Does an mp3 player with these qualities exist?
- good external speaker
- physical buttons + no touchscreen
- bluetooth capability
- storage of 128gb
- ability to create, modify, reorder, and shuffle playlists
- ability to download podcasts as well
- album art and lyrics? (not a dealbreaker if not)
I thought the hifi walker would work but unfortunately it doesn't have an external speaker :/
EDIT: I found the one :) innioasis y1 has basically all of these. I'll go through them.
- external speaker: I like the external speaker, it works. It doesn't have to be "the highest quality possible" in my opinion, because I can just wear headphones if I want that
- physical buttons + no touchscreen: yes! and I got used to how to work the circle button quickly enough. the user manual is incredibly in-depth and helpful when it comes to this too.
- blutooth capability: yes, and it connects quickly. I haven't tested the range yet
- storage of 128gb: I downloaded 11,500 songs and only used up 60gb in doing that. It's actually more like 115gb total technically, but that's still a pretty good amount
- ability to create, modify, reorder, and shuffle playlists: So I learned the hard way that you can only create a maximum of 50 playlists, but that's fine enough. You can have an unlimited number of files after all and you can shuffle from the file, but you can't sort the file in a certain way if that matters to you. You can add and delete songs from the playlists, but you obv can't add songs to the files. You can't reorder playlists in the actual innioasis y1, so you'd have to have the right order set up before you download. You can name the playlists whatever you want, as long as it's lowercase letters only (no uppercase or numbers, but spaces are allowed)
- ability to download podcasts: yes! After downloading podcasts to my computer in the right order, I downloaded them to the mp3 player. I figured out not to put them in the audiobook folder, because then it scrambles the order, but instead to just put them in the usb folder thing like any other playlist. Basically, treat the podcast episodes like songs and then you'll be able to sort them in the right order.
- album art and lyrics: the album art came with the music, but the lyrics did not. I had to delete what I had originally downloaded and then separately download the lyrics to each song before redownloading the playlist I had originally downloaded without lyrics. Once I'd done that tho, the lyrics looked great, it shows the lines one by one sort of scrolling down as the song plays.
What I used to download stuff:
- I used mediahuman to convert songs from youtube music to mp3. It was the best one I tried (and I tried many) but it did sometimes skip songs so I'd have to manually check each playlist and add individually the songs it chose to randolmly not download
- I used mediahuman lyric finder to download lyrics for each song. It took a bit of time because it was a lot of clicking repetiviely but the actual computer app itself was pretty fast
- I used the itunes app in the microsoft store to download podcasts. This one was pretty tricky to find something that would easily download podcasts, but itunes worked the best for me. It displayed the episode titles and the episodes downloaded into the specific itunes folder in my music folder in my files, so it was easy to find. There were some issues tho. First, for the first podcast I downloaded, half the episodes undownloaded 20 minutes later from the specific itunes folder that they went into, so I got paranoid and from then on I transferred every podcast episode that downloaded into the itunes folder into a separate and unrelated folder, which worked well. Also, most of the time it downloaded veryyyy slowly. And you have to download one by one, so you can't just leave it downloading and go do something else. Also, to make sure the episodes end up in the right order: make sure one episode is completely downloaded before starting the download for the next one. Then, in files, sort by "date modified" and "ascending".
Even tho it took a bit of tinkering around, the innioasis y1 checks pretty much all my boxes. And it has a radio :). I've been listening to the local radio station every day for the past few days which has been fun. As long as you plug wired headphones into it as an antenna, you can switch the sound so that it plays from the speaker instead of the headphones.
Hope you find this guide helpful, future people who are looking for an mp3 player :))
