It’s a Creative Zen Stone that I got as a Christmas gift in 2008. I just found it in a drawer, and it’s still holding charge. The last thing I put on it was The Life And Times Of Scrooge by Tuomas Holopainen, in 2015 – I don’t know why, at that time I definitely had a smartphone.
It has a headphone jack, which immediately makes it better than every smartphone produced in the last several years, and it can easily drive my 80-ohm Beyerdynamic. The audio quality is as good as one can expect. The only drawback is that it only holds 1GB… my old CD rips had to be compressed to hell and back.
Let me reiterate that this has been sitting untouched for a decade and was immediately ready for action. No login, no annoying software updates, expired subscription, or remote bricking by the manufacturer. Eat my shorts, Spotify Car Thing.
P.s. A Lifetime Of Adventure is a banger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWwSVOo5K_k
I feel like my opinion is more controversial. I knew how to do all those things. I helped orchestrate a gigantic CD rip and swap using “lab” work computer equipment at a time when hard drive space was very expensive. I knew how to download files before Napster. When subscription music arrived and then the family plan followed, I subscribed and deleted everything. If I didn’t like new music but just relied on a catalog of older music maybe I wouldn’t have gone that route—but even then I think my kids would have wanted access to new music.
Honestly, I like subscription music—I listen to hundreds of new songs every month. I love wireless headphones for exercise. I don’t care about the lack of headphone jack. To me it isn’t enshittification, it is a wonderful product suite that I much prefer to the one I used to use.
I’d much rather own it and the storage requirements (‘till HDD death do we part), than rely on a web of licensing and exclusivity arrangements between streaming platforms and labels, which can - and have - been capriciously revoked in a moment. That’s also assuming the service offers the kind of music you like, or has good fidelity. And there’s platform agnostic issues like data connection - when we head up into the mountains I still have my files to play, but my wife is fully dependent upon Spotify and good cell signal.
And there’s your radically different use case. I value having my music collection and archive, I follow artists throughout their career, and seek out entire albums vs individual tracks. Someone who may not care so deeply or develops a different relationship with music based on playlists or radio hits won’t value the archival aspect as much, because music’s value is temporal.
I think in a different life I might have ended up on your path and I appreciate how much it is the right one for many. I’ll toss out a few more comments (mainly cause I am trying to contribute to Lemmy both monetarily and by not just lurking).
I love the fidelity of Apple Music which is what I use—it is certainly much better than my CD collection ever was. I don’t even bother using the lossless option as I cannot tell the difference. I usually have about 50GB of music sync’d to my devices and my wife and I camp without cell service often.
I carefully curate my music collection. I have about 5000 songs I love neatly sorted into decade playlists plus specialty playlists. I keep a textual backup of my playlists in addition to exported playlist backups to allow me to recover from pretty much any issue including apple account loss.
I rarely see removed songs, but do occasionally see them. Since my library is well curated it is easy to see which tracks are unavailable. I would guess I have been impacted on less than 0.1%.
It is extremely rare for me to not find the songs I want on Apple Music, but I have uploaded many tracks to Apple Music that I had to procure from other locations. The most common ones have been live tracks, soundtracks and mixes. At that point they work just like any other music in my library.
It’s been a pretty good experience—not one I would have predicted 20 years ago.