Use an old iPhone?
Nonsense, and I think you know better as well. I use my ipod almost every day, better than Spotify and no ads. I know people who have worn theirs out and search for replacements. There is a large community of people who hack them for more space or other uses.
I know that most people are playing music/games on their phones, but I don’t like burning up battery power or paying for more data. I even know people who listen to music on cassettes and Walkmans, including some 20-something kids.
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THIS.
I have a 5th gen Classic with 500GB, 40,000 songs at 320kbps, and still room to go.
I also have a dedicated ipod hooked into my car through a USB in the glove box. Finally no more cassettes and cds rattling around on the floor or clogging up the passenger seat. And no worries about connectivity when I’m out in the boondocks.
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ALAC or AAC (Which is not an Apple format, they just popularised it)?
Most audio players had support for AAC in an mp4 container the last time I checked years ago.
I have an iPod Classic with a dead battery and dying hard drive. It’s been very tempting to do these mods and get a fresh battery for it to keep in my car as a jukebox.
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The 5th gen is pretty easy. The 6th gen is not (you will destroy the rear case opening it, so get a new replacement on ebay.) The 3rd gen (with the touch sensitive buttons) is a real problem (you have to find an older Mac with Firewire, and even then it reads battery charging wrong for reasons I’ve never been able to figure out.) Getting a fresh battery may not be an issue if you plug it into the car via a USB in that some newer cars have (or that can be found on some newer aftermarket car stereos.)
The actual labor is pretty easy once it’s open, just go slow, be wary of damaging ribbon cables, and if you are going to replace anything else (headphone jack for example) do it all at once. ALSO: depending on the model there are limits to how much memory you can add-- 30gb or less ipods have a 120gb limit for the 5th gen, and all 6th gens have a similar limit unless you have the 160gb version. There may be quirks with limits on number of songs too when you get up in the half TB range of flash memory.
(The ipod Mini, precursor to the nano is also tough to do – ribbon cables, small space, prone to breakage.)
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That’s what I did with mine [5th gen]; if you need to put in a new battery, may as well convert to a ss drive while you have it opened up. The ifixit guides are easy to follow.
Since my car only has a casette/radio, I found an adapter that plugs into the ipod headphone jack so it can play on the radio.
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^This part FTW! Pandora’s offline playlist is an OK feature, but if you’re not actively curating it, it gets repetitive and old really quick.
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This article came out back in 2014 when the classic iPod was killed, but it is a great requiem for the iPod. I still have a classic one that I have plugged into my car’s usb port. It’s loaded with all the songs that the past me, from 12 years ago, considered vital.
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Oh yeah! I had a Rio (I can’t remember the model) and it was much better than the iPod (until suddenly it wasn’t).
The article says the original iPod held 1,000 songs, but if you listen to 1970’s prog like I do, that was cut down to about 5.
Not that I can blame Apple for that. 
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Classic.
I had a Diamond Rio PMP300, the OG of MP3 players.
It had a paltry 32 GB of space (although you could expand it with SmartMedia cards — which were obscure even then). It could only hold a few MP3s and used a clunky and proprietary parallel port adapter for syncing, but it could run for like 10 hours off of a single AA battery.
It definitely wasn’t awesome by any means - definitely more of a toy and curiosity than anything, but I was able to acquire one for like $30 from the Fry’s bargain bin so it was totally worth it.
Do you know what? I looked through all those media players listed on Wikipedia and what I actually had was a Creative ZEN Micro and it was awesome. I am pretty sure I had the 6GB version which held a boatload of mp3’s.
I can’t remember the battery life ever being a problem either. A friend bought a Zune and despite the fact we laughed at him it actually worked pretty well. The same guy still has one of the old hard drive iPods plugged into his amp at home. Still works fine.
Works just fine on wiFi.
I always said, do you really need 1,000 songs with you everywhere all the time? But I’m strange like that.
My player of choice is the Sansa Clip+, which has of course been discontinued and replaced with an inferior model. I’ve already had one of them die on me. (I really ought to sell off the parts on eBay rather than continuing to dream that I’ll be able to salvage it one way or another.)
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