HACKER Q&A
📣 xlii

"Dumb" music players with stream support?


I have teenagers in school. Recently school decided to adopt regulations where use of a phone (smartphone or regular) is prohibited at premises. This is a controversial decision and kids are unhappy but willing to cooperate.

One outcome they’re very unhappy about is inability to access music during recess/between lessons.

I’ve been looking for a solution for it but it’s either all dumb (I.e. offline only with MP3 support) which makes it complex to buy and convert music to or the players are audiophile grade and cost 400€+

Are there any solutions that would be convenient (i.e. smart enough to work with any streaming), won’t resemble smartphone and cost a kidney?

  👤 dangravell Accepted Answer ✓
You can get Android based music players (DAPs e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalAudioPlayer/ ) which you could install software which streams when online, uses local storage when offline. Look into the Subsonic protocol - many music servers support this and it has built in support for this online/offline dichotomy.
👤 PaulHoule
Put in the streaming support and it is a smartphone in practice even if it isn’t technically. (Are any of my tablets phones because they can run Skype, or are they not phones because they don’t have SIM cards and that publishers choose to not release games like Azur Lane on them?)

If a device has the brains to work with Spotify it can just as easily work with Facebook but it will not benefit from the mass market, carrier subsidization, and general perception that a phone is “essential”. I can just picture this world where you are carrying 5 smartphones on your person that are all specialized to do this one thing or that one thing.

👤 _spduchamp
While not quite the solution you are seeking, we wanted to give our kid access to whatever music they want to hear but without having a screen based device, so we bought a used Google Nest mini speaker. It works very well.

Some clever kid could take one of those to school, get it setup on the wifi just outside school, then bring it in and say it's not a phone.

👤 znpy
Essentially: no.

Streaming music if a "smart feature". A music player doing that would be "smart" by definition.

Even the audiophile-grade stuff you mention usually is some kind of android device with some "better" audio stuff. Essentially a smartphone without a sim slot and with some audio gears instead.

👤 JojoFatsani
How bout a radio?