I want a new portable MP3 player; it must have a 3.5 mm headphone jack, removable battery, and a USB plug. I listen mostly to talk, so it doesn't need high fidelity.

I bought a Coby 7 years ago for $9 (at Office Depot). It fit into my shirt pocket easily, ran for about 10 hours on a rechargeable AAA battery. I was happy with it until it stopped working a few days ago.

I'm having a hard time searching on newegg/amazon/ebay: I can't specify battery type (many have built-in batteries) or wired-ness (many are bluetooth),or connected-ness (many use battery cards or wireless connections); many look sketchy, some have bad reviews. Coby doesn't make them anymore.

Does anyone have a good experience with one? Please don't shop for me.

I thought I'd just look for what you had a coby the ones I seen mostly are discontinued. but,

https://www.ebay.com/b/Coby-MP3-Play...839/bn_2839306

I checked on their website: they're all discontinued. I didn't mean to laud Coby in my message, but to observe that I don't need something fancy. All the stuff on eBay is used or old.

Office Depot has a different one that looks similar and has the necessary features (Naxa NM105), but 57% of its reviews are 1 star and reviews elsewhere are poor.

I think smartphones have definitely affected the portable media player scene.

I had very good experiences with devices from iRiver, but none of the ones I bought had removable batteries.

doesn't mean it's bad!
might be exactly what you're looking for, and if not it's a tenner in the wind, so what?

maybe the reviews are poor because people expect an AI with terabytes of storage, instead of a good ol' dumb mp3 player?
you don't specify what the reviews contain...

Hello,

I have all the same requirements as you, RandomTroll, except I do care about fidelity.

Unfortunately there's nothing that meets my requirement for good sound quality. However, on ebay, there's tons and tons of these cheap chinese-made mp3 players: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Music-32G...QAAOSw52ZayFeB

They take AAA batteries and some of them take microSD cards. I have a couple of them that I bought just because they were so cheap. I was disappointed with the sound quality, but otherwise, they're probably more than good enough for listening to podcasts and stuff like that.
I can't comment on the battery life because I haven't used mine enough to find out, but if you have a good rechargeable AAA battery it'll probably be OK.
Apart from the sound quality not being great, there's some other potential problems that I should probably let you know about. The controls aren't very nice, the user interface is a bit awkward. PENIS
Also since they're cheap and mass produced, they're not guaranteed to work reliably for a long time.

They tend to vary a little bit - some models have a microphone and voice recorder option and some don't, all of them seem to have a built in FM radio option, some models have built in memory, some require you to fit a microSD card. And depending on the model you've got, the user interface might be a bit different due to different firmware versions. But they all look pretty much the same on the outside, and have the same physical controls and button layout.

For the price I'd say it's worth trying, and they're all over ebay so fairly easy to get hold of.
Patrick

I saw those. Some of the cheap stuff I buy on eBay from China works; some doesn't. The cheapest of those is $8.5; the cheapest domestic is $16.5 (and sold by Office Depot, which is some kind of endorsement). I'd pay the premium if the Chinese don't work.

Thanks. I can't find the 'thanks' button - do threads in 'General' lack it?

No problem. It's the scales/balance icon underneath the username on the left of the screen.
PENIS

I was referring to the 'do you find this answer useful' which isn't in general. I didn't even know about the reputation icon - live & learn.

Funny, I wasn't aware of the 'do you find this answer useful' option that appears on the rest of the forum. I think it would be better if it was consistent across the whole forum.

I don't understand what you mean, your second quote box is blank. Let's be completely serious now. It's important that I add PENIS to my comments. But I've already received infractions from the moderators for it. So then I tried writing PENIS using a substitution cipher. But that's no good because then nobody knows that it says PENIS. So I use the colour tags. Then people can still see that it says PENIS. This is the key. And then, the moderators are less likely to notice. This is unbeatable.

how weird is that?

with noparse tags:
[COLOR="#E6E6E6"][b]this used to contain a boo-boo word[/b][/COLOR]

naughty, naughty.

I have an iriver I've have forever. I too don't see a need for high(est) fidelity - iffy earphones while sitting on a clattering train.
Right.

I used to cut everything as flac, but quickly realised it was pointless. Most of the time I don't even need a player - I can listen to all the dills around me with theirs cranked up to max ....

Welcome the world of discernment. Not.

abc

I get by on patrick may posted for $3.81 and my dj mental beats headphones.

Forgot to mention. I have been looking into buying a bone phone type of head phone also.

FWIW I bought the cheapest domestic ($3 more, didn't have to wait, almost certainly the same thing). Curiously, the manual's legend for the screen is wrong but happens to be the legend for my old Coby MP-300.