this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 119 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (4 children)

Tembra, his music downloaded. Darmok and Jalad with the AUX cable.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago

Shaka-khan, when the beat drops

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago

Arnock, on the night of his joining.

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[–] [email protected] 103 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Nice project. $249 seems a bit high, but I guess it's like the Fairphone, they can't save as much as the large manufacturers do.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Holy f*** $250? Wow well it is not for me then :(

[–] [email protected] 45 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'm genuinely curious if someone's published a BoM cost breakdown, I'm wondering if there's a couple of super high tickets items in the like the scroll wheel and custom PCB cost.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (3 children)

The cost of the scroll wheel cannot possibly be more than 10€ and the pcb cannot be more than 1€ battery is about 4e and display can be 7-8, chip is 2-3e and passives, connectors etc brlow 5. The manufacturing costs of the thing are likely below 40€, even in small volumes. Assy costs are probably about 20% of the total.

Part of the high cost may be investments in moulds for the casing and r&d cost.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 9 months ago (7 children)

It's a project by an Australian team, so one would assume two things:

  1. It's in Australian Dollars.
  2. Australia has experienced severe hyperinflation overnight (or earlier today, for many of us reading this)
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

It’s a neat project. Costs as much as an iPod :P

[–] [email protected] 59 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Hopefully people take the source and release a full walkthrough on doing this with an entirely off-the-shelf design. I've got a full electronics workshop and two 3d printers and would LOVE to assemble my own music player with open source designs.

[–] [email protected] 58 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Brings back fond memories of rockbox on my sansa.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Rockbox was the shit.

Breathed so much life into my iRiver. And I always had to defend the thing: “it's older than iPods! It can't be an rip-off”

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Rockbox *is...

It's still going.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I use rockbox on a late ipod classic. I find it a very good listening experience, but I am interested in switching to open source *hardware

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Now you too can play Doom on the worst screen imaginable!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

With the worst controls imaginable to boot :)

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Ayo that was amazing on the Sansa Clip+.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (2 children)

This is insanely priced, particularly when you see that it literally loses on everything but battery life compared to the original iPod 5gb, let alone the Classic.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Not quite. It has 1TB sd card storage. That's far, far better. And it has wifi and USB not just FireWire. Ram is less sure but how much ram do you need for playing tunes?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Where did you read 1TB? The webpage says it supports up to 2TB but doesn't say it ships with an SD card.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (7 children)

20 hour battery life of use is actually far better than I thought it would be. Wonder what the pi equiv build would bu

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The Pi in any form is a much larger system with a whole lot more clock cycles, larger architecture, and more peripherals like a full memory management unit, graphics hardware, etc.

On the flip side IIRC most ESP32's are 210MHz and just dual core. It is microcontroller versus microprocessor, so probably 10× less power or more.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

A Raspberry Pi Pico would be sufficient for this. It uses the RP2040, which is comparable to the ESP32, minus the WiFi.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Actually not really. The pi pico has no functional, good low power states currently developed. That is essential for a mobile device. A pi pico would simply drain the battery in sleep mode very quickly.

Tons of MCUs could do the job. Some STMs would also be good for it. The pi pico is more focused at non-mobile applications though at the moment like a very cheap general MCU for things that are USB powered or mains powered.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

For something like this, you would use the RP2040 chip rather than the whole Pi Pico module. The RP2040 uses 180µA in its lowest power sleep mode and the flash and regulator will use a few more microamps. The battery would still last for over a year in standby. Of course it could just be turned off when not in use. Without an operating system, the boot time should only be a fraction of a second.

The ESP32 uses 800µA in sleep mode if you want to retain the memory contents or 10µA with only the RTC memory retained.

A low power STM32 would use orders of magnitude less power in sleep mode than either the RP2040 or ESP32 though.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yes, I know. I have designed with the RP2040 and 180μA is extremely high power usage for deep sleep mode.

The ESP32 has far more sleep modes than that that each use different power, you are just talking about its light sleep: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32/api-reference/system/sleep_modes.html

You are comparing the deep sleep of the pi pico to the light sleep of the ESP32 where the coprocessor is still running. The rp2040 light sleep mode consumes 7mA. It is literally orders of magnitude different. https://learn.adafruit.com/deep-sleep-with-circuitpython/rp2040-sleep (they only did light sleep.mode because deep sleep wasn't even available)

As far as the professional chips, they cost on average far more for less and less sleep gains. (A lot of the L series of stm is like 15€ per chip)

You would definitely use deep sleep for this as you would only wake it up to start using it with a button press. Whether they would use light sleep or deep sleep, there is an order of magnitude difference in sleep power consumption.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Has anyone checked out prices for refurbished ipod classics? $300 for a 20 year old mp3 player! Insanity!

Edit: looking at the specs for the Tangara..... 16MB of internal storage???? Uhhhhhhh......... I guess the intent is to use an SD card.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Looks like the first iPod, the brick.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (5 children)

It sounds like that was intentional.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

I haven't seen a device that takes full sized sdhc cards in at least a decade.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

They got $136k funding from an original goal of $10k. Did it go to their head?

[–] ICastFist 13 points 9 months ago

Listening to music like it's 2005 all over again

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (7 children)

Genuine question : Why use that instead of storing your musics on your phone ?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

I prefer an MP3 player over my phone. Here is the one I use. Why I like this one:

  • Dedicated device designed for music.
  • Hardware designed to play high quality music. (Think using Ubuntu vs Ubuntu Studio for music production)
  • Dedicated buttons instead of all touch screen.
  • More options for integration with other devices or systems
  • No distractions. Phones nowadays demand our attention for every little thing. Every app, no matter what it is, has notifications.
  • The Bluetooth is better.
  • You can literally hear the difference in the quality of the music if you use good quality headphones/ear buds. The same song, same file, will not sound the same if it's a good quality FLAC.
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

I will always prefer my iPod Mini with extra storage, new battery and Rockbox like this guy did, and the reasons are:

  • better overall build and audio quality
  • way cheaper (70-80$ vs 249$)
  • better software support (Rockbox is FOSS and has been going on for ages and it's not gonna stop)
  • it actually upcycles old hardware instead of buying new devices and creating more e-waste
  • nostalgia value +100 points
[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (14 children)

Cute, but what problem does this solve? Regardless of what you feel about any particular platform, consolidating multiple pieces of functionality into the highly integrated smartphone platform was a major step forward in mobility. This just feels like a regression.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Below you will find my highly researched list of advantages over the typical smartphone:

  • Headphone jack
  • Mucho storage space
  • Works without internet connection
  • Free software purity (I don't know, ask RMS)
  • Coolness
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (4 children)

It comes with a 3.5mm audio output for starters.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

Will buy for the Opus audio codec support alone.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

The only reason i’d consider this is if the soundcard was premium with DAC and amp included. Otherwise that piece of junk brings nothing to the table. Yes this thing has it, but its nowhere near premium.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (7 children)

This is all well and good, especially from a nostalgia perspective (in addition to the general pushback against cloud everything); but what I miss most about portable music nowadays is the lack of decent inline remotes (think early 2000s Sony MiniDisc players).

The player stated in your pocket, and the remote handled everything, volume, playback, and even had a dot-matrix screen to identify and navigate playlists!

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