio player I can give some reasons:
- Since most phones don’t come with headphone jacks anymore, it’s nice to have a device you can just plug your wired headphones into. It also means headphone jack inclusion is no longer a factor when choosing a smartphone.
- Better audio quality depending on the DAC inside the device.
- Expandable storage. Most DAPs let you insert one, some even two micro sd cards. No need to stream anything, plus you have space for lossless files.
- No need to worry about data/wifi, your music is always there ready to listen offline.
- Some DAPs are really small (Shanling M0 for example), making them more portable than a phone for a lot of use cases.
- More headphone compatibility. A lot of higher end DAPs support more than a 3.5 mm jack. The Fiio m11 plus for example has a 4.4 and 2.5 balanced output jacks in addition to the standard 3.5 mm.
- Higher power amps to power hungry headphones. A smartphone can’t power say a pair of Sennheiser HD 600s, a DAP can because it comes with a preamp (not all though, depends on the specs).
- Dedicated physical buttons. A touchscreen will never compare to controlling playback with physical buttons.
Though I will say, even as someone who owns one, unless you’re really into carrying your music library with you it’s generally not worth it. But they are nifty little gadgets and new ones come out every year to innovate the space.
It’s similar to an e-reader as others pointed out. Sure, you can read on a phone/tablet as well but it’s nice to have a device that’s purpose built for one thing and does it really well. The same applies to a digital audio player. Yeah you can (and most people are fine with) play music on your smartphone, but a dedicated device does add some nice QoL to the experience.
Ever heard of a kindle?
I see the appeal when your music gets constantly interrupted due to every fucking app wanting to send you notifications to remind you of its existence and those constant messages from work flooding whatever communications tool you’re using.
I also see the appeal for something for kids to give them music without giving them a fill on smart device.
Yes, a phone can do almost anything, but single purpose devices can and should be better for that purpose.
oh fuck, right, i got so used to obliterating apps ability to send notifications and ads that I forgot that’s kind of the baseline experience, yeah.
I realise this isn’t a good solution for everyone, but my phone lives on do not disturb mode and only lets calls through (and even then my phone tends to stay on vibrate). It’s nice, generally leaves me uninterrupted when I’m doing other stuff.
Smartphones rarely have headphone jacks or physical buttons for blind control anymore. They are also too large to fit most pants pockets. Their audio hardware (if it exists) is also usually quite poor.
But I dont wanna use my phone. Usually, I try to keep that as far away as possible.
Eh.
I’d rather have a touch screen. I don’t want retro looks over functionality.
The dedicated digital music player scene is rough right now. A year ago I looked into getting one cuz my iPod finally died and I don’t want to use my phone for music. I wanted touch screen and Android so I could download apps from the app store. It was surprisingly hard to find one. Ended up with a Chinese brand that works, but there’s no support and the screen is real glass and broke already. I like being able to download whatever apps I want and there’s a ton of storage space, but I’d really like some better options.
I wanted touch screen and Android
https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders/walkman-mp3-players/p/nwa306-b
If it’s an iPod classic/video, you can repair them all very easily and there is huge aftermarket support.
But if you want touchscreen and android plus am app store, why not just buy an old smart phone?
best bets probably an aliexpress phone that you dont use as a phone
Honestly, you’re probably right.
I bought one. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t work well with large music libraries. The database building step takes several hours, with no progress indicator, and once it’s done, the scroll wheel does not accelerate, meaning that scrolling through a long list of artists/albums will take a long time. Hopefully these will be remedied in a future firmware.
Holy shit…that seems like day 0 issues. By that I mean issues to address before mass production. Certainly before any customer recieves their product.
To be fair, the Fiio MP3 player I bought in the late 2010s also didn’t have acceleration while scrolling, and never got it in firmware upgrades. I suspect that 80% of the market might only carry small music collections with them, and the other 20% may be regarded as not worth bothering with (except by Rockbox and the original Apple iPod)
Not having a progress indicator on the exceedingly long database building application, though, is a bit harder to excuse.
I love my fiio but it’s very rough around the edges, this might be a weird tale but I love that it doesn’t have speakers and I can’t accidentally blast my very unique taste in music in public
Easier and cheaper to flash mod a Gen5/Gen7 iPod and put Rockbox on it. Looks better too.
Yes, but we desperately need a thriving ecosystem of open source devices. With the way electronics are going - for example, being forced to agree to a new license agreement before being able to use a device I already purchased, and the agreement forces arbitration for disputes? We need more people working on enshittification-proof devices.
Those mods don’t look particularly easy. I’ve seen the results of mods gone awry on a few 7th gens.
Also interesting that they don’t add Flac in the supported files for the iPods but mention RockBox.
I love it. Thanks for sharing, I hadn’t heard about this.
This would be cool to load up with 10s of thousands of songs and to just leave tethered to your home HiFi system
While I do do electronics, I’m not amazing at it, but, I always wonder how the UIs are so clunky and slow on a processor that outpaces a Pentium 1 ,which would run Windows 95…
What was the thinking behind full sized SDXC cards instead of micro sdxc like damn near every other device made this side of 2011?
I suspect due to them being easier to handle and easy to plugs into laptops that still have an SD card reader. Since most Micro SD cards come with a full size adapter anyway, it doesn’t really seem to have any downside to go with fullsize.
You can adapt a micro sd into a full-sized right?
ouuuu that looks rly cool! Right in the vein of Pine64.
I like that despite only supporting SBC for now, they are looking to expand the Bluetooth codec support with updates. I think LDAC might be a no-brainer here, since it’s royalty free and the encoder is open iirc
Tangara also has basic Bluetooth SBC audio support, with more modern codecs possible via future firmware updates.
Well SBC is basically useless so I hope the development is not too far away in the future. I see it’s Bluetooth v4.2 but as far as I know the best codec available compresses down to 1 Mbps but v4.2 supports up to 3Mbps and v5 up to 6 Mbps so still room for improvements but that’s up to headphone manufacturers to support these future codec.
$250 ‽!
no, thanks
If you look at the comparison models, it seems pretty competitive for an audiophile.
iPod was 400 or 500 when it came out.
But we got much better technology in that time, you can get a 512gb sd card for $30-40 nowadays compared to when the iPhone came out that a 1gb thumb drive would have $10-20
In the early 2000s. Depending on the generation that’s around 800-900 dollars in today’s dollars.
That’s crazy when you put it like that. $900 to be locked into apple’s iTunes hellscape.
