This has been a bit of a peeve of mine for ages.

I have had an MP3 player for years. Different ones, for sure — my first was 256Mb and I’ve gone through Creative, Sandisk and now…

So my main thing these days is playlists. And not static ones either. Let me explain.

I can’t keep up to date with my podcasts. So I’m always running a bit behind the curve, so I download (via an RSS reader — QuiteRSS, if you care, but it’s not relevant) the podcasts I might want to listen to into a folder on my PC, then (using my favourite file manager, XYplorer) I transfer podcasts in date order (ie oldest first) to my player, having first deleted the ones I’ve listened to on the latter AND (this is the crucial bit) remove the entries for the listened to podcasts from the M3U8 playlist using a text editor. Oh, and as XYplorer has a neat facility for copying the filenames of all selected files to the clipboard, the new bunch get added to the end of the podcasts playlist.

So an MP3 player has to be able to do a couple of things to be able to support this (perhaps slightly idiosyncratic) way of working. First, it has to be able to resume from where it left off playing; second, it has to be able to support text-editable playlists as managing playlists on the player is usually extremely tedious, if it’s possible at all.

And nobody wants MP3 players any more, so the market is mostly odd brands with variants of mostly similar firmware and user experiences.

My current player is an AGPtEK device. It’s idiosyncratic but it works for me, just about. What it’s not good at is maintaining a database — so although it has 16Gb internal storage and theoretically supports an additional 64Gb addon storage, the sorts of things I’ve got used to being able to do in previous years — navigating to artist, then album, then play an album in track order — it ONLY does (a) if I’m navigating the drive on which the relevant album is, and (b) if I’ve built a playlist for the album myself. With a maximum of 80Gb storage, it ought to be a portable jukebox but the amount of work to get to that point from where I am (a handful of playlists plus my podcasts setup) is potentially prohibitive.

Anyone following this is probably wondering why I don’t just use VLC on my smartphone. I’d rather not, basically — my phone is quite capable of it but I can’t throw that much storage at it (I don’t have the budget for a dual-SIM phone that additionally supports something like a 128Gb SD card) and, well, I don’t like VLC enough for all sorts of — mostly ergonomic — reasons.

My ideal would be a new player that supports Rockbox. That looks like a non-starter right now. (The Sandisk Sansa devices that supported Rockbox were brilliant but no longer available except secondhand and replacing batteries — which inevitably die, eventually — is beyond my levels of technical competence.)

So, I guess the point of all this is: am I really the last enthusiastic user of standalone MP3 players? And if I’m not, does anyone have any recommendations of good players with decent storage capabilities, resume from the last point played and easy-to-edit playlists?