Portable Music Player with Open Source Firmware and CAD Files (Now in production)

I just received mine a few days ago!

I am excited to have it and start using it but I would also caution people interested in it. It is currently a little rough around the edges software wise but I'm optimistic it will continue to improve with time.

I am personally glad I opted to support this project and while I don't think I'll be able to contribute to code I do hope to at least provide beneficial feedback and end user diagnostics.

I also got mine recently! Definitely agree with the rough around the edges part. This is definitely an artisanal, hand-rolled, music player. It... doesn't seem very durable. Mine rattles when I move it...
I bought it to support open source and because I'm hoping it'll last a long time. (As long as I don't move it too much.)
- Haha I think it's plenty durable so long as you aren't dropping it all the time.
  The rattle is probably just the side buttons which do have a little wiggle due to the tolerances of the case.
  The touch wheel on my was a little loose too which was a know issue. I just put a little piece of double sides tape on the top between it and the case and now it's all good.
I'm optimistic it will continue to improve with time.
In my experience there are few crowdsourced products that continue to be significantly developed after the initial sales have finished unless they are astoundingly well-reviewed to continue selling.
Pebble was one of the few exceptions for one that I funded. Even then, once the Apple Watch came out they got gobbled up by (garmin) and all development on the originals died.
- I don't necessarily expect it to be supported indefinitely but they only just got the hardware into backers hands and are now taking in a lot of feedback so I don't think it unreasonable to expect some reasonable improvements in the shorter term.
  Time will tell though. Personally I'd be quite happy with it after some bug fixes and a few small features. And if worse comes to worse it will become a personal coding project for myself.

Does anyone here remember Rockbox? I still have my old Sansa player running it.

I have my iPod 5th gen running on RockBox. IMO it's even better than the stock firmware because it can play flacs.
- And ogg and m4a and opus and so many more. I have an ipod 6th gen runnung rockbox. Its great. If the harddrive dies I'll replace it with sd-cards and still keep uaing it.
- I even had Doom running on it. The controls were difficult though
- Rockbox is cool, I just wish it was able to replace the base system without touching the UI. Something about it just feels off on an iPod. Even supposedly iPod-accurate themes just feel uncanny.
- Same, someone also added a new battery at some point so I have an awesome weeklong working device. And after rockbox, its even better.
- It's a shame rockbox doesn't support video playback though.
  How is stability for you? My 7th gen with about 750gb is pretty unstable, mostly I have a lot of difficulty transferring since the iPod crashes 15gb in all the time.
Mine is also a Sansa! 😁👍
I used to use Sansa clip+ with Rockbox back when the audio quality on my phone was terrible.

Darmok and Jalad, at Tangara?

shaka, when the walls fell

$271,285 raised of $10,000 goal. That's some pretty good odds of success

For the more adventurous, Tangara’s ESP32 firmware is written in C++ using the ESP-IDF framework. ... Tangara’s battery is a standard LiPo pouch cell with a 3-pin JST connector. ... Active battery life depends on use case (typically >20 hours)

Sorry, thanks but not thanks. Make it use a swappable 18650 and run Rockbox. Also it costs $250 which might have been ok in the early 2000s but is outlandish today. Finally it's Crowdsupply, which is not a scam but is a pain to deal with. And the battery drain is a lot too. Sandisk players were getting 10+ hours on an AAA cell in 2005 or so. This is just not an interesting product and the makers should have spent a few evenings on the Rockbox forums before starting the project.

Thanks for this! I didn't know about Rockbox before.

I bought one. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t work well with large music libraries. The database building step takes several hours, with no progress indicator, and once it’s done, the scroll wheel does not accelerate, meaning that scrolling through a long list of artists/albums will take a long time. Hopefully these will be remedied in a future firmware.

Holy shit......that seems like day 0 issues. By that I mean issues to address before mass production. Certainly before any customer recieves their product.
- To be fair, the Fiio MP3 player I bought in the late 2010s also didn’t have acceleration while scrolling, and never got it in firmware upgrades. I suspect that 80% of the market might only carry small music collections with them, and the other 20% may be regarded as not worth bothering with (except by Rockbox and the original Apple iPod)
  Not having a progress indicator on the exceedingly long database building application, though, is a bit harder to excuse.

This would be cool to load up with 10s of thousands of songs and to just leave tethered to your home HiFi system

Easier and cheaper to flash mod a Gen5/Gen7 iPod and put Rockbox on it. Looks better too.

Yes, but we desperately need a thriving ecosystem of open source devices. With the way electronics are going - for example, being forced to agree to a new license agreement before being able to use a device I already purchased, and the agreement forces arbitration for disputes? We need more people working on enshittification-proof devices.
Those mods don't look particularly easy. I've seen the results of mods gone awry on a few 7th gens.
Also interesting that they don't add Flac in the supported files for the iPods but mention RockBox.
- Rockbox supports FLAC. Native iPod OS doesn't :(

While I do do electronics, I'm not amazing at it, but, I always wonder how the UIs are so clunky and slow on a processor that outpaces a Pentium 1 ,which would run Windows 95..

ouuuu that looks rly cool! Right in the vein of Pine64.

I like that despite only supporting SBC for now, they are looking to expand the Bluetooth codec support with updates. I think LDAC might be a no-brainer here, since it's royalty free and the encoder is open iirc

I'd rather see a project that brings back legacy Zunes - completely jailbreaks or ROMhacks the Zune software. The hardware was badass and you could easily retrofit SSDs into them. The software needs some sprucing up though.

Eh.

I'd rather have a touch screen. I don't want retro looks over functionality.

The dedicated digital music player scene is rough right now. A year ago I looked into getting one cuz my iPod finally died and I don't want to use my phone for music. I wanted touch screen and Android so I could download apps from the app store. It was surprisingly hard to find one. Ended up with a Chinese brand that works, but there's no support and the screen is real glass and broke already. I like being able to download whatever apps I want and there's a ton of storage space, but I'd really like some better options.

I wanted touch screen and Android
https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders/walkman-mp3-players/p/nwa306-b
There are several good options made by Shanling, Fiio, Sony and Hiby amongst others that would meet your criteria. Not sure where you looked to suggest that the DAP scene is "rough".
Some options to consider:
Hiby R4 - https://store.hiby.com/products/hiby-r4
Hiby M300 - https://store.hiby.com/products/hiby-digital-m300
Fiio JM21 - https://www.fiio.com/jm21
Sony NW-A306 - https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders/walkman-mp3-players/p/nwa306-b
Shanling M3 Ultra - https://en.shanling.com/product/424
best bets probably an aliexpress phone that you dont use as a phone
- Honestly, you're probably right.
If it's an iPod classic/video, you can repair them all very easily and there is huge aftermarket support.
But if you want touchscreen and android plus am app store, why not just buy an old smart phone?

I don't get the appeal of a single-purpose device like this when smartphones are practically mandatory.

As someone who owns a digital audio player I can give some reasons:
Since most phones don't come with headphone jacks anymore, it's nice to have a device you can just plug your wired headphones into. It also means headphone jack inclusion is no longer a factor when choosing a smartphone.
Better audio quality depending on the DAC inside the device.
Expandable storage. Most DAPs let you insert one, some even two micro sd cards. No need to stream anything, plus you have space for lossless files.
No need to worry about data/wifi, your music is always there ready to listen offline.
Some DAPs are really small (Shanling M0 for example), making them more portable than a phone for a lot of use cases.
More headphone compatibility. A lot of higher end DAPs support more than a 3.5 mm jack. The Fiio m11 plus for example has a 4.4 and 2.5 balanced output jacks in addition to the standard 3.5 mm.
Higher power amps to power hungry headphones. A smartphone can't power say a pair of Sennheiser HD 600s, a DAP can because it comes with a preamp (not all though, depends on the specs).
Dedicated physical buttons. A touchscreen will never compare to controlling playback with physical buttons.
Though I will say, even as someone who owns one, unless you're really into carrying your music library with you it's generally not worth it. But they are nifty little gadgets and new ones come out every year to innovate the space.
It's similar to an e-reader as others pointed out. Sure, you can read on a phone/tablet as well but it's nice to have a device that's purpose built for one thing and does it really well. The same applies to a digital audio player. Yeah you can (and most people are fine with) play music on your smartphone, but a dedicated device does add some nice QoL to the experience.
- There's also another niche (that is frankly very annoying to shop for); Music in a SCIF. Assuming you can get the device approved. absolutely no wireless capabilities, and no recording capabilities, amongst other requirements.
  More or less limits you to older ipods.
I see the appeal when your music gets constantly interrupted due to every fucking app wanting to send you notifications to remind you of its existence and those constant messages from work flooding whatever communications tool you’re using.
I also see the appeal for something for kids to give them music without giving them a fill on smart device.
Yes, a phone can do almost anything, but single purpose devices can and should be better for that purpose.
- oh fuck, right, i got so used to obliterating apps ability to send notifications and ads that I forgot that's kind of the baseline experience, yeah.
- I realise this isn't a good solution for everyone, but my phone lives on do not disturb mode and only lets calls through (and even then my phone tends to stay on vibrate). It's nice, generally leaves me uninterrupted when I'm doing other stuff.
Smartphones rarely have headphone jacks or physical buttons for blind control anymore. They are also too large to fit most pants pockets. Their audio hardware (if it exists) is also usually quite poor.
I brings back the headphone jack and high quality analog audio for those of us who care enough.
Ever heard of a kindle?
This debate is so, sooo old, but after all these times I've wroten arguments for having a dedicated player, I feel I singled out the most important ones to me.
It is not my phone. I enter a different headspace when I use an e-book or a mp3 player, I mentally dedicate myself to use it and enjoy it. I don't switch between apps, see notifications popping up, for if I'm using it, I can turn the beeping fucker off and just have a good time with my tired old Walkman and Sleep's Holy Mountain album undistracted. And I know I can put on the plane mode on, but it feels like an important switch to my brains when I leave my phone for a dumb player. My intent to use it, leaving everything else behind, somehow makes me enjoy my time with music more. We're all wired differently, but maybe you can feel it too.
And I'm left amused by the impressions of W. Gibson, the cyberpunk daddy, when he had his first Walkman and took a walk. Him, having a personal music headspace for the first time, seeing all these huge banner adds for early tech wonders on the streets, gave him a lot of inspiration, made him feel like he is detached from this era and brought into some distant future. For some time, he felt like a character of his novels. In some sense, it was like carving your own room from out of nowhere with a click of a button while leaving in human hives of metropolitan areas. And the romantic vibes of it make me take it as another reason pro dumb players.
It's irrational, but I choose to like it.
- it's not irrational
But I dont wanna use my phone. Usually, I try to keep that as far away as possible.
We have this debate every time the topic of DAPs, e-readers or mobile gaming devices come up. "wHy d0n't yOu jU5t uSe y0uR pH0n3?"

I love it. Thanks for sharing, I hadn't heard about this.

For the people that don't want to click through to find the code:

https://codeberg.org/cool-tech-zone/-/projects/12798

Tangara also has basic Bluetooth SBC audio support, with more modern codecs possible via future firmware updates.

Well SBC is basically useless so I hope the development is not too far away in the future. I see it's Bluetooth v4.2 but as far as I know the best codec available compresses down to 1 Mbps but v4.2 supports up to 3Mbps and v5 up to 6 Mbps so still room for improvements but that's up to headphone manufacturers to support these future codec.

Ideally there would be zero bluetooth support and this would be catered to the HIFI crowd, with only 3.5mm jack supported.
At least until we get a HIFI successor to bluetooth.
- Why would you want to not have Bluetooth Audio when it is extremely cheap to add and basically comes bundled with most WiFi chips nowadays? It just allows the user to use the device in more situations eg. Coming home from a commute and then continue with your music on your home Bluetooth kitchen speaker or change to your car speakers. I don't know, but I don't really see the appeal for the device yet, however I do appreciate the general philosophy of the design and open sourcing everything. I'd want a truely offline music podcast device that had both 3.5mm Audio and exelent Bluetooth and WiFi capabilities because using the phone can be annoying sometines.

$250 ‽!

no, thanks

If you look at the comparison models, it seems pretty competitive for an audiophile.
iPod was 400 or 500 when it came out.
- In the early 2000s. Depending on the generation that's around 800-900 dollars in today's dollars.
- But we got much better technology in that time, you can get a 512gb sd card for $30-40 nowadays compared to when the iPhone came out that a 1gb thumb drive would have $10-20

Glad to see its on crowd supply

Can we get an Open-Hardware CD-ROM/Optical-disk reader for our PCs ?

What was the thinking behind full sized SDXC cards instead of micro sdxc like damn near every other device made this side of 2011?

I suspect due to them being easier to handle and easy to plugs into laptops that still have an SD card reader. Since most Micro SD cards come with a full size adapter anyway, it doesn't really seem to have any downside to go with fullsize.
You can adapt a micro sd into a full-sized right?

No earbuds, player only.

I've waited so long for one but it's too underpowered for the price.

How can this be underpowered?
- 8 mb of ram and 240mHZ. I know the costs are bigger for new companies but an rpi zero is 15-20€ and it has 1gGHZ and 512mb of ram. There's no problem if they have very good optimized code but it shouldn't cost 250$

Could it run Rockbox ? My iPods and sansa run with rockbox, it's awesome.

How large a library can it handle? I've had two others similar but they parsed files so slowly as to be ultimately useless

you'd have to be pretty dumb to fuck up text parsing that badly. Maybe if you don't implement segmented processing, and have a 50k line text file or something.
- Guess maybe 30GB of files in an avg of 10MB bites is a chore

Link saved. Definitely gonna see how this progresses so I might get one in the future.

Lots of people complaining about the software. Why did they even bother writing software? Does it run rockbox?

Because they wanted to. It's a passion project meant for certainly not everyone and made by a very small team of people.
- Sure, but if they have fewer people then why reinvent the wheel? The open hardware is new and great, but the open software already exists.

we're reinventing walkmans now. ok.

Its not really a reinvention. Personal Music Players are still a thing with a large ecosystem behind them. This one in particular is unique as it is entirely open source from the software all the day down to the hardware.
Open source. So, yeah, this is finally happening
Some of us care enough to bring back the 3.5mm headphone jack. HiFi enthusiasts like me despise bluetooth, and USB-C audio headphones or adapters are low quality trash too.