On MP3 Players

Got my “MP3” player working!

A photograph of a Blue R1 HD phone. It is in a pink and gray case with a background of an anime woman in profile. The picture is all purples or black. Very striking in person. The time and other negligible Android Marshmallow bits and bobs are around, but it is showing a push notification from a music app. The song playing, that is currently paused as I put it there for display purposes, is Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go) by the band Garbage. It's hella queer and excellent.

This has been a minor recycling project of mine. I love the bottom of the radio dial where university radio lives, (in the US at least,) but sometimes I don't like what any of them are playing and corp radio sucks. I (overall) like my Pixel, but a big slight against it is that it does not have expandable storage. I'm sure to try and force you to pay for Google Drive. I still don't even pay for data, so I can't stream music even if I wanted to. I have a couple of ancient iPods, but that involves iTunes or some 3rd party knockoff, and I bricked one of them trying to get it to work.

I thought about getting a new MP3 player, but they are all either chintzy Chinese junk, or start at $250USD. I've had a chintzy MP3 player before and it sucked, and I don't have $250 to blow on a single use item.

I mentioned this to a friend and she offered to mail me her old Walkman, and while I did consider it and appreciate the offer, I declined. The cost of international mail isn't worth it. I also thought about buying a used phone and slapping /e/OS on it, but between the phone and the SD card, it was going to be at least $50.

Then I remembered I still had my first smartphone in my drawer collecting dust. It is a BLU R1 HD. You might remember it was the $50 phone with Amazon ads on the lockscreen. I used it for several years until my mom's phone service deprecated 2G. I gave her this 3G phone with a new case (pictured,) and got myself a 4G Motorola G7 Power. (I still highly recommend Motorolas if you need a cheap phone. Really well made.) I used that for a year or three, until my mom's phone company said they were deprecating 3G. So I gave my mom the Moto and got a Pixel, (which a couple years later was bricked by a defect and Google gave me a new one that is a far better phone.) Thus, this one being in the drawer.

I had issues getting it to run. It was abnormally slow, and refused to play anything. The first part I thought might just be because it's a nine year old phone, but the second part told me there was a bigger issue. I ended up doing a Factory Reset, then I didn't pair the SD card as internal storage with it, (the phone's OS is old enough that's still an option).

Then I tried to format the card and put it back in. “Corrupted.”

Tried another card, “Corrupted.”

Tried a third card from a shelved tablet that I tested and it worked in the tablet. “Corrupted.”

So now I think the SD card reader in it is borked and well beyond my ability/amount of spare fucks to fix.

Giving up on that, I just shoved what music I could into the internal storage, disabled most of the system apps, and put it in airplane mode. Now it is doing what I want it to.

The people over at /e/OS' Forum were super helpful and even created a build for me, but I haven't tried it out yet since I got it to work. Might be able to free up space by using it to remove bloatware though.

Now I just need to get it so it will work with my magsafe mount.

Art is by Ilya Kuvshinov Song feature on lockscreen Cherry Lips (Go Baby, Go) by Garbage Music app: Music Player Lite 9F-Droid

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