These days most people use their mobile phones as music players, unlike the old days when most people had an ipod or simliar mp3 player for their music listening on the go. Still high end players do still exist as “DAP’s” (Digital Audio Players) along with really cheap and nasty basic mp3 players. But both suffer from either badly designed UI’s or UI’s that are overly complex, or both, while the cheap players also have rather poor quality hardware as well. None are really suitable for my use case of: being used by a first grader who just wants to listen to some songs or a radio-play during a long car trip.

Being a software developer however, I was in the privileged position of being able to choose to take a DIY approach and make my own and so I’ve documented my little journey into DAP-making here to help anyone else who would like to try this approach.

Hardware

Starting with the hardware, I briefly considered taking a DIY approach of something like a Raspberry Pi Zero paired with a Pimoroni pirate audio board and custom 3d printed case, but decided that it would be rather more time consuming then I wanted to and the physical controls and tiny screen still probably would not be well suited for my use case.

#flutter #android