For the people that don’t want to click through to find the code:
For the more adventurous, Tangara’s ESP32 firmware is written in C++ using the ESP-IDF framework. … Tangara’s battery is a standard LiPo pouch cell with a 3-pin JST connector. … Active battery life depends on use case (typically >20 hours)
Sorry, thanks but not thanks. Make it use a swappable 18650 and run Rockbox. Also it costs $250 which might have been ok in the early 2000s but is outlandish today. Finally it’s Crowdsupply, which is not a scam but is a pain to deal with. And the battery drain is a lot too. Sandisk players were getting 10+ hours on an AAA cell in 2005 or so. This is just not an interesting product and the makers should have spent a few evenings on the Rockbox forums before starting the project.
Thanks for this! I didn’t know about Rockbox before.
I’d rather see a project that brings back legacy Zunes - completely jailbreaks or ROMhacks the Zune software. The hardware was badass and you could easily retrofit SSDs into them. The software needs some sprucing up though.
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’m optimistic it will continue to improve with time.
In my experience there are few crowdsourced products that continue to be significantly developed after the initial sales have finished unless they are astoundingly well-reviewed to continue selling.
Pebble was one of the few exceptions for one that I funded. Even then, once the Apple Watch came out they got gobbled up by (garmin) and all development on the originals died.
I don’t necessarily expect it to be supported indefinitely but they only just got the hardware into backers hands and are now taking in a lot of feedback so I don’t think it unreasonable to expect some reasonable improvements in the shorter term.
Time will tell though. Personally I’d be quite happy with it after some bug fixes and a few small features. And if worse comes to worse it will become a personal coding project for myself.
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.)
Haha I think it’s plenty durable so long as you aren’t dropping it all the time.
The rattle is probably just the side buttons which do have a little wiggle due to the tolerances of the case.
The touch wheel on my was a little loose too which was a know issue. I just put a little piece of double sides tape on the top between it and the case and now it’s all good.
Does anyone here remember Rockbox? I still have my old Sansa player running it.
I have my iPod 5th gen running on RockBox. IMO it’s even better than the stock firmware because it can play flacs.
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.
Yeah, I have the iFlash solo, works great.
I even had Doom running on it. The controls were difficult though
Oh, yeah, I played it too, got used to the controls enough to start having fun, though didn’t finish any level.
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.
I’ve been using the adwaita dark one, matches my GNOME Fedora desktop on my PC.
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.
Mine’s been great, though I have only about 2 GB of music on there.
Same, someone also added a new battery at some point so I have an awesome weeklong working device. And after rockbox, its even better.
Mine is also a Sansa! 😁👍
I used to use Sansa clip+ with Rockbox back when the audio quality on my phone was terrible.
Darmok and Jalad, at Tangara?
shaka, when the walls fell
Does it come with open source earbuds?
Can we get an Open-Hardware CD-ROM/Optical-disk reader for our PCs ?
I’ve waited so long for one but it’s too underpowered for the price.
How can this be underpowered?
8 mb of ram and 240mHZ. I know the costs are bigger for new companies but an rpi zero is 15-20€ and it has 1gGHZ and 512mb of ram. There’s no problem if they have very good optimized code but it shouldn’t cost 250$
I don’t get the appeal of a single-purpose device like this when smartphones are practically mandatory.
I brings back the headphone jack and high quality analog audio for those of us who care enough.
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.
There’s also another niche (that is frankly very annoying to shop for); Music in a SCIF. Assuming you can get the device approved. absolutely no wireless capabilities, and no recording capabilities, amongst other requirements.
More or less limits you to older ipods.
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.
Then it’s not for you and that is fine.
- I have very good wired headphones and i need a headphone out with very good power.
- My music is also flac and I have been collecting it for decades, so it would use up all of the storage of my phone.
- Also phone needs to serve an emergency function so I don’t like its battery drained.
- Ontop of that pixel has some notifications you can’t turn off and silent mode is not an option for me so it is very good to have them separated. Especially if you want to waste life on the internet, its nice not to have your song not be intertupted with " wait till you see what happens in the end!!!”
- I personally also like a “master of one” devices. I have a supernote and i like that my mp3 player and notepad both only do what they say they do without distractions.
- My cheap chinese mp3 player and cheap chinese earbuds offer fantastic noise isolation so they’re great to travel with, they together also take up less space than noise cancelling headphones and sound wise I haven’t seen anything sub 800 range that comes close to them.
- They last for a long time. It plays music and that’s it so 10 years is a pretty normal age for them to last. Now most cheap ones have bluetooth and preamp output as well so there is really no reason to switch.
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.
This debate is so, sooo old, but after all these times I’ve wroten arguments for having a dedicated player, I feel I singled out the most important ones to me.
It is not my phone. I enter a different headspace when I use an e-book or a mp3 player, I mentally dedicate myself to use it and enjoy it. I don’t switch between apps, see notifications popping up, for if I’m using it, I can turn the beeping fucker off and just have a good time with my tired old Walkman and Sleep’s Holy Mountain album undistracted. And I know I can put on the plane mode on, but it feels like an important switch to my brains when I leave my phone for a dumb player. My intent to use it, leaving everything else behind, somehow makes me enjoy my time with music more. We’re all wired differently, but maybe you can feel it too.
And I’m left amused by the impressions of W. Gibson, the cyberpunk daddy, when he had his first Walkman and took a walk. Him, having a personal music headspace for the first time, seeing all these huge banner adds for early tech wonders on the streets, gave him a lot of inspiration, made him feel like he is detached from this era and brought into some distant future. For some time, he felt like a character of his novels. In some sense, it was like carving your own room from out of nowhere with a click of a button while leaving in human hives of metropolitan areas. And the romantic vibes of it make me take it as another reason pro dumb players.
It’s irrational, but I choose to like it.
it’s not irrational
Ever heard of a kindle?
But I dont wanna use my phone. Usually, I try to keep that as far away as possible.
We have this debate every time the topic of DAPs, e-readers or mobile gaming devices comes up. “wHy d0n’t yOu jU5t uSe y0uR pH0n3?”
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 dunno, I made an ipod clone app in Android for myself recently and it has both acceleration and a db progress indicator. These were not tough features to implement…
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
Could it run Rockbox ? My iPods and sansa run with rockbox, it’s awesome.
How large a library can it handle? I’ve had two others similar but they parsed files so slowly as to be ultimately useless
you’d have to be pretty dumb to fuck up text parsing that badly. Maybe if you don’t implement segmented processing, and have a 50k line text file or something.
Guess maybe 30GB of files in an avg of 10MB bites is a chore
i wouldn’t know, i’m sure we’ll know soon enough though.
Glad to see its on crowd supply
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.
