What was the thinking behind full sized SDXC cards instead of micro sdxc like damn near every other device made this side of 2011?
I suspect due to them being easier to handle and easy to plugs into laptops that still have an SD card reader. Since most Micro SD cards come with a full size adapter anyway, it doesn’t really seem to have any downside to go with fullsize.
You can adapt a micro sd into a full-sized right?
$271,285 raised of $10,000 goal. That’s some pretty good odds of success
Glad to see its on crowd supply
I’d rather see a project that brings back legacy Zunes - completely jailbreaks or ROMhacks the Zune software. The hardware was badass and you could easily retrofit SSDs into them. The software needs some sprucing up though.
Can we get an Open-Hardware CD-ROM/Optical-disk reader for our PCs ?
Does it come with open source earbuds?
No earbuds, player only.
This would be cool to load up with 10s of thousands of songs and to just leave tethered to your home HiFi system
I just received mine a few days ago!
I am excited to have it and start using it but I would also caution people interested in it. It is currently a little rough around the edges software wise but I’m optimistic it will continue to improve with time.
I am personally glad I opted to support this project and while I don’t think I’ll be able to contribute to code I do hope to at least provide beneficial feedback and end user diagnostics.
I also got mine recently! Definitely agree with the rough around the edges part. This is definitely an artisanal, hand-rolled, music player. It… doesn’t seem very durable. Mine rattles when I move it…
I bought it to support open source and because I’m hoping it’ll last a long time. (As long as I don’t move it too much.)
Haha I think it’s plenty durable so long as you aren’t dropping it all the time.
The rattle is probably just the side buttons which do have a little wiggle due to the tolerances of the case.
The touch wheel on my was a little loose too which was a know issue. I just put a little piece of double sides tape on the top between it and the case and now it’s all good.
I’m optimistic it will continue to improve with time.
In my experience there are few crowdsourced products that continue to be significantly developed after the initial sales have finished unless they are astoundingly well-reviewed to continue selling.
Pebble was one of the few exceptions for one that I funded. Even then, once the Apple Watch came out they got gobbled up by (garmin) and all development on the originals died.
I don’t necessarily expect it to be supported indefinitely but they only just got the hardware into backers hands and are now taking in a lot of feedback so I don’t think it unreasonable to expect some reasonable improvements in the shorter term.
Time will tell though. Personally I’d be quite happy with it after some bug fixes and a few small features. And if worse comes to worse it will become a personal coding project for myself.
Easier and cheaper to flash mod a Gen5/Gen7 iPod and put Rockbox on it. Looks better too.
Also interesting that they don’t add Flac in the supported files for the iPods but mention RockBox.
Rockbox supports FLAC. Native iPod OS doesn’t :(
Those mods don’t look particularly easy. I’ve seen the results of mods gone awry on a few 7th gens.
Yes, but we desperately need a thriving ecosystem of open source devices. With the way electronics are going - for example, being forced to agree to a new license agreement before being able to use a device I already purchased, and the agreement forces arbitration for disputes? We need more people working on enshittification-proof devices.
Does anyone here remember Rockbox? I still have my old Sansa player running it.
I used to use Sansa clip+ with Rockbox back when the audio quality on my phone was terrible.
Mine is also a Sansa! 😁👍
I have my iPod 5th gen running on RockBox. IMO it’s even better than the stock firmware because it can play flacs.
Rockbox is cool, I just wish it was able to replace the base system without touching the UI. Something about it just feels off on an iPod. Even supposedly iPod-accurate themes just feel uncanny.
I’ve been using the adwaita dark one, matches my GNOME Fedora desktop on my PC.
Same, someone also added a new battery at some point so I have an awesome weeklong working device. And after rockbox, its even better.
I even had Doom running on it. The controls were difficult though
Oh, yeah, I played it too, got used to the controls enough to start having fun, though didn’t finish any level.
And ogg and m4a and opus and so many more. I have an ipod 6th gen runnung rockbox. Its great. If the harddrive dies I’ll replace it with sd-cards and still keep uaing it.
Yeah, I have the iFlash solo, works great.
It’s a shame rockbox doesn’t support video playback though.
How is stability for you? My 7th gen with about 750gb is pretty unstable, mostly I have a lot of difficulty transferring since the iPod crashes 15gb in all the time.
Mine’s been great, though I have only about 2 GB of music on there.
While I do do electronics, I’m not amazing at it, but, I always wonder how the UIs are so clunky and slow on a processor that outpaces a Pentium 1 ,which would run Windows 95…
I bought one. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t work well with large music libraries. The database building step takes several hours, with no progress indicator, and once it’s done, the scroll wheel does not accelerate, meaning that scrolling through a long list of artists/albums will take a long time. Hopefully these will be remedied in a future firmware.
Holy shit…that seems like day 0 issues. By that I mean issues to address before mass production. Certainly before any customer recieves their product.
To be fair, the Fiio MP3 player I bought in the late 2010s also didn’t have acceleration while scrolling, and never got it in firmware upgrades. I suspect that 80% of the market might only carry small music collections with them, and the other 20% may be regarded as not worth bothering with (except by Rockbox and the original Apple iPod)
Not having a progress indicator on the exceedingly long database building application, though, is a bit harder to excuse.
I love my fiio but it’s very rough around the edges, this might be a weird tale but I love that it doesn’t have speakers and I can’t accidentally blast my very unique taste in music in public
I dunno, I made an ipod clone app in Android for myself recently and it has both acceleration and a db progress indicator. These were not tough features to implement…
ouuuu that looks rly cool! Right in the vein of Pine64.
I like that despite only supporting SBC for now, they are looking to expand the Bluetooth codec support with updates. I think LDAC might be a no-brainer here, since it’s royalty free and the encoder is open iirc
Tangara also has basic Bluetooth SBC audio support, with more modern codecs possible via future firmware updates.
Well SBC is basically useless so I hope the development is not too far away in the future. I see it’s Bluetooth v4.2 but as far as I know the best codec available compresses down to 1 Mbps but v4.2 supports up to 3Mbps and v5 up to 6 Mbps so still room for improvements but that’s up to headphone manufacturers to support these future codec.
Ideally there would be zero bluetooth support and this would be catered to the HIFI crowd, with only 3.5mm jack supported.
At least until we get a HIFI successor to bluetooth.
Why would you want to not have Bluetooth Audio when it is extremely cheap to add and basically comes bundled with most WiFi chips nowadays? It just allows the user to use the device in more situations eg. Coming home from a commute and then continue with your music on your home Bluetooth kitchen speaker or change to your car speakers. I don’t know, but I don’t really see the appeal for the device yet, however I do appreciate the general philosophy of the design and open sourcing everything. I’d want a truely offline music podcast device that had both 3.5mm Audio and exelent Bluetooth and WiFi capabilities because using the phone can be annoying sometines.
Yeah makes sense.
I guess I’m wanting Tangara to cater to the HIFI crowd, and add more HIFI capabilities, file support, something to compete with devices like these: https://slrpnk.net/post/17871660/13529567
Which isn’t mutually exclusive with having WIFI and Bluetooth connectivity.
Darmok and Jalad, at Tangara?
shaka, when the walls fell
