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.
I haven’t tested, but you should be able to hook up a USB CD drive to an Android phone. No idea if anyone’s bothered to make a CD ripping app for Android, though.
If you’re willing to skip the CD step then they’re are lots of ways, even without SD cards. Lots of cheap MP3 players work as USB drives. You can turn your phone into host mode and just plug them in to your phone and transfer files.
To get the songs, torrent or download or rip your songs with NewPipe or whatever. Lots of ways to get mp3s.
Or rip the CDs at the library and put them directly into your MP3 player. You can borrow the CDs from the library for free, too, as an added bonus.
As others have suggested you could just your phone as an MP3 player, which I have been doing for multiple years now and works just fine, you just need an app for playback (you could just use something that’s already on the phone, but the experience will definitely be better with something dedicated); I use Poweramp, which is like 5 bucks but it’s definitely worth that much. If you want to use an MP3 player, they definitely still make these, from cheap ones for like 20 bucks to, in my opinion, completely overpriced ones for 300+ bucks for audiophiles. If you also want to rip your CDs, you can try this reddit thread. They used a tablet but I guess it should work an android phone just as well (unless Pixel doesn’t want to…)
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.
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?
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.
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
Probably is an audiophile with a FLAC collection 😄
Ah yes, FLAC users always eventually accept mp3 as the superior format 😄.
I have at least 70gb of music on my 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
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 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 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.
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.
Many phones also have an expansion slot for a micro sd card, you could have that card as dedicated music storage area on the device and then just find a music playing app you like.
Even if you’re doing high fidelity files, there are some quite large micro sd cards for cheap (ex. I got a 1Tb one for a security camera I have for $30 or so).
I’m willing to bet there’s possibly even a way to rip music straight from an external cd drive to your phone if you hunt around for an app and the right drive that can do usb-c or whatever your phone has. Cut out the middle man.
Many phones also have an expansion slot for a micro sd card
Hahahaha
I guess I don’t get the joke. In newer phones they some times put a space for one on the back side of the sim card tray. While I suppose Apple/Pixel do have a habit of reducing features in their flagship phones, there are still plenty of models that have the ability.
You can buy anything from a basic model to a super deluxe audiophile player. But you are going to need some kind of desktop or laptop for transferring files, an ipad probably won’t work.
I use a Sandisk clip, it’s 12 years old and the battery still lasts a few days. Sandisk players are still for sale - they have a few models, their sound quality is quite good and they are less than $50? Though I’m sure a lot of lesser known brands would also be decent at this point also.
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.
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?”
Bless you
If you have an Android, use a USB adapter which allows you to connect flash drives and more to your phone. Then a file manager can be used to move music files to an attached MP3 player.
And yes standalone mp3 players still exists
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.
I personally use an iPod with rockbox to listeb to music as FLAC files
Looks like they stopped dev in '21, but RockBox is what I used to use. Amazing software.
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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.
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!
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 like to self host my stuff and have an Airsonic server with all my music. I can connect to it via web or a number of compatible apps available in the Play and App Stores. All the convenience of streaming and none of the subscription fees
