@jacqueline i expect you already did choose a good battery.
has your team considered a case made out of aluminium like the iPod mini has? it would make it feel much more polished. maybe that could be possible with the money collected
what i wanted to say is that a more polished product could reach a wider audience. but i don't know if that's your goal. for me, a used iPod seem like a better choice
but i like to see more open source hardware projects!
@davidak we plan to do aluminium cases later. the material choice for this campaign isn’t informed by cost, it’s informed by rf concerns; it’s harder to get good bluetooth performance when the antenna is sitting inside a metal box.
@jacqueline@ailurux I love the concept. Given that the system has WiFi, how feasible would it be, to implement a podcast downloader on this hardware? Being able to get podcasts on the device without having to sync them from a PC would make a huge difference in terms of usefulness for me.
@mxk@ailurux it's entirely feasible! it'll be a while before we get around to implementing it, but to me it's one of the big reasons to even have wifi on a device like this.
this toot saved me from buying a proprietary hardware PMP. is there a way to easily replace a battery on this cutie little thing? nevertheless, will definitely buy one when i get the chance.
Would it be possible to ask about the long term plans and sustainability of the project?
It's hard to reconcile the cost compared to a bargain cell phone.
Given the talented team behind the player will cool tech zone's costs be fully covered in the purchase price?
Is there a projection on how long it will be possible to run support structures with the current funding?
Funding this project needs to make sure you are cared for.
@kumisaappaat i set the pricing such that i can go all the way down to batches of ~100 and still make a small profit. i'll keep making them as long as folks keep wanting them!
whether it continues to be a project i can do full-time into the future is unclear. i can definitely spend this whole year working on it. beyond that, it'll depend on ongoing sales.
@jacqueline
It looks amazing, I wish you the best of luck.
With utmost humility, may I ask why you are choosing to write a new firmware from scratch instead of going with Rockbox? There are so, so many person-years of work, discussions and end-user support sunk into Rockbox, freely available to use. And yet you want to... do it all over again? I am genuinely, and respectfully, puzzled.
@bjst rockbox is fine, but it's not really the right choice as a first-party firmware imo. some examples: there's no wifi or bt support (and the effort to add them would be large), the theming system is a mess, the codebase really hasn't aged particularly well (it's plain old c, and there's a ton of legacy platform-specific # ifdefs).
ultimately i don't feel i can sell something advertised as "easily hackable!" when the primary firmware, frankly, sucks to hack on. i dream of a better firmware.
@bjst there's also potential patent issues with some of the codecs they ship, potential memory usage issues bc of the esp32's approach to spiram. the need to either rewrite a bunch of very low-level drivers from scratch, or attempt to port espressif's sdk into rockbox's build system.
overall, there's just so many issues with a rockbox port, and at the end of the day it wasn't clear to me that the end result would pass the sniff test of "is this actually a good experience?"
@jacqueline had the same realization when looking into rockbox for shenanigans (I didn't end-up doing).
It is a product of its time, couple that with years of development by accretion, and it feels like other than being already familiar and involved with rockbox, it is sadly not a good project to add new platforms to :(.
full disclaimer: I really really liked using rockbox on my ipod.
@samueldr "a product of its time" is 1000% accurate.
they built rockbox in an age where having a computer in your pocket was novel, and everyone wanted to see just how much you could do.
now we live in an age where i have too many computers, and the one in my pocket can do almost everything. i don't need another one, i need a device that plays tunes and is easy to set up the way i like it.
@jacqueline
Are you expecting it to be possible to download and listen to podcast on device via WiFi?
Are you expecting it to be possible to listen to non-browser internet radios? (*.m3u)
Any idea how wifi will impact the battery usage?
Is it possible to record a microphone on a 4 ring headset?
I am tempted to buy it if it can replace my smartphone for podcast and https://rainwave.cc/all/ consumption.
@freemin7 it won't be possible for a while, but being able to do podcast management on-device is one of my big "this would be fucking sick" long-term goals
m3u support is on our radar!
honestly wifi shouldn't impact battery life so much; we won't leave the radio on for very long
Mhh even without TRRS this is sweet. Delivery estimate in September. I hope with these unexpected order quantities you are able to speed up delivery.
It not being supported in software for a while is fine tm when the hardware also takes a while. 👍
@jacqueline
Oh i just read:
> Listen to music, audio books, and podcasts on a purpose-built device with a tried-and-true form factor, a familiar user interface, and no interest in your data.
If you are not sure you'll support podcasts on device, i would remove podcasts from that line.
@freemin7 eh, i think it's fine. you can listen to podcasts on the device. automatic syncing of new eps is a really good feature to have, but a lack of it doesn't make podcasts not work.
@jacqueline this is pretty fucking great. Since my #1 use for my phone is music, I sometimes miss how I had an iPod and a phone as separate entities. Of course I think there are still standalone iPods, but I can't keep track and I just really need something like my old model.
Can I ask if this is something that supports playlists created in Apple's current Music app? Or do you need to order playlists on the device itself?
@wicche do you know what format the music app uses for playlists? we haven't added playlist support yet, but when we do we're most likely starting with .m3u files
@realleif it's a bit of both. we intentionally don't update the screen as fast as we could; there's only so much ram available, and we prioritise using it for audio processing
@jacqueline in nitpicking mode, this is too big compared to my (3rd) Sansa Clip+, which has all the features I want/need. But ... since they're not making the Clip+ anymore and it is getting harder and harder to find them, I'll look forward to this as my next device (and will try to be happy about bt/wifi connectivity). Nice work!
@jacqueline@PaulDavisTheFirst I haven't seen a new device with a full size SD card slot in a while. I'm curious what the reason was to prefer that over microSD.
@be@PaulDavisTheFirst to be completely honest, full size sd just has much better vibes. harder to lose, more variety in what specific card you use, and you can still use microsd anyway.
@jacqueline This is pretty neat! Though I wish (if I read the description properly) the USB could be used to passthrough audio and metadata...
Partly why I switched to an iPod Touch from my iPod Mini was so I could use it with my Car's audio system (it also has a 3.5mm jack though), and I must admit I like it telling me what song I'm playing on the entertainment display along with controlling what track (or playlist) I'm listening to from my steering wheel controls... So that would be a "nice to have"... 😅
@piggo@jacqueline I couldn't say... I just know that my car was specifically advertised to be compatible with iPods wayback-when... So probably some proprietary protocol considering it's Apple! 😩
@MMusselwhite@piggo they're usually 'ipod accessory protocol'. it's relatively well understood; basically just usb serial. and we already have usb serial passthrough to the esp32.
@jacqueline I appreciate the choice to not have onboard storage and instead let users choose their own budget for an SD card (which will get cheaper in the future while a Tangara might not).
@frostchild durability is okay. i haven't been brave enough to intentionally drop our cnc prototype on a hard floor yet, but polycarb isn't going to shatter or anything. and worse case a 3d printed repair is pretty easy.
we use the onboard wifi of the esp32.
we don't enable the wifi or bluetooth peripherals unless they're in use! battery life in testing so far has been really good.
i'll be selling them as long as people are buying them.
@jacqueline Btw, I asked about durability, because I like to listen to music before I sleep and have it very close to my bed. Still curious about if it will have a built in speaker though, or an easily replaceable headphone jack. I think I found my birthday present for this year.
@frostchild no built in speaker (though there should be enough power for a small one). the headphone jack is through hole, so some skill needed to replace. but not insurmountable. the jack itself is fairly durable though!
@jacqueline Good news for sure. Headphone jacks can break.
But yeah, is there a feature where once it starts, it will shut off in a certain amount of time if its idle long enough?
Rockbox has this and it conserves battery life quite a bit. playlists and repeat/shuffle I assume you already have though. Correct me if I am wrong though.
@frostchild oh buddy do we have it!!! this is actually tangara's default standby mode; the idea is that with a combination of fast booting, and good persistence of whatever you were last doing, we can turn off the whole device every time you lock it without anything playing.
this, combined with our teeny tiny standby power draw, makes the device last a really long time between charges.
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