Post #2554612

2026-05-03 13:21 UTC

> Yet, when I want to sit down and actually listen to an album, the phone is often the most frustrating tool in my pocket. Between the constant pings from Slack and the AI-generated discovery feeds that keep trying to shove viral tracks down my throat Bruh, what? Just have the songs locally like on your iPod; you don't *have* to stream, and it's easier to put on your phone than your iPod. And what do Slack notifs have to do with this? Just turn it on DnD or whatever. In what universe are Slack notifs distracting you less than your phone while you listen on your iPod? If you give that little of a shit about them, you can turn them off. > I can leave for a week-long trip with my iPod and not have to think about bringing a charger along. ??? But you're already bringing a phone that needs to remain charged?? Playing audio doesn't drain the battery that hard, and phone batteries nowadays get enough charge that even an absent-minded dipshit like myself barely has to worry about it. --- This author is either nostalgia-baiting for clicks or an absolute moron. Using an iPod might be a fun novelty; absolutely the fuck is it not "the best way to enjoy music". You're carrying around a separate, fairly large device just for music that probably even has worse audio quality; that's so unnecessarily cumbersome if I just want to listen to music. They're using a ClickWheel with, at most, 40 GB of storage. That's like ~~ten~~ twenty FLAC albums. *Is what I would say*, except: "Since I replaced the original spinning hard drive with a microSD adapter, there are no moving parts and significantly less power draw. I am currently running 512GB of storage paired with a significantly larger battery that lasts weeks, not hours." So they wait *well* into the article to tell the audience that they hardmodded their old iPod and that's why it's actually viable. What the actual fuck. Basically nobody is going to do that. Even with that hardmodding, the literal only advantage they have here, then, is the ClickWheel – because again, your phone should be charged and always on you in 2026. The ClickWheel is not *that* special to warrant hardmodding a 2006 iPod and using it separately for music. Then they have a gargantuan segment whining about streaming as though local storage just doesn't exist on their phone. It's literally a non-issue. Right now I'm listening to a FLAC album I got off Bandcamp months ago. On my phone. Because I don't use streaming services. On my phone. This piece of shit article could've been boiled down to "the haptic feedback on the ClickWheel was cool we should bring that back lol".

Replies (7)

@rozodru@piefed.world 2026-05-03 13:46

it's Nostalgia bait. I don't know why this is suddenly a new trend online. Like the articles recently that for whatever reason are about how great Zip disks were. no...they weren't. no...you weren't there. Next thing you know there's going to be articles about how great a 28.8 dial modem was or digital cameras that used floppy disks were peak for storage. No Julia, they weren't.

Open ##2554629
@deranger@sh.itjust.works 2026-05-03 14:44

You’re not considering the iPod DAC which is higher quality than most cellphone DACs. Also, thinking 40GB fits 10 FLAC albums is stupid. This isn’t correct even for uncompressed WAV files. I can’t imagine putting this much effort into complaining about someone using their media player of choice. People like vinyl and even cassettes because they’re a different experience, do you write up paragraphs about that too?

Open ##2554630
@Signtist@bookwyr.me 2026-05-03 14:46

I recently got into vinyl, and what I found was that convenience is antithetical to my music listening experience. The less I have to think about the process of turning on music, the less I think about the music at all, leaving me without any real memories about it. The more deliberate I have to be about my music, the better. Like, yeah, I *can* listen to a full album on a streaming site, but I *don't*. It just doesn't happen, and I can't get myself to change, so I change the medium instead. Might not be the solution for everyone, but I can understand how having a dedicated box for music on the go would be preferable, not just in spite of the inconvenience, but because of it.

Open ##2554635
@one_old_coder@piefed.social 2026-05-03 13:44

Same answer. You now have 2 devices, 2 batteries to charge, twice the volume in your pocket. iPod = Android + VLC. Nostalgia is stupid sometimes. I compress everything from FLAC to Opus, and I have way more content than an iPod. Also the iPod cannot read the Opus format unless you're prepared to install an alternative OS.

Open ##2554636
@mannycalavera@feddit.uk 2026-05-03 21:34

> This author is either nostalgia-baiting for clicks or an absolute moron. Correct

Open ##2554637
@Sisyphe@lemmy.world 2026-05-03 15:38

You either get it or you don't. Using a dedicated music player feels like treating yourself, whereas using your do-it-all smartphone feels austere. It doesn't matter if you've got a nice phone, or if your music player is an old iPod or an old garbage mp3 player or one of those modern DAPs (which are basically android phones with fancy DACs and huge batteries). I regret selling my old iPod, I would be modding the shit out of it if I'd still had it right now. But alas, it became "obsolete" the moment I got a smartphone with internet connectivity and YouTube and streaming apps. ...And one last thing™: the click wheel was awesome and it was probably the best input solution for a portable music player ever. It was truly special.

Open ##2554638
@shweddy@lemmy.world 2026-05-04 16:59

This sounds like blizzard "dont you guys have phones" ngl

Open ##2554639