If I wanted an MP3 player again, in 2023, and wanted to rip cds to it and put digitally purchased albums on it, as actual owned files (not inside an proprietary ecosystem where I pay to only listen to that track within that service) could I still do that? What would I need? I don’t own, and can’t afford, a “real computer”, but i recall having lots of compatibility issues at the time between my mp3 player and computer os anyway. I’ve got an ipad and a pixel. Is there any feasible, non-ridiculously-difficult way to do this? Do they still sell any mp3 players? Do any of the old ones work with modern tech? I miss hearing my music on a simple, quiet, offline device without ads or streaming services.
Do you need an mp3 player?
Power to you if you’re doing it for giggles and shits, but can’t you load VLC onto that Pixle of yours?
I hadn’t looked into it, as I’d gotten used to assuming that my phones won’t have the memory space for music - but that’s a smart idea. I’ll have to look into that.
You’ll have enough room for sure
Most phones ship with at least 64GB of storage and songs aren’t very big files
You’ll probably have like 25+GB free and that’s enough for a lot of songs.
Let’s say the file sizes are 2.5MB per minute (which is pretty close to standard for high quality MP3s) then you could fit 10000 minutes of music on there. So if your songs are on average 5 minutes long then you could fit 2000 songs on there.
Just pirate the music you want as mp3 files directly on your phone. No computer required. And if you only have a small amount of storage on your phone you can download like a hundred songs and then delete the ones you’re tired of to make room for new ones, and if you ever wanna hear the old songs again you can just download them again.
MP3s compress down a lot, as low as 1 meg a minute for acceptable quality depending on the content. Newer codecs like Opus and AAC can easily do that with much better quality, and your Pixel will definitely be able to play them.
Oh, hell. Opus is totally awesome.
Opus consistently impresses me with how good audio sounds at ridiculous compression levels, both music and speech. 4 minutes of music not even breaking 900k and it sounds just as good as the ol’ 128kbps mp3s, and that’s stereo. Can’t even imagine how much you could squeeze down mono audiobooks.
4gb of storage is infinite music, just use your phone
On my phone music takes up 14.95GB for 1,132 songs which on average is around 13.5MB per song. Great majority of it is 320K MP3s, but it is all over the place. The worst one is 32K AAC, and the best one is 24-bit 96kHz FLAC.
Re-encode everything above 192 Kbps to Opus 128 Kbps and thank me later
I have at least 70gb of music on my phone
Probably is an audiophile with a FLAC collection 😄
Ah yes, FLAC users always eventually accept mp3 as the superior format 😄.
MP3s compress pretty well, depending on the bitrate you rip your CDs at. Your Pixel should be able to easily store upwards of 300 hours of audio without much issue.
Many phones also have an expansion slot for a micro sd card, you could have that card as dedicated music storage area on the device and then just find a music playing app you like.
Even if you’re doing high fidelity files, there are some quite large micro sd cards for cheap (ex. I got a 1Tb one for a security camera I have for $30 or so).
I’m willing to bet there’s possibly even a way to rip music straight from an external cd drive to your phone if you hunt around for an app and the right drive that can do usb-c or whatever your phone has. Cut out the middle man.
Hahahaha
I guess I don’t get the joke. In newer phones they some times put a space for one on the back side of the sim card tray. While I suppose Apple/Pixel do have a habit of reducing features in their flagship phones, there are still plenty of models that have the ability.
You can simply load up mp3 files into a spare/old phone (or your present phone/iPad) and use vlc media player. Your phone will be your mp3 player. I do the exact same thing with old phones lying at home.
Or a dedicated audio player app like Vinyl