For years I’ve been a Spotify guy. Whole Spotify family, family share plan for me and everybody in the house. It’s convenient. I think they’re fascists now? Capitalism is complicated. There are some really good curated vaporwave playlists.
Anyway, a key reason I eventually became a Spotify guy is that the hard drive that had my whole mp3 collection on it was, like many things from when I was in my 20s, lost in the shuffle of upgrading PCs and moving house a whole bunch of times between 2008 and 2020, oops. Was it just in the basket of crap that my ex girlfriend took with her that was “shared property” like it’s a divorce? That’s getting a little personal. I think I lost some cool books that way, too.
So for years I was like, well I had all these awesome OC Remix tracks from around 2005 that are a hassle to listen to on youtube, I guess I’ll just die. And then, one fine day in TYOL 2024, I remembered that I had, at some point in my youth backed up my whole music collection to Google Music. I don’t remember why! Maybe I just wanted to see if it would work. But I decided to check out the situation, and all that stuff was still there in my private library on youtube music! Now here’s where it gets cool:
They don’t throw a whole parade about it, but if you do some sniffing around like I did, you will learn that google has a policy AND a control panel to let users download back any files they’ve ever uploaded to a google service. It’s called Google Takeout, and it’s pretty robust. They’ll package all the files you request into a big archive- it’s a task they queue up in the background, and it can take a pretty long time, but they notify you once it’s finished and you can download your giant zip file of mp3s that were definitely all originally procured legally.
Now we can talk about the fun part. I had all my old mp3s again, but the Zune software I once used to manage them no longer exists. At the time, I decided to go with Media Monkey. I’ll have to look into something else soon for the home server I’m setting up, since they don’t have a Linux version, but I’m pretty happy with the decision. I was able to sort and categorize all my music, fix all the busted metadata that I think got scrubbed on its way through Google, and overall get it prepped for export to an mp3 player.
Did you know that mp3 players are a whole rabbit hole now? You’ve got a surprisingly large range of choices, though a lot of them come from sort of mysterious brands now. For a while at least, Sony was making some kind of Walkman-branded Android device, which makes it sort of like one of those iPod Touches that Apple was putting out as the last gasp for that product line. Speaking of iPods, I also found out you can buy a refurbished and upgraded iPod for like $250 on etsy? With a big SSD, a new battery, and a jailbroken OS? I keep telling myself I’m gonna get one of those, I think they’re insanely cool. Anyway, I decided to start small. For a paltry $30, you can get a 32GB player that’s sort of a bootleg iPod Nano, with a nice physical control interface and a color screen (AGPTEK A02). The UI is a little fiddly, but it gets the job done. I got some inexpensive earbuds to go with it, and it works! It sounds pretty good, at least no worse than I remember my devices sounding back in the day. It’s fun to listen to my old music. The battery life on this little guy is insane, I could probably take it camping with me and not worry about charging. If I were to upgrade out of it, it’s either gonna be one of those iPod refurbs, or an Innioasis Y1, which is kind of an iPod clone that officially supports flashing its OS to Rockbox.
Going through this whole process also got me tumbling down a weird media preservation kick, but that’s for another post. Suffice to say it got me really thinking about like, media, ownership, and the economics of availability. Did you know you can still buy CDs? They still make them! A corporation can’t run out of time on a distribution contract for a disc you have in your house. What are you supposed to do if the movie you wanna show your kids isn’t available for general streaming? Buy a stream key for it? That seems insane. Another post, though.
Is it worth buying an mp3 player in 2026? I think it is, if you’ve still got mp3s. Re-curating my music library and getting it all onto the device was a fun way to spend a couple of afternoons. I also ended up checking out WACUP because of this, which is sort ongoing Winamp Emulator that’s still being updated. It’s just as cool as it used to be, especially since the latest available client from the actual Winamp people appears to be flagged as some kind of cyber threat.
At the end of the day, I’ve really enjoyed rediscovering my old collection of music from around the high school and college years. I appreciated that a cheap mp3 player is still cheap, and it’s cool that they’re so much more full-featured than the old USB stick ones were. It turns out I was really missing the simple joy of jamming out to my favorite music while I plug away at a Minecraft build, and I’m looking forward to spending more time with my old tunes and maybe curating some new ones.
Leave a Reply