I brought an MP3 Player like an year ago as:
- to conserve battery life on my phone
- Google Pixel didn't have MircoSD slot or headphone jack without use of headphone USB-C dongle
So I look around for any good second-hand MP3 players which I did look at the iPods because of DankPod's video which he often mods the iPod. I did tried to mod it but it was annoying to do and I have ended up damaging it which is easy to do when you are trying to mod the iPod to use an SD-Card adapter instead of the hard drive which no longer works. Instead of doing a second try and buying another iPod which can cost around £30-60 depending on the model in question, I just brought a SanDisk's Sansa Clip Zip which has MircoSD slot and also can have Rockbox flashed. I mainly have Rockbox just for the themes and last.fm Scrobble plugin. It's bit clunky the menus but you do get used to it and it has a lot of options in the settings which I recommend reading the manuals on their website about it.
My experience with it is that I used my phone less for listening to music has I have more storage for my .flac music library. It hasn't replaced any of the music streaming services for me as I used two of them for different purposes. For my MP3 Player, it's music I already owned and at least liked the song so I got an album if I have already got it and streaming services to discover music I hadn't listen to or got just yet.
I had the second LG Soul around 2000ish.
It was revolutionary at the time, especially with the little inline remote control letting you see what was playing and skip to and from the start of tracks. At the time, only large CD players had that functionality.
One of the handful of times that tech made me cool for ten minutes in school 😊 good times!