For the people that don’t want to click through to find the code:
Does it come with open source earbuds?
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.
I’ve waited so long for one but it’s too underpowered for the price.
How can this be underpowered?
8 mb of ram and 240mHZ. I know the costs are bigger for new companies but an rpi zero is 15-20€ and it has 1gGHZ and 512mb of ram. There’s no problem if they have very good optimized code but it shouldn’t cost 250$
For the more adventurous, Tangara’s ESP32 firmware is written in C++ using the ESP-IDF framework. … Tangara’s battery is a standard LiPo pouch cell with a 3-pin JST connector. … Active battery life depends on use case (typically >20 hours)
Sorry, thanks but not thanks. Make it use a swappable 18650 and run Rockbox. Also it costs $250 which might have been ok in the early 2000s but is outlandish today. Finally it’s Crowdsupply, which is not a scam but is a pain to deal with. And the battery drain is a lot too. Sandisk players were getting 10+ hours on an AAA cell in 2005 or so. This is just not an interesting product and the makers should have spent a few evenings on the Rockbox forums before starting the project.
Thanks for this! I didn’t know about Rockbox before.
Could it run Rockbox ? My iPods and sansa run with rockbox, it’s awesome.
Can we get an Open-Hardware CD-ROM/Optical-disk reader for our PCs ?
How large a library can it handle? I’ve had two others similar but they parsed files so slowly as to be ultimately useless
you’d have to be pretty dumb to fuck up text parsing that badly. Maybe if you don’t implement segmented processing, and have a 50k line text file or something.
Guess maybe 30GB of files in an avg of 10MB bites is a chore
Glad to see its on crowd supply
$271,285 raised of $10,000 goal. That’s some pretty good odds of success
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’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.
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.
Does anyone here remember Rockbox? I still have my old Sansa player running it.
I have my iPod 5th gen running on RockBox. IMO it’s even better than the stock firmware because it can play flacs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same, someone also added a new battery at some point so I have an awesome weeklong working device. And after rockbox, its even better.
Mine is also a Sansa! 😁👍
I used to use Sansa clip+ with Rockbox back when the audio quality on my phone was terrible.
Darmok and Jalad, at Tangara?
shaka, when the walls fell
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 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…
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
Lots of people complaining about the software. Why did they even bother writing software? Does it run rockbox?
Because they wanted to. It’s a passion project meant for certainly not everyone and made by a very small team of people.
Sure, but if they have fewer people then why reinvent the wheel? The open hardware is new and great, but the open software already exists.
Its good to have options and while it may not be great now they have to start somewhere
