A couple years ago, Owlrooster published an article about vir experience buying and using an MP3 player, focusing on how it changed vir relationship with the music vi listens to. A few months ago, we read that article and thought, hey, that sounds cool and fun. So we bought our own player, chucked some FOSS firmware on it, and started putting music on it. This is a write-up of our experience so far, concerning both the player itself and how it's changed the way we interact with music.
First, the player and set-up thereof. We bought a Sansa e200v2 secondhand; given the clock when we turned it on for the first time, it hadn't been used in well over a decade and a half. Putting Rockbox, FOSS firmware for MP3 players on it was mostly painless, although we had to install Open SSL 1.1.1o to get the install utility to work. A few commands and a folder move later, though, everything was fine.
The physical interface took some getting used to. We had to figure out how to move the ring without hurting our thumb. Other than that, though, it's been fairly intuitive. Rockbox itself hasn't caused any issues as far as we're aware. Sometimes when the player's dropped it'll spontaneously shut off; pressing the power button turns it back on without issue. The only thing we would describe as an actual issue is that if files are incorrectly copied onto the player, it causes all files to be externally unmodifiable; no adding or deleting anything. When this happens, we go in and delete the offending files via the player's interface. To avoid it in the first place, we copy things one at a time (whether that's a folder or an individual file).
Overall, it does what it needs to do well. I'm surprised it's functioning as well as it is for how old it is, although that might be it being mostly unused or Rockbox being very efficient. The user experience is pleasant, though, and that's what matters.
After set-up, we started moving music onto it. We're still working on building up the library; currently it mostly consister of Bandcamp purchases and YouTube finds. We even snagged some some stuff our parents bought years ago. On an unrelated note, I think Spotify might have some content security policy issues regarding songs that are unavailable to listen to but still visible.
Anyway, it's been fun. Unlike Owl, we didn't have an MP3 player growing up and never really listened to the radio, either; our musical experience was limited to the six CDs our mother played in the car and whatever we encountered at school. The Web, governed by the algorithms of YouTube and Spotify, was the first place we had to really explore and connect with music; to have that experience of finding a song and looping it over and over, or saving it in any sense of the word at all.
Getting the MP3 player and putting music on it was a wholely novel experience to us. The process of downloading, tending to the metadata, and putting it onto the player was new to us. We were familiar with the process from having saved music to our computer in the past, but now there was another step, and instead of just rifling through YouTube we were also checking Bandcamp to see if they were available for purchase there. Money became a consideration. We also had to download and attach the album art if we wanted it to look pretty on the player. (Really, a wholely optional step—the screen turns off after 10 seconds anyway—but one we like to do anyway.)
The whole process has made us much more conscious of our relationship with music. Of course we want to buy that song, it means so much to us; I'm not sure if we should buy individual songs or the whole album, let's count how many we really like; yes this is worth opening the Wikipedia page so we can put all the songs in the correct order. Having to put effort into saving the songs means we think about what they mean to us and what they're worth.
Our experience of listening to music in general is very different with the MP3 player. We're used to bluetooth headphones and being able to dance around the room without really being aware of our surroundings; we can't do that with the player. It needs a cord. If we want to listen to music on it, we have to hold it and some of the cord so it doesn't go flying or get tangled up. Another difference is that we can't skip around in a song or loop the same thirty seconds over and over; we have to listen the whole way through. You can't auto-loop a song with a simple button tap, either—or, if you can, it's not in the user manual. These all might sound like downsides, but as someone who's had a habit of getting stuck in daydreaming loops while listening to songs for years now, they're good. They make getting lost harder.
Listening requires more intention. If we want to put something on, we have to plug everything in, turn it on, wait the few seconds for it to boot up, navigate to what we want, click, and then listen. Ironically, it's made us more appreciative of intrumental music; that kind of music doesn't have lyrics and so doesn't get stuck in our brain as easily, but we're finding that we enjoy it more than we expected. We're more patient and conscious of what's going on when we choose to listen to it instead of skipping around for the part that scratches our brain just right. I think the patience is the key here; we have to slow down and pay attention when we listen just by virtue of having to pick up the specific device and use the wheel and buttons.
Slowing down feels good. We get more out of what we listen to. It's this general principle we've had on the brain recently: the less you focus on, the more you get out of it. There's so much cool stuff out there, but we'll only ever be able to appreciate a tiny fraction of it no matter what.
In conclusion, literal and metaphorical price of listening to music on a fifteen-plus year old device that, while technically being able to play Doom, is really just meant for audio files, is worth it. We've had a similar experience to Owl in that the effort required to put music on the player does improve our awareness of how we relate to the songs we listen to; the friction produced by using the player has also been beneficial to us more generally.
One final note: we would be remiss not to mention that Owl makes music of vir own, which you can find on vir website and on Bandcamp. This ending paragraph is too short to say a lot but I like silk, a very short piece that sounds like falling through layers of reality in your own brain. Go check it out!