Mp3 players?

[Tangled Metal]

Looking for non phone mp3 player for son who is too young for a cheap phone. Reasonable for music, podcasts and audio books. Budget is low

[richardfm]

A phone without a SIM card?

[Tangled Metal]

WiFi is everywhere these days for free. Even without sim card a phone has access to Internet. Mp3 players usually need to be connected to a PC to load anything on and has no Internet access through mobile or WiFi connections. Safer option all round, often for a cheaper price and with better music format support like the lossless formats eg FLAC.

[Jdsk]

They start at < £1 on eBay UK:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from ... =0&_sop=15

Jonathan

[rjb]

There's a good article here about audio quality when using compression features.
https://homedjstudio.com/audio-bitrates-formats/
At the end of the day it's a trade off between quality and storage size. I have an old 2gb Sansa clip which I use with MP3 s at 256 kB/sec. I find the sound quality acceptable for the limited storage space available.

I use the BBC sounds app frequently but some radio programme podcasts are only available through the sounds app which I find frustrating as I can't then transfer them to my player via my pc.

[Paulatic]

I’ve an IRiver T30 which must be getting on for 20 years now. Still use it working perfectly and looking at the price of them now on that EBay link still worth money.

[mattheus]

They start at < £1 on eBay UK:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from ... =0&_sop=15

Jonathan

Which would you recommend?

[Jdsk]

They start at < £1 on eBay UK:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from ... =0&_sop=15

Which would you recommend?

An old iPhone with Parental Control cranked down tight according to taste.

Jonathan

[simonineaston]

I bought a couple of original 'click-wheel' iPods off of ebay and had fun converting them to colossal ssd card storage, with a view to carting around my entire music library, but have since concluded that, fun tho' it was, the game wasn't worth the candle. However the fact remains that ebay is awash with old Apple iPods, inc. the very phone-like iPod Touch. Jobs once described the Touch as "training wheels for the iPhone" and I can see his point...
The iPod is in my view one of human-kind's crowning achievements, along with bread, beer and cheese. What seperates the iPod from these others is that the iPod is not, as far as I know, made with the assistance of yeast.
Oh, and the bicycle, of course...

[DevonDamo]

I’ve an IRiver T30 which must be getting on for 20 years now. Still use it working perfectly and looking at the price of them now on that EBay link still worth money.

I'm not sure if it applies to your specific model, but some older iRiver players were very popular with scuba divers because iRiver produced an underwater housing which was good for a depth of 70m. (And waterproof earphones.) Diving to those sort of depths quickly racks up a decompression requirement, whereby a relatively short period at depth has to be followed by ages (often more than an hour), bored to tears, floating around in the shallows to avoid getting bent. For this reason, iRiver players used to get snapped up when they came up on the small ads, and I don't believe anyone since has manufactured an MP3 player with such a beefy pressure housing.

[mattheus]

I’ve an IRiver T30 which must be getting on for 20 years now. Still use it working perfectly and looking at the price of them now on that EBay link still worth money.

I'm not sure if it applies to your specific model, but some older iRiver players were very popular with scuba divers because iRiver produced an underwater housing which was good for a depth of 70m. (And waterproof earphones.) Diving to those sort of depths quickly racks up a decompression requirement, whereby a relatively short period at depth has to be followed by ages (often more than an hour), bored to tears, floating around in the shallows to avoid getting bent. For this reason, iRiver players used to get snapped up when they came up on the small ads, and I don't believe anyone since has manufactured an MP3 player with such a beefy pressure housing.

Thsi thread has now reached new depths of geekery ...

[rjb]

Unfortunately my iPod touch gave up the ghost when the battery eventually expired and they are not easy to change. I would avoid them for this issue.

[Tangled Metal]

They start at < £1 on eBay UK:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from ... =0&_sop=15

Which would you recommend?

An old iPhone with Parental Control cranked down tight according to taste.

Jonathan

No such thing as parental control when the 9 yo knows more about it than his parents. He cracked his mum's phone password at 4yo! He nearly got mine too but I changed it after I spotted he had half of the old one.

[Tangled Metal]

Never liked the apple music ecosystem so they're out for me. Although I did own a shuffle for backpacking trips. Bought when I saw it at a ridiculously low price from a big retailer. It was cheaper than the cheapest non apple. Was a pain transferring my mp3s to apple format and onto my shuffle. I ended up putting only a few albums on it, certainly not enough to fill even half its memory.

Now there's a few heavily tweaked android based mp3 players. Apparently tweaked to look like ipod touch interface. Personally I don't think it needs that to be a good mp3 player. Ease of loading music or podcasts on it is more important. A lot are drag and drop in windows these days.

[sussex cyclist]

The iPod is in my view one of human-kind's crowning achievements

Sing it brother