Why are they all so horrible?

[icewater]

I've tried several low-end mp3 players.  They're all just so bad.  The physical controls, the menu options / state changes...  Do they not test this stuff before putting out a product?  It seems like such an opportunity for someone to just do it right and own the space.

Is there a market for open source mp3 player hardware?  Maybe a high-level software development kit for them so the software can be customized for the intended use case (for me 99% long-form podcast listening)?

Or have phone apps displaced any interest for these devices?

[depperl]

I would certainly be interested in an open source mp3 player. But I am only a single person.

[Frankenpod]

I've tried several low-end mp3 players.  They're all just so bad.  The physical controls, the menu options / state changes...  Do they not test this stuff before putting out a product?  It seems like such an opportunity for someone to just do it right and own the space.

Is there a market for open source mp3 player hardware?  Maybe a high-level software development kit for them so the software can be customized for the intended use case (for me 99% long-form podcast listening)?

Or have phone apps displaced any interest for these devices?

On the second point there I think there are several existing threads debating just that topic, so no point starting another one.  But I share your puzzlement on the first point, it's weird that nobody in the cheap-shovelware player market has made even a bit of effort to produce something with at least a not-awful UI design.  As you say, if someone made something that just reached the level of 'not terrible' it could wipe the floor with the existing ones.  I guess mobile phones mean the dedicated-player market is now so small it isn't even worth that modicum of effort.

[speachy]

But I share your puzzlement on the first point, it's weird that nobody in the cheap-shovelware player market has made even a bit of effort to produce something with at least a not-awful UI design.

That's actually very easy to explain -- the cheap shovelware players are so limited in their capabilities (ie almost no RAM) that it is pretty much impossible to implement a not-awful UI.

[keptskb403]

That's actually very easy to explain -- the cheap shovelware players are so limited in their capabilities (ie almost no RAM) that it is pretty much impossible to implement a not-awful UI.

That coming from you is particularly odd. I first ran rockbox 15y ago on absolute trash hardware. Great UI does not require any resources at all, if done right. The codec will require more.

Literally a handful of lines of logically arranged text do the trick. Haven't used rb in many years, but I remember being very impressed with what you had back then. The doom and such were funny, but of course we don't need that.

I'm just as puzzled as you icewater.

People are willing to go into extensive debt for a spyware brick (cough 'smart'phone that is 'outdated' in 6months anyway) these days, so it seems nobody cares anymore. All meaning lost.

[saratoga]

That's actually very easy to explain -- the cheap shovelware players are so limited in their capabilities (ie almost no RAM) that it is pretty much impossible to implement a not-awful UI.

That coming from you is particularly odd. I first ran rockbox 15y ago on absolute trash hardware. Great UI does not require any resources at all, if done right. The codec will require more.

You had 10-100x as much RAM if you were running rockbox. Without available RAM software is very limited.

[speachy]

That coming from you is particularly odd. I first ran rockbox 15y ago on absolute trash hardware. Great UI does not require any resources at all, if done right. The codec will require more.

Literally a handful of lines of logically arranged text do the trick. Haven't used rb in many years, but I remember being very impressed with what you had back then. The doom and such were funny, but of course we don't need that.

The "absolute trash hardware" from 15 years ago had about 8x the RAM as more modern shovelware players.

And sure, we can save a non-trivial amount of runtime RAM if we ditch the themable UI.  And free up even more RAM if we go back to HWCODEC onlly.  And make it so you can play music OR do anything else (eg browse files).  Oh, and the translation engine and voiced UIs.  And so forth.

The point being, by the time we do all of that work to completely rewrite [note this is _not_ an exaggeration] the codebase to make something _fit_ into the limited RAM of these shovelware devices, what's left is no longer recognizable as "rockbox" any more, lacking all of the cool features that folks expect to get.  So what exactly is the point of doing all of that work?

Incidentally, the least capable port we have today, ie the Sansa Clip with 2KB of RAM, no SD card, and a 128x64 monochrome screen, needs 344KB of RAM to even _boot_,  This doesn't include memory for (any!) buffers -- eg file/directory caches, SD dma buffers, theme resources, etc -- or things like codec or plugin scratch space.

Then consider that most of these shovelware players have 224K (or less) of _total_ RAM, and we have _zero_ documentation how how to use them.