If I wanted an MP3 player again, in 2023, and wanted to rip cds to it and put digitally purchased albums on it, as actual owned files (not inside an proprietary ecosystem where I pay to only listen to that track within that service) could I still do that?
What would I need?
I don’t own, and can’t afford, a “real computer”, but i recall having lots of compatibility issues at the time between my mp3 player and computer os anyway. I’ve got an ipad and a pixel. Is there any feasible, non-ridiculously-difficult way to do this? Do they still sell any mp3 players? Do any of the old ones work with modern tech? I miss hearing my music on a simple, quiet, offline device without ads or streaming services.
Here’s a cheap Sandisk one and here’s a cheap Sony one. I’d probably just install foobar2000 on your phone though. They also sell USB CD drives that you can pick up for cheap. I’m sure there’s plenty of Android apps that can rip CDs.
I hadn’t looked into it, as I’d gotten used to assuming that my phones won’t have the memory space for music - but that’s a smart idea. I’ll have to look into that.
Just pirate the music you want as mp3 files directly on your phone. No computer required. And if you only have a small amount of storage on your phone you can download like a hundred songs and then delete the ones you’re tired of to make room for new ones, and if you ever wanna hear the old songs again you can just download them again.
MP3s compress pretty well, depending on the bitrate you rip your CDs at. Your Pixel should be able to easily store upwards of 300 hours of audio without much issue.
Most phones ship with at least 64GB of storage and songs aren’t very big files
You’ll probably have like 25+GB free and that’s enough for a lot of songs.
Let’s say the file sizes are 2.5MB per minute (which is pretty close to standard for high quality MP3s) then you could fit 10000 minutes of music on there. So if your songs are on average 5 minutes long then you could fit 2000 songs on there.
On my phone music takes up 14.95GB for 1,132 songs which on average is around 13.5MB per song. Great majority of it is 320K MP3s, but it is all over the place. The worst one is 32K AAC, and the best one is 24-bit 96kHz FLAC.
You can simply load up mp3 files into a spare/old phone (or your present phone/iPad) and use vlc media player. Your phone will be your mp3 player. I do the exact same thing with old phones lying at home.
MP3s compress down a lot, as low as 1 meg a minute for acceptable quality depending on the content. Newer codecs like Opus and AAC can easily do that with much better quality, and your Pixel will definitely be able to play them.
Opus consistently impresses me with how good audio sounds at ridiculous compression levels, both music and speech. 4 minutes of music not even breaking 900k and it sounds just as good as the ol’ 128kbps mp3s, and that’s stereo. Can’t even imagine how much you could squeeze down mono audiobooks.
You can buy MP3 players on Aliexpress. They still make them and they are not expensive, and you can even get bluetooth compatible ones.
I recently went about trying to do what you’re doing. I have a laptop and it was still pretty hard. Just buying digital music is tricky. I ended up downloading iTunes for some music, and buying others from Bandcamp for the few artists I could find on there.
I can still see problems. Without a computer, how will you transfer the files onto the MP3 player? Without a CD drive, how will you rip CDs?
I think you’re going to need to borrow a computer from a friend, but other than that it’s all feasible if a little annoying.
Yeah…I was hoping by now that maybe they made mp3 players by now that could sync to phones or tablets. I’m not above transferring files slowly and a few at a time - I used to type in the song names manually haha so it can’t be much worse. CDs are trickier. But I’m glad to know it was annoying but feasible. They really have made owning media such a high effort thing. Sigh.
You already have a bunch of answers so I’m gonna go one further and guess your next question “Can I stream these mp3s around the house using free and open source software too?”
In theory, any MP3 player / DAP that can have music loaded onto it by drag and drop could work with your iPad (assuming you have the means to connect it, of course).
But there are a number of things to consider.
Firstly; storage. Obviously, your iPad doesn’t have expandable storage, so depending on the size of your collection, you might run out of space. Using the same method you’ll need to connect the player to your iPad, you can hook up an external drive of some description. Files should be able to see it (as long as it’s formatted to exFAT or FAT). From there, using Files you can simply drag from one place to another.
However, this doesn’t allow you to change metadata or anything. There are apps you can download that will allow you to do it, but it can be a pain in the ass if you’ve got quite a bit of music.
Finally, there’s where you get the music from.
If you buy from somewhere like Bandcamp, then you can download directly to your iPad, though they don’t make it easy. You can’t buy from iTunes because the app won’t let you open them in Files. Torrents are obviously out, so is CD ripping, as there are no CD drivers for iPad that I’m aware of.
So while it’s entirely possible to run a DAP with just an iPad, it’s kind of a pain in the arse, unless you already have a ready supply of music and it’s either already tagged well, or you don’t really care about that sort of thing. As others have suggested, it might be just as easy for you to pick up a cheap PC. It doesn’t need to have any bells and whistles, just the ability to store music and have some way of managing the library.
Double post, but focusing more on the real computer. Do you have access to a library? Sometimes they have computers people can use. You might be able to load a program to rip onto a USB stick and run it portably (that is, without installing it onto the computer.) Not ideal, but if it’s Windows I think Windows Media Player can rip CDs natively.
In that case, bring in the CDs and the MP3 player, rip the CDs, then load them all at the library. There might even be CDs at the library you can check out as well.
I think you’ll need a “real computer” to act as host device. Having said that, you could use a Raspberry Pi to be your “real computer”. You might be able to fake something out, but an MP3 player will usually act as a storage device, and another device will have to act as host to load it with files. You might find an MP3 player that can connect to some cloud service, but that undermines the whole point.
I’ve currently got 2 functioning MP3 devices. Well, technically 1, since I gave one to my dad.
The one I gave to my dad is this guy, a Sandisk Sansa Clip. It connects as an MTP device via USB cable. Copy files into it’s storage, disconnect, and go. Any computer capable of acting as an MTP host should work.
The one still in my possession is an earlier version of this one, the Mixxtape. They are regularly on sale for around $60 USD IIRC, so not the cheapest, but it can also play back via a tape deck, like my very first MP3 player, the Digisette Duo Aria MP3 player, with a whopping 32MB of storage! I guess my first MP3 player wasn’t the most capable, but the Mixxtape evokes that nostalgia for me, plus is far more capable. Again, it mounts as an MTP storage device, so any other device capable of hosting an MTP connection should work.
As to your comment on OS, I’ve been using Linux primarily for well over a decade, and it supports MTP just fine. The only problem you’ll run into is older MP3 players from before USB Mass Storage Class (MSC), Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) and Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) were widespread. I think some early models had custom file transfer schemes. That hasn’t been a thing for well over a decade. Except maybe for iDevices. Apple (as always) is special. From my experience, plugging any MSC/PTP/ or MTP device into just about any Linux computer will “just work”. It should “just work” for Windows as well.
Finally, a “real computer”. Something like a Raspberry Pi 400 kit should work fine, but there are also lots of perfectly fine ex-office computers for sale refurbished at similar prices. Best Buy also has refurbs. An old laptop would work as well. You might be able to use the Pixel to host. I know the Pixel supports USB-OTG or whatever the successor protocol is, allowing it to act as a USB host for limited power devices. Only way to find out is to try.
As an 80s kid, that Mixxtape just blew me away 🤯😍 Talk about must-own gadgets that I absolutely don’t need! Man, that’s slick!
Analog playback, insane 😳😍
Now I just need Paulthings to make the Mixxtape’s older sister: a digital to analog reel-to-reel tape 😱 Maybe call it the 2real2reel? REELxREEL?
I saw a product mock-up years back of a digital device shaped like a roll of 35mm camera film. The concept was that you insert it into your old analog 35mm camera instead of film, and it turns the camera into a digital one. Basically a universal digital SLR back. Was heartbroken when it turned out it was just a concept with no plans to create it. I’d go and buy an old Pentax 35mm SLR faster than the guy in the Mixxtape video can dish out Yo Mamma jokes.
I’ll see if I can find it. I still think it would be the most revolutionary camera gadget to come out in ages; imagine being able to take any old 35mm camera and turn it digital in an instant 😮❤️ Old cameras on eBay would quadruple in price overnight.
The biggest problem I can see with this digital back idea is that full frame sensors are hella expensive and require a lot more electronics than could fit in that space. This 20MP sensor, for instance, is $4000 by itself.
Yeah, just get an MP3 player that uses an SD card, and copy your MP3 files to the card.
The question is, where are your files? Are they already on your phone or iPad? If not, you have the challenge of ripping from a USB CD player to the iPad or Pixel. I have no idea what software can do that, but there are apps on the Google Play store that claim to be able to.
Sounds like a great opportunity to dig up an old laptop and use Linux, though. I’ve got a couple of USB DVD readers sitting in a drawer that I pull out for these jobs, they’ve worked fine for years.
The new term is “digital audio player”. http://www.reddit.com/r/digitalaudioplayer is a good community for that. mp3s are out, if you want a really small file size, opus has better quality. If quality is more important than file size, rip to FLAC. I know at least for android, there are music player apps like musicolet and poweramp that will allow you to play songs from your phone if you have the storage space. The old ones work with modern computers. You can buy reconditioned ipods on ebay, but the new ones are better IMO. For ripping music a good community is http://www.reddit.com/r/musichoarder
So then just get a real computer. Go to goodwill or ebay and get yourself one of those $20 HP desktops the size of a book. It will be more than adequate for putting music on an MP3 player.
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If you wanna make your life more painful, you could do this with a playdate! It’s even got themes!
Neat. Does the playdate even have a headphone jack?
Yep! It’s got mic input on the jack too, a few people have been writing recording tools for it
Here’s a cheap Sandisk one and here’s a cheap Sony one. I’d probably just install foobar2000 on your phone though. They also sell USB CD drives that you can pick up for cheap. I’m sure there’s plenty of Android apps that can rip CDs.
Your iPad is an MP3 player, but as far as ripping a CD, first you need a USB CD drive, which is easy enough to get.
BUT… iOS doesn’t recognize optical drives, so once you have the USB drive, you need some other device to connect it to in order to rip the CDs.
Could be something like a Steam Deck or an inexpensive laptop or Chrome Book.
Once you rip the files to the device, you need to probably upload them to cloud storage accessible by both that device and the iPad.
Once the files are transferred to the iPad, you should be good to go!
Do you need an mp3 player?
Power to you if you’re doing it for giggles and shits, but can’t you load VLC onto that Pixle of yours?
Or a dedicated audio player app like Vinyl
I hadn’t looked into it, as I’d gotten used to assuming that my phones won’t have the memory space for music - but that’s a smart idea. I’ll have to look into that.
Just pirate the music you want as mp3 files directly on your phone. No computer required. And if you only have a small amount of storage on your phone you can download like a hundred songs and then delete the ones you’re tired of to make room for new ones, and if you ever wanna hear the old songs again you can just download them again.
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Hahahaha
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MP3s compress pretty well, depending on the bitrate you rip your CDs at. Your Pixel should be able to easily store upwards of 300 hours of audio without much issue.
You’ll have enough room for sure
Most phones ship with at least 64GB of storage and songs aren’t very big files
You’ll probably have like 25+GB free and that’s enough for a lot of songs.
Let’s say the file sizes are 2.5MB per minute (which is pretty close to standard for high quality MP3s) then you could fit 10000 minutes of music on there. So if your songs are on average 5 minutes long then you could fit 2000 songs on there.
4gb of storage is infinite music, just use your phone
On my phone music takes up 14.95GB for 1,132 songs which on average is around 13.5MB per song. Great majority of it is 320K MP3s, but it is all over the place. The worst one is 32K AAC, and the best one is 24-bit 96kHz FLAC.
Re-encode everything above 192 Kbps to Opus 128 Kbps and thank me later
I have at least 70gb of music on my phone
Probably is an audiophile with a FLAC collection 😄
Ah yes, FLAC users always eventually accept mp3 as the superior format 😄.
You can simply load up mp3 files into a spare/old phone (or your present phone/iPad) and use vlc media player. Your phone will be your mp3 player. I do the exact same thing with old phones lying at home.
MP3s compress down a lot, as low as 1 meg a minute for acceptable quality depending on the content. Newer codecs like Opus and AAC can easily do that with much better quality, and your Pixel will definitely be able to play them.
Oh, hell. Opus is totally awesome.
Opus consistently impresses me with how good audio sounds at ridiculous compression levels, both music and speech. 4 minutes of music not even breaking 900k and it sounds just as good as the ol’ 128kbps mp3s, and that’s stereo. Can’t even imagine how much you could squeeze down mono audiobooks.
You can buy MP3 players on Aliexpress. They still make them and they are not expensive, and you can even get bluetooth compatible ones.
I recently went about trying to do what you’re doing. I have a laptop and it was still pretty hard. Just buying digital music is tricky. I ended up downloading iTunes for some music, and buying others from Bandcamp for the few artists I could find on there.
I can still see problems. Without a computer, how will you transfer the files onto the MP3 player? Without a CD drive, how will you rip CDs?
I think you’re going to need to borrow a computer from a friend, but other than that it’s all feasible if a little annoying.
Yeah…I was hoping by now that maybe they made mp3 players by now that could sync to phones or tablets. I’m not above transferring files slowly and a few at a time - I used to type in the song names manually haha so it can’t be much worse. CDs are trickier. But I’m glad to know it was annoying but feasible. They really have made owning media such a high effort thing. Sigh.
most phones these days are an mp3 player. even my flip phones back to my first cdma one ~ 20 years ago.
You already have a bunch of answers so I’m gonna go one further and guess your next question “Can I stream these mp3s around the house using free and open source software too?”
https://www.picoreplayer.org/
Bless you
In theory, any MP3 player / DAP that can have music loaded onto it by drag and drop could work with your iPad (assuming you have the means to connect it, of course).
But there are a number of things to consider.
Firstly; storage. Obviously, your iPad doesn’t have expandable storage, so depending on the size of your collection, you might run out of space. Using the same method you’ll need to connect the player to your iPad, you can hook up an external drive of some description. Files should be able to see it (as long as it’s formatted to exFAT or FAT). From there, using Files you can simply drag from one place to another.
However, this doesn’t allow you to change metadata or anything. There are apps you can download that will allow you to do it, but it can be a pain in the ass if you’ve got quite a bit of music.
Finally, there’s where you get the music from.
If you buy from somewhere like Bandcamp, then you can download directly to your iPad, though they don’t make it easy. You can’t buy from iTunes because the app won’t let you open them in Files. Torrents are obviously out, so is CD ripping, as there are no CD drivers for iPad that I’m aware of.
So while it’s entirely possible to run a DAP with just an iPad, it’s kind of a pain in the arse, unless you already have a ready supply of music and it’s either already tagged well, or you don’t really care about that sort of thing. As others have suggested, it might be just as easy for you to pick up a cheap PC. It doesn’t need to have any bells and whistles, just the ability to store music and have some way of managing the library.
Double post, but focusing more on the real computer. Do you have access to a library? Sometimes they have computers people can use. You might be able to load a program to rip onto a USB stick and run it portably (that is, without installing it onto the computer.) Not ideal, but if it’s Windows I think Windows Media Player can rip CDs natively.
In that case, bring in the CDs and the MP3 player, rip the CDs, then load them all at the library. There might even be CDs at the library you can check out as well.
I think you’ll need a “real computer” to act as host device. Having said that, you could use a Raspberry Pi to be your “real computer”. You might be able to fake something out, but an MP3 player will usually act as a storage device, and another device will have to act as host to load it with files. You might find an MP3 player that can connect to some cloud service, but that undermines the whole point.
I’ve currently got 2 functioning MP3 devices. Well, technically 1, since I gave one to my dad.
The one I gave to my dad is this guy, a Sandisk Sansa Clip. It connects as an MTP device via USB cable. Copy files into it’s storage, disconnect, and go. Any computer capable of acting as an MTP host should work.
The one still in my possession is an earlier version of this one, the Mixxtape. They are regularly on sale for around $60 USD IIRC, so not the cheapest, but it can also play back via a tape deck, like my very first MP3 player, the Digisette Duo Aria MP3 player, with a whopping 32MB of storage! I guess my first MP3 player wasn’t the most capable, but the Mixxtape evokes that nostalgia for me, plus is far more capable. Again, it mounts as an MTP storage device, so any other device capable of hosting an MTP connection should work.
As to your comment on OS, I’ve been using Linux primarily for well over a decade, and it supports MTP just fine. The only problem you’ll run into is older MP3 players from before USB Mass Storage Class (MSC), Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) and Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) were widespread. I think some early models had custom file transfer schemes. That hasn’t been a thing for well over a decade. Except maybe for iDevices. Apple (as always) is special. From my experience, plugging any MSC/PTP/ or MTP device into just about any Linux computer will “just work”. It should “just work” for Windows as well.
Finally, a “real computer”. Something like a Raspberry Pi 400 kit should work fine, but there are also lots of perfectly fine ex-office computers for sale refurbished at similar prices. Best Buy also has refurbs. An old laptop would work as well. You might be able to use the Pixel to host. I know the Pixel supports USB-OTG or whatever the successor protocol is, allowing it to act as a USB host for limited power devices. Only way to find out is to try.
As an 80s kid, that Mixxtape just blew me away 🤯😍 Talk about must-own gadgets that I absolutely don’t need! Man, that’s slick!
Analog playback, insane 😳😍
Now I just need Paulthings to make the Mixxtape’s older sister: a digital to analog reel-to-reel tape 😱 Maybe call it the 2real2reel? REELxREEL?
I saw a product mock-up years back of a digital device shaped like a roll of 35mm camera film. The concept was that you insert it into your old analog 35mm camera instead of film, and it turns the camera into a digital one. Basically a universal digital SLR back. Was heartbroken when it turned out it was just a concept with no plans to create it. I’d go and buy an old Pentax 35mm SLR faster than the guy in the Mixxtape video can dish out Yo Mamma jokes.
I’ll see if I can find it. I still think it would be the most revolutionary camera gadget to come out in ages; imagine being able to take any old 35mm camera and turn it digital in an instant 😮❤️ Old cameras on eBay would quadruple in price overnight.
Edit: Found the “digital film” concept, was released back in 2011.
The biggest problem I can see with this digital back idea is that full frame sensors are hella expensive and require a lot more electronics than could fit in that space. This 20MP sensor, for instance, is $4000 by itself.
If I wanted to do this today I would use iTunes and an old iPhone as the mp3 player. I would use an old laptop to rip, or iTunes to purchase.
Yeah, just get an MP3 player that uses an SD card, and copy your MP3 files to the card.
The question is, where are your files? Are they already on your phone or iPad? If not, you have the challenge of ripping from a USB CD player to the iPad or Pixel. I have no idea what software can do that, but there are apps on the Google Play store that claim to be able to.
Sounds like a great opportunity to dig up an old laptop and use Linux, though. I’ve got a couple of USB DVD readers sitting in a drawer that I pull out for these jobs, they’ve worked fine for years.
I personally use an iPod with rockbox to listeb to music as FLAC files
The new term is “digital audio player”. http://www.reddit.com/r/digitalaudioplayer is a good community for that. mp3s are out, if you want a really small file size, opus has better quality. If quality is more important than file size, rip to FLAC. I know at least for android, there are music player apps like musicolet and poweramp that will allow you to play songs from your phone if you have the storage space. The old ones work with modern computers. You can buy reconditioned ipods on ebay, but the new ones are better IMO. For ripping music a good community is http://www.reddit.com/r/musichoarder
Looks like they stopped dev in '21, but RockBox is what I used to use. Amazing software.
Development hasn’t stopped, it’s just that they haven’t made new releases. I would suggest you install one of the dev builds instead.
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Rockbox was awesome. I used it on many iPods. I remember one of my irc friends was the one of the main devs of the clock app that shipped with it.
So then just get a real computer. Go to goodwill or ebay and get yourself one of those $20 HP desktops the size of a book. It will be more than adequate for putting music on an MP3 player.