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 hate that so many devices try hard to obscure filesystems even though they are right there, right under the hood. I remember how ridiculous it was to try and browse an iPod as the hard drive it was. They copied your files into an indecipherable file tree with weird names. If companies aren't trying to keep you from copying shit then they're thinking you're too dumb to understand files and folders and putting some other weird UI on top of them to make them "user friendly".
And thusly, they made kids unable to understand file browsers/systems :'(
I think at this point it's a concerted effort to make sure we're all consumers, not users
👨🚀🔫👨🚀
100%. the hippies and the punks were straight up right