An offline MP3 player in 2024?

[ddrueding]

My daughter has limits on screen time, and she hasn't demonstrated enough control to regulate it on her own. She's young enough that this isn't surprising, and I've deployed a number of automated systems to help her by preventing the machines from working outside the prescribed times.

However, I have no objection to her listening to audiobooks or podcasts the rest of the time.

My first instinct is to get her a standalone MP3 player, a decent set of speakers, and acquire/transcode her content into MP3. Her current podcast is on YouTube, and I'm sure there are ways to download/transcode those. I suspect content from Audible would be harder, but there are probably more open audiobook sources I could work from.

The easy question is, what MP3 player would you recommend? Must support wired connections, but bonus points for bluetooth. Nothing internet capable (I've seen a bunch running Android with wifi, those are out), and ideally nothing that can play video at all.

The hard question is, is there an easier solution (both easier for me to administer and her to use) that I'm missing? She already has an Android tablet and gaming PC, but those lock themselves down based on time and daily usage, and I want this to operate independent of those restrictions.

Would appreciate all your thoughts.

 

[Mercutio]

Blackplayer works well on Android devices but for non-video podcasts, my recommendation is Pocket Casts, which works REALLY well with both Amazon and Google Home devices and can pick up and leave off on whichever assistant puck you happen to have.
There are scads of tools that will download an entire Youtube playlist and many of them are smart enough to only grab the audio stream if that's all you want, but if you're doing all that locally, you'll need something like Audiobookshelf to support starting and stopping play.

You might want to look at Circle as a parental control tool for screens. I haven't used it myself but I've been asked this enough to have spent time looking in to it. The biggest knock is that it's not CHEAP, but it has kind of cool features like the ability to dock or add extra screen time easily, as well as pretty thorough activity reporting.

Maybe you could give her a separate tablet whose MAC address is locked on to a VLAN that doesn't have internet routing but could connect to local resources like an Audiobookshelf instance? Or only connects in the middle of the night to reup on subscribed podcasts?

As far as absurdly nice audio systems, my partner has a Fiio R7, which is a stand-alone audio player of absurd capability. They're CRAZY expensive, but it was a gift someone gave her. It runs Android underneath everything, but it's so over-engineered to do everything audio that it has XLR output. It can even talk to multiple outputs simultaneously. It'll talk to streaming services but it doesn't have a web browser.

 

[Mercutio]

Mild update which is that the Fiio does straight-up have the Play Store on it so you can install Firefox or whatever else you can get that runs on Android 10.

 

[ddrueding]

Thanks for that Merc, but I'm specifically looking for something that doesn't have any of that. No internet capabilities, no downloading or network connectivity. I don't want to have to monitor or police it at all. I'll just transcode her content to MP3, copy them to the local storage of her device, and she can play/pause as she likes.

The second-generation iPod Nano has the feature set I think I'm after, minus bluetooth, a healthy battery, and a normal USB interface.

 

[Mercutio]

There's still an entire world of portable players that don't say Apple on them. I carried a Sandisk Clip+ in my pocket for YEARS because they handled oddball formats like .ogg. They also stored progress in media files, which was great since mine had the entirety of "This American Life" on it.

 

[sedrosken]

As big of a pain as Apple devices can be, I love my 4th gen mono iPod. It's an excellent listening device for when I want to be unreachable by the world at large. It's just that it also takes some work to be usable in $currentYear. I had to replace the battery and install a 1.8" IDE to CF adapter, and then an SD to CF adapter in that, as the original drive was dead and I wanted to flashmod it anyway. iFlash has a kit for this that works very well, I went the cheap hobo way and paired a couple adapters together. If your battery is particularly dead on anything 5th gen and older I believe, a FireWire charger may be what you need as it provides a bit more oomph than a USB port.

I tried Rockbox on it but didn't end up liking it. It's back to the stock Apple firmware now, and one of the functions of my Core2 box when it's booted into XP is to facilitate syncing to it and restoring it if needed.