I’m looking for a BIFL (or at least last me for a while) music player that can play .wav files, has a lot of storage, is portable, and the parts are able to be replaced/upgraded. I’ve heard about using iPod classics but it seems like they’re unable to play .wav files. Any reccomendations?
Without running afoul of the BIFL ethos, I wonder why you can’t just use your smartphone?
No smartphones are BIFL, but you’re always going to have one, and even if you insist on WAV instead of MP3 or FLAC, you can still fit a pretty big music collection in local storage.
No headphone jack, and I want a dedicated device so I’m not as reliant on my phone.
A Qudelix solves the first part but not the second. Though you might be able to bluetooth it to your computer if you’re at home and your place is small.
I have a OnePlus Nord w/a headphone jack, use Musicolet player, have SD card that supports up to 2TB if I remember correctly (I’m using a smaller card right now). Supports wav & flac (which is what I use). It’s a great player, and sometimes I use it as a phone. :)
I hope you meant 2TB not 2GB
Fixed. Yes I did.
This doesn’t address the phone reliance bit, but you can stick a passthrough USB-C audio interface on the end of your headphones cable.
Stuff like this:
https://www.amazon.com/JacobsParts-Headphone-Charging-Passthrough-Converter/dp/B09HJQJSWY
Then you don’t tie up your USB-C jack.
Ooh, nice. I didn’t realize those exist. Is there any impact on audio quality?
Well, absent some kind of sample rate conversion that I wouldn’t expect running into, the audio is identical from a digital standpoint, so up until the point where it sees analog conversion, no.
Once you convert it to analog…I mean, it’s a DAC. Could be better or worse than a DAC built into your phone. Nothing intrinsically requires one be better than the other.
I had a phone with a headphones jack, some time back, that had poor power regulation on its internal DAC. If I was charging my phone in my car while playing back music, noise leaked into the audio. I wound up getting a tiny Bluetooth receiver with its own DAC and plugging that into the car’s auxiliary audio input to avoid that. That phone didn’t have a great DAC.
But I’m sure that you can also make a USB-C audio interface with a bad DAC. I have a USB-powered analog mixer that also lets a noticeable amount of noise in when plugged into my USB hub. I put it on a dedicated USB power supply to reduce that.
As far as I know, nobody’s tried rounding up a bunch of USB-powered DACs, feeding them dirty power, and measuring the amount of noise that comes out of them, so… shrug Probably have to try one and see how that one compares.