Tangara is a portable, open-source music player based on an ESP32 MCU

Tembra, his music downloaded. Darmok and Jalad with the AUX cable.

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.

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.

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.

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.

20 hour battery life of use is actually far better than I thought it would be. Wonder what the pi equiv build would bu

Looks like the first iPod, the brick.

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

Genuine question : Why use that instead of storing your musics on your phone ?

Will buy for the Opus audio codec support alone.

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.

I will always prefer my iPod Mini with extra storage, new battery and Rockbox like this guy did, and the reasons are:

• better overall build and audio quality
• way cheaper (70-80$ vs 249$)
• better software support (Rockbox is FOSS and has been going on for ages and it's not gonna stop)
• it actually upcycles old hardware instead of buying new devices and creating more e-waste
• nostalgia value +100 points

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!

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.

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 would be a neat gift for anyone that enjoyed the first generation iPod.

Sounds kind of cool. Does is support Rockbox, yet?

Rip Creative Nomad.

Well damn. Might be what i was looking for. Gotta know if it had Gapless Playback before purchase though

With optimization that battery should last more than 10 days.

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.

I picked up an ESP32 somewhat randomly for a hardware project I had and was blown away at how capable these things are for the price point. Currently have a Micropython build flashed on mine but tbh with some time and dedication to actually using it at a low level, you could use these to power tons of open source designs for popular devices/products.

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.