Apple iPod Video

The big thing here is the concept of a device doing ONE thing and doing it well. Is there a name for that? I've been rocking an iPod Video for like 15 years and it is still my go-to music device. All the stereos in my office, house and shop have a 3.5mm cable hanging from them. I've also been using rockbox so I can play FLAC files. The ipod is on it's 4th battery at this point and I've also upgraded to SD cards from the internal HD about 6 years ago. The screen is not working in a few places now, but the thing keeps working and I'd be very sad if it ever stopped because I'm not sure what would replace it. Whenever I'm programming and I feel like I've been very productive, it's often the times I'm using this ipod with headphones - instead of a music playing piece of software. Maybe it's because I'm less inclined to open up the software and spend time choosing an album/podcast/etc.

Speaking about up-sampling, Im curious to know your opinion on the benefits of it. Im sending CD resolution audio as well as web streams from soundcloud.com to cambridge audio azur 840C and its not clear if its the up-sampling that makes the difference or their per channel wolfson dac arch. The iPod Video with their dac sounded amazing with just normal AAC files compared to the iPods before or after it.

I picked up an iPod Video last year and could never go back to Spotify. What a mistake that was. With Rockbox installed I can play lossless codexs. With Bandcamp I can actually support artists. Without an infinite library I treasure what I have. When I want something that's not on bandcamp, like for example a live recording of a gig on youtube, theres yt-dlp. And otherwise CDs are cheap. All of this without distractions, without an internet connection, and without draining my phones battery. Spotify was a huge mistake.

I took my old iPod video and swapped out the hard drive for an adapter that just uses micro sd cards. I suppose you can’t use wireless headphones but it’s now ultra light and the battery life is great.

I have no idea I'm afraid, just going off a fuzzy memory. This seems to go into a lot more detail than I ever could: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Gapless_playback . There's no way to go back and fix old files, but I know iTunes has done flawless gapless (when the source files are good, e.g. ripped from CD in iTunes) for about 10 years (I remember getting the firmware update on my black iPod video, ahhh now that was a beautiful looking bit of kit! Not very waterproof as it turns out though...) Google Music doesn't play gapless properly, which is incredibly annoying, and indeed I struggled to get any player on Android to play gapless as well as iTunes. Poweramp was the closest I could find. Ended up going back to iPhone for that and other reasons. Not sure how iTunes Match handles gapless as I could never get it to upload my library properly, never mind play it back... I still feel there is a big gap in the market for a really good cloud music repository. Hopefully Spotify can get in to that space, their player is the best out of the ones I've tried (though still a lot of room for improvement). I did try using Subsonic briefly but the clients were horrible.