It’s a Creative Zen Stone that I got as a Christmas gift in 2008. I just found it in a drawer, and it’s still holding charge. The last thing I put on it was The Life And Times Of Scrooge by Tuomas Holopainen, in 2015 – I don’t know why, at that time I definitely had a smartphone.
It has a headphone jack, which immediately makes it better than every smartphone produced in the last several years, and it can easily drive my 80-ohm Beyerdynamic. The audio quality is as good as one can expect. The only drawback is that it only holds 1GB… my old CD rips had to be compressed to hell and back.
Let me reiterate that this has been sitting untouched for a decade and was immediately ready for action. No login, no annoying software updates, expired subscription, or remote bricking by the manufacturer. Eat my shorts, Spotify Car Thing.
P.s. A Lifetime Of Adventure is a banger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWwSVOo5K_k
I have a Rio Volt SP-250. A CD-MP3 player I’ve had since 2001. The in-line remote died somehow but the unit itself works flawlessly and is in excellent condition. It runs on AA batteries; originally they were rechargeable but they were Ni-MH cells. I don’t know where its charger went, but I can run the thing on Alkaline batteries or charge Eneloops in a separate charger.
It long outlasted the iPod it replaced and is still serviceable to this day.
I have an old iPod shuffle. No screen, works as a USB stick, just plug it in, put some songs on, and it works.
Hah, just took my 2006 sansa e280 (similar device to yours, similar decade on the sideline) away with me on a trip.
I didn’t want to be contactable but was hiking so wanted to listen to music. Loved connecting back with my old music too
Back in the day, I had one that looked like this and was essentially built around an AA battery, which was great since you could always carry a spare.
I used to have one of these to listen to music while walking to school back in the day. It was the first device I hacked the firmware to move the menu options around. It was the perfect size to fit into the breast pocket on school uniforms.
I loved this thing. Bought like three of them in a decade rather than join the iPod universe.
Weren’t those Cowon, or something like that?
Mine was a Samsung IIRC and I remember having to look a while for something with a swappable battery and FLAC support
Nice. Didn’t remember Samsung making some. Mine were Cowon or iRiver (which might actually also be Cowon).
I have this one.
I got this for my girlfriend. If I recall it held about 100 CDs worth of music—it had a small hard drive in it. Up until that point she had used a portable CD player in her car. I remember it being a little finicky, but ultimately working well.
I had one of these, they were great devices back then. Really ate through batteries, but 6GB of music on the go was amazing.
I miss Creative. Best computer speakers I ever had. Also when everyone at school was rocking a 4gb iPod they got at the mall for hundreds of dollars and had to choose which music they wanted, I was rocking this puppy for like $100 off of eBay with my entire library on it. Notice it’s 30gb! It also doubled as a portable hard drive. This is back when corporations did everything they could to make a good product. Not too sure, given the quality difference, why apple thrived and companies like creative died.
Still have a sandisk clip sport. When it dies I’m gonna search for something alike… Sooooo much better than a phone and a app
+1 on dedicated music players. I can listen to music for hours without worrying that my phone is gonna die.
+1 000 000 on A Lifetime Of Adventure. Fantastic song.
It’s how small things can be when they don’t need a screen
If you google for mp3-players without touchscreen and you open a link like “12 best mp3-players without touchscreen 2025”, you may find maybe one in this list without touchscreen.
Enshitification has been a long slow burn, boiling the frog so we don’t notice.
we’ve noticed every step of the way
That sad truth is that most people don’t care
most people don’t care
lol, what a bad chain of takes. Most people care but what can anyone do against a trillion dollar company
hit up amazon, search mp3 players
There’s probably a hundred options. With Screens, without screens, can play video, 60GB, 80GB, 128GB.
You can EASILY still buy what we used to have (mostly even better) for $20-$40
You can still buy phones with headphone jacks.
At a point, collectively, we cared. We all bought at least a few things that eschewed enshittification. But eventually, for most, wireless headphones and not spending time curating our music won out for most.
I still have all my shit downloaded. Playlists on fleek. I stream it to myself now but could easily copy it to my phone.
But I don’t have an itch to have a stand-alone MP3 player anymore. Nor a pocket camera.
If pressed, i’d consider making an mp3 player out of an ESP32, but there’d have to be a compelling reason for me to do it.
Not continue to demand. Not purchase the unethical Google, the low value Apple and the enshittified Samsung. By purchasing products from corrupt capital-obsessed corporations, people are signifying that they don’t care. The good news is that the amount of people choosing ethics over greed is increasing.
*capital as in monetary value, capitalismOf course, the most problematic companies have income from so many integral sources that it’s impossible to fully boycott unless everyone along the chain does the same. Google’ primary income is advertising, so block all ads. Amazon’s is AWS, that serves internet for millions of systems, and the hardest to avoid.
Then get a bad phone from who?
Controversial opinion: while enshittification does exist (from ‘value engineering’ or feature regression) because the profit motive, this imo is more a case of the userbase getting what they ask for. Normies who aren’t super tech literate and know how to navigate a PC, weren’t buying early mp3 players like iRivers, because it wasn’t accessible. You had to:
- Have a PC
- Know how to use that PC to either rip from CDs to mp3 or acquire mp3s
- Know how to sync files - most of these early devices were basically generic USB storage
- Know that these players exist, and be willing to spend a lot (for the era) on them compared to a cassette/CD player
Until the iPod hit the scene, nobody had solved #2 (iTunes store), #3 (iTunes), and #4 (Apple marketing) at the same time. #1 was a timing issue, as digitization increased and home PC prices dropped the userbase wasn’t as large yet. The devices downgraded because the broader userbase doesn’t ask/use the extra features, they want convenience and to not have to think. And as they are the demand segment for industry, so goes the product - dumb it down and mass market it.
I feel like my opinion is more controversial. I knew how to do all those things. I helped orchestrate a gigantic CD rip and swap using “lab” work computer equipment at a time when hard drive space was very expensive. I knew how to download files before Napster. When subscription music arrived and then the family plan followed, I subscribed and deleted everything. If I didn’t like new music but just relied on a catalog of older music maybe I wouldn’t have gone that route—but even then I think my kids would have wanted access to new music.
Honestly, I like subscription music—I listen to hundreds of new songs every month. I love wireless headphones for exercise. I don’t care about the lack of headphone jack. To me it isn’t enshittification, it is a wonderful product suite that I much prefer to the one I used to use.
When subscription music arrived and then the family plan followed, I subscribed and deleted everything
I’d much rather own it and the storage requirements (‘till HDD death do we part), than rely on a web of licensing and exclusivity arrangements between streaming platforms and labels, which can - and have - been capriciously revoked in a moment. That’s also assuming the service offers the kind of music you like, or has good fidelity. And there’s platform agnostic issues like data connection - when we head up into the mountains I still have my files to play, but my wife is fully dependent upon Spotify and good cell signal.
…but even then I think my kids would have wanted access to new music
And there’s your radically different use case. I value having my music collection and archive, I follow artists throughout their career, and seek out entire albums vs individual tracks. Someone who may not care so deeply or develops a different relationship with music based on playlists or radio hits won’t value the archival aspect as much, because music’s value is temporal.
I think people are forgetting you can still buy players like this. -With a mini jack, lots of space, drag and drop to transfer music…
I started using something similar recently. I started buying music on indie sites and I have a closer relationship with my music. I keep listening to the same things since my library is still small. Because of that I remember the lyrics, know the names of favorite tracks or hum the songs during the day.
With phones not having the 3.5mm jack these days it sort of makes sense to have a separate 3.5mm jack device even.
The one I got is a Fiio Snowsky Echo Mini (2025) that is similarly old school - no Wi-Fi, just USB file transfer upload. Listening to music on a smartphone is mentally draining in comparison.
The player Is not such a good deal as it was before the Fiio tariff-related price hike, when it was around 40€, but eh. The battery is soldered on despite the case having a “stylistic” battery cover on the case. Supposedly on the inside it’s still a standardized battery cell, so if you unscrew the case it should still be serviceable.
There are MP3 players which are simple and Digital Audio Players (DAPs) which are supposed to be more hi-fi. In Europe, AGPTEK is available (can’t vouch, but see A52PL, C2S, U5PL) too. In the US, a simple modern iPod clone seems to be the Innioasis Y1. SanDisk (Western Digital) seems to have stopped making their Clip line and they’re hard to find used where I’m from.
There’s also a custom firmware for some DAPs/MP3 players called rockbox, here’s the supported device list https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/TargetStatus
i was explaining to a college student about mp3 players and they thought they sounded like some amazing new product coming down the pipeline. it made me feel super old and super sad for all that tech companies have robbed from us
What were they so impressed by?
thousands of songs on your device with no internet connection and days without recharging
At first I was gonna say you can have thousands of songs on your smartphone regardless, but I guess those kids probably aren’t too acquainted with file browsers.
Not in the slightest, no
I hate that so many devices try hard to obscure filesystems even though they are right there, right under the hood. I remember how ridiculous it was to try and browse an iPod as the hard drive it was. They copied your files into an indecipherable file tree with weird names. If companies aren’t trying to keep you from copying shit then they’re thinking you’re too dumb to understand files and folders and putting some other weird UI on top of them to make them “user friendly”.
And thusly, they made kids unable to understand file browsers/systems :'(
I think at this point it’s a concerted effort to make sure we’re all consumers, not users
👨🚀🔫👨🚀
Still have my 120G Zune and 16G Zune HD, both of which still work flawlessly. It’s wild to think what we left behind
I gave my (young) son a 16G Zune HD. It lived through a washer/dryer cycle—I don’t understand how.
My Creative mp3 fit in my pocket and had a joystick to control the music through my jeans. No voice commands, no touch screen, no touching my headphones, just sitting on the bus and fast forwarding or skipping as I desired.
