9 Oct
2025
9 Oct
'25
8:18 a.m.
On 09/10/2025 00:54, Josh Lawrence wrote:
Hello everyone,
I need some recommendations for a portable hardware audio player (mp3,
ogg, flac) that supports Linux, and is of reasonable quality. A quick
search on Amazon pulls up everything from $18 - $200, and I'm afraid to
pull the trigger without some kind of recommendation. My needs are
simple, I just need to put tons of practice tracks on it and plug it up
to my keyboard via some kind of audio jack (1/8"). Power on, select a
track, play, experience musical disappointment, power off. :)
General brand recommendations are useful, pretty much any info is more
than welcome - my trusty mp3 player that was recommended by this list
many years ago has vanished, so I must replace it.
I'll admit that I have
switched to just using my Android phone for
'offline music play' and I also use it for practice (e.g. I load tracks
to play along with bass).
The advantage is that now Android plays opus which I currently use as a
preferred lossy format.
I use KDE plasma as a DE so with KDE connect and related Android App
it's quite convenient to copy files to the phone (including the SD card
which I use for music files).
There are loads of player apps, I have the Android version of VLC and
another rather simple one plus sometimes one of those which allows you
to slow down files.
As you mentioned practice scnario, I also have a cheap battery powered
bass 'preamp pedal' which supports bluetooth: using the phone as file
player eliminates two cable when practicing: Play track-list on phone
via bluetooth, plug bass and headphones in the pedal (no mains as it's
battery powered) and play.
This is essentially my most 'mobile' (literally) set-up for bass practic
/ play-along of 3/4 I have. I can elaborate if interesting.
And.. hope I didn't go too off-topic on your off-topic, but maybe it's
useful as you mentioned practice tracks :-)
Lorenzo