it's been a while since i last talked about my music setup and things have changed a bit.
the music player
main benefits of owning a device specifically for listening to music for me are:
- it saves on battery life of my other devices
- it allows listening to music without any distractions
so these are all well and good but finding a decent music player in 2026 is really hard. in my experience most devices fall into two categories: the high end stuff made by audio brands whose prices rival smartphones or really really cheaply made music players which sound like tin cans.
i was also looking for buying a second hand ipod but their prices have been inflated so much by the retro movement it's kind of insane. plus with an ipod you can't use flac files and there is no last.fm or listenbrainz scrobbling or bluetooth audio. (maybe you can get better deals if you decide to mod one yourself by buying a broken one but that is out of my skillset)
then i realised something. an old android phone can do a lot of what i'm looking for. so i grabbed my mom's old phone (a huawei p30) and aggressively debloated it with adb until only the essentials remained on the device. i downloaded poweramp, panoscrobbler, slapped on niagara launcher and i've been using it exclusively for listening to music for the past couple of months and it's going really smoothly. IT EVEN HAS A HEADPHONE JACKKK!!
the files
i get most of my files through soulseek using nicotine+ then pass them through beets for tagging. for syncing i tried to get syncthing to work but it always ended up crashing my phone. i searched around for answers and saw other people who ran into the same error with syncthing but i don't think anyone is working on fixing a crash on a phone that came out in 2019.
in the meantime i'm manually syncing my files through usb and it's not that big of a deal, my library doesn't change as much as it's used to.
the headphones
i had sony xm4's for listening to music but i also got kz zsn pro 2's from a friend for a really good price and they sound really good. it's great for the current summer weather when i don't want to put on a headphone and sweat all over it.
conclusion
old android phones are surprisingly good as separate music players. they have most of the modern features you want and also a headphone jack. also you are actively keeping them away from landfills so that's always a plus in my book.
