Tangara is a portable, open-source music player based on an ESP32 MCU
Tangara is a portable music player that is out to make MP3 players cool again. With an iPod-inspired design and an ESP32 module at its core, Tangara
Tembra, his music downloaded. Darmok and Jalad with the AUX cable.
Shaka-khan, when the beat drops
Arnock, on the night of his joining.
Nice project. $249 seems a bit high, but I guess it's like the Fairphone, they can't save as much as the large manufacturers do.
It's a project by an Australian team, so one would assume two things:
It’s a neat project. Costs as much as an iPod :P
Hopefully people take the source and release a full walkthrough on doing this with an entirely off-the-shelf design. I've got a full electronics workshop and two 3d printers and would LOVE to assemble my own music player with open source designs.
Brings back fond memories of rockbox on my sansa.
Ayo that was amazing on the Sansa Clip+.
oh shit rockbox I had forgotten about that
This is insanely priced, particularly when you see that it literally loses on everything but battery life compared to the original iPod 5gb, let alone the Classic.
Not quite. It has 1TB sd card storage. That's far, far better. And it has wifi and USB not just FireWire. Ram is less sure but how much ram do you need for playing tunes?
If you have chrome browser JavaScript applet as the media player backend, terabytes.
Aha, I did indeed miss the "external storage" row—mostly because it only uses the "Tb" acronym quite late in the description. I think the difference between Firewire and USB-C is minimal? (ie they are both "fast enough") but I guess having wifi is a step up (although I always still plug my phone in to transfer music at this point so…)
well there also does not seem.to be a multi billion dollar corrupt gang of geniouses behind it. what you do with your data is up to you but im just saying that we can be happy that there are options out there.
20 hour battery life of use is actually far better than I thought it would be. Wonder what the pi equiv build would bu
The Pi in any form is a much larger system with a whole lot more clock cycles, larger architecture, and more peripherals like a full memory management unit, graphics hardware, etc.
On the flip side IIRC most ESP32's are 210MHz and just dual core. It is microcontroller versus microprocessor, so probably 10× less power or more.
That's actually so low imo. It just plays music and doesn't connect to internet right? Should last for like a week at least.
Has anyone checked out prices for refurbished ipod classics? $300 for a 20 year old mp3 player! Insanity!
Edit: looking at the specs for the Tangara..... 16MB of internal storage???? Uhhhhhhh......... I guess the intent is to use an SD card.
Are these “refurbished” or “updated”?
An OG iPod in decent shape with original specs is cool from a collectors point of view, but even then $300 sounds steep.
But if you slap a modern li-po and higher capacity modern flash storage, maybe a haptic module? Dude. Now it’s a highly functional piece of nostalgia.
I haven't seen a device that takes full sized sdhc cards in at least a decade.
They got $136k funding from an original goal of $10k. Did it go to their head?
Listening to music like it's 2005 all over again
darmok & jalad at tanagra
Shaka, when the walls fell
Leykam and Howard when they raised the roof.
Genuine question : Why use that instead of storing your musics on your phone ?
I prefer an MP3 player over my phone. Here is the one I use. Why I like this one:
My phone doesn't have a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Such courage! /s
While I use my phone for music I can certainly see some advantages:
physical buttons
smaller and lighter
less distraction than a phone
cheaper to replace if stolen or broken
You can replace your phone with dedicated electronics, which has some advantages, such as better battery life and generally better performance. Like I bet this thing has a better amplifier than a phone has.
And phones have their downsides. They don't last as long and are expensive. Privacy issues. And can be too stimulating and intrusive. For example sometimes you just need to know the time and before you know it you're emailing someone.
When I go hiking I can just as well take a dumb phone, a GPS and an mp3 player with me. Maybe a camera too.
I have a shuffle just for running.
Having something that doesn't connect to the internet makes for a better device in the long run. Plus, as others have mentioned, less distractions.
I will always prefer my iPod Mini with extra storage, new battery and Rockbox like this guy did, and the reasons are:
Cute, but what problem does this solve? Regardless of what you feel about any particular platform, consolidating multiple pieces of functionality into the highly integrated smartphone platform was a major step forward in mobility. This just feels like a regression.
Below you will find my highly researched list of advantages over the typical smartphone:
Some people like to enjoy their media without having to use a smartphone, they prefer to keep their smartphones as strictly communication devices. Doing so allows them to switch off entirely when at their leisure in addition to saving phone battery life.
2tb of removable storage dedicated to music and the existence of a headphone jack are significant advantages for me. Not that I would purchase this particular contraption but I understand the appeal of single function/media devices such as DAPs and ereaders.
Some people like to enjoy their media without having to use a smartphone, they prefer to keep their smartphones as strictly communication devices.
Okay, I guess that's fair. I can see this useful for being out for a run or whatnot. I'm not sure I find it quite comparable to an e-reader, since the screen on an e-reader provides a decidedly different experience from a smartphone both in size and readability.
You could say this about any type of music player tbh (LP, cassette, etc.)
Yup, this just feels like someone trying to make the cassette cool again. There's a reason it fell out of fashion. If someone wants it, so be it, in the end that's their business. I just think it's a little silly to be sprouting more devices (and associated e-waste) when people can stay consolidated in one compact package.
Will buy for the Opus audio codec support alone.
The only reason i’d consider this is if the soundcard was premium with DAC and amp included. Otherwise that piece of junk brings nothing to the table. Yes this thing has it, but its nowhere near premium.
Nobody said it was.
This is all well and good, especially from a nostalgia perspective (in addition to the general pushback against cloud everything); but what I miss most about portable music nowadays is the lack of decent inline remotes (think early 2000s Sony MiniDisc players).
The player stated in your pocket, and the remote handled everything, volume, playback, and even had a dot-matrix screen to identify and navigate playlists!
I had a Sony portable CD player that I used to use for listening to audiobooks as a kid. It also had an inline remote with a screen. One notable feature it had was custom screen messages (dunno why you would need one tbh). Nothing beats setting the remote so that there was an ASCII dick on the screen all the time, and then have your dad give you the look of disappointment afterwards.
At some point the remote was lost, and the laser assembly broke. I miss that player dearly
I just want an mp3 player to replace my Walkman with sensme, they killed sensme and nothing has replaced it so to date the best mp3 player I own is that little thing, I tell it what mood I am in and it always delivers, I dread the day it dies.
I've tried cloud based music services like Spotify etc they are not really same thing as it's just global playlists for a mood/genre, not something tailored to your tastes in a set catalogue.
It is named Omakase Channel in Japan.
The phrase omakase, literally 'I leave it up to you', is most commonly used when dining at Japanese restaurants where the customer leaves it up to the chef to select and serve seasonal specialties.
Hey, would a Spotify playlist analyzer help you?
I've tried them and they were hit and miss, also to make things more niche most of my music is a mix of video game music and film/anime music, which Spotify is quite short on.
Spotify and other services are trying to make you discover new music. While that's useful I just want it to analyse my local music and work out what to play.
Its a shame the tech exists but as its patented (I think) you can't simply make an open source version, I believe really it's just a 2d graph plot against tempo and some other metric derived from analysis.
It would be a neat gift for anyone that enjoyed the first generation iPod.
Sounds kind of cool. Does is support Rockbox, yet?
Dude, I haven’t hear the name Rockbox in yeeeeeears! I had that in my first mp3 player that predated the iPod. I don’t remember the name of it, but Rockbox really improved the interface.
One of my first "hacking" a device was putting Rockbox on a 4 gb Samsung MP3 player in 2010. This device wasn't meant to play/watch videos, but Rockbox unlocked that capability. It had a tiny screen, but still.
Rip Creative Nomad.
I had one, real piece of shit tho.
With optimization that battery should last more than 10 days.
Well damn. Might be what i was looking for. Gotta know if it had Gapless Playback before purchase though
OpenNugget 🐍
Will be needing to check-in on this over time to see if anything is changed or default functions expand just a bit. I have been looking for a good media device for loading my archived podcast episodes/seasons and audiobooks without having all the extra bloat and/or possible malware that can be on lots of similar and cheaper Android players (or the overkill of using an old phone that doesn't have a aux port). Main thing for podcasts and audiobooks is variable playback speed settings and stuff like understanding audiobook formats with chapters.
Sadly I (for now) have settled on a sketchy Android device that I would love to root so I can remove a specific flagged app that the Play Store always pops a notification about that is not uninstallable like so many companies do. But since it is a no name brand without firmware images to download from their site. I just I only ever put it online long enough for my favorite podcast app to pull new eps or Audible. Though I am planning to eventually just download and strip DRM from my library for having backups.
So if this thing can get variable speed for podcasts and support open/free formats that are specific to books. Then I am sold. I never got to have an iPod back in the day, so I very much like the throwback look of this thing! I do wish it had more RAM though, as I would imagine that it could limit some higher quality formats/codecs (but I am not a dev so maybe it wouldn't matter). The price seems fair given it isn't from just another global mega-corp. I hope they pay their devs well to make sure their official firmware updates stay active, and/or put some profits into future revisions and whatnot.
So just saying....I found a pretty simple iPod classic upgrade...you do the battery and swap out hard drive for a SD motherboard which can handle any SD drive you throw in it....
This is the way
Does the iPod Classic support variable playback speeds and open audiobook formats? I genuinely don't know much of anything about them aside from how to play regular music whenever my friend that had different Nanos over a few years back in the day. Also can stuff be loaded without iTunes? If so, then I would certainly look into them again!
We need more devices like this. Will definitely pick this up.
While I'd prefer a sort of iPod-like alternative to high-end DAPs like FiiO or Astell&Kern make, this is nice too. If it just had a balanced audio jack, it'd be perfect.
https://www.westerndigital.com/products/mp3-players/sandisk-clip-sport-go?sku=SDMX30-016G-G46B
$50.
Edit: What's the point of open sourcing this product? It's an MP3 player. How does it utilize wifi? Does it run apps? Can it access a file server to download new media? The video and article doesn't go into that at all. BT is nice but Sandisk $50 clip players have had that for a long time.
This seems like 5x the price for a dev product.
What’s the point of open sourcing this product?
Some people just like to have the possibility to change and completely own their stuff. Some people actually do change firmware or hardware components. I'd say it's mostly for tech enthusiasts and tinkerers.
does the sandisk do 2tb of flac?
It supports FLAC but goes only to about 64 GB micro SD cards. Although they made newer models since, but every one seem to have missing important features, like Bluetooth only or lack of SD cards support.
It could do whatever since it is open source and uses ESP-IDF. Adding features like that or coding an entirely new firmware would be well within hobbyist capabilities.
