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08 Aug, 2026
it's been a while since i last talked about my music setup and things have changed a bit.
the music player
main benefits of owning a device specifically for listening to music for me are:
- it saves on battery life of my other devices
- it allows listening to music without any distractions
so these are all well and good but finding a decent music player in 2026 is really hard. in my experience most devices fall into two categories: the high end stuff made by audio brands whose prices rival smartphones or really really cheaply made music players which sound like tin cans.
i was also looking for buying a second hand ipod but their prices have been inflated so much by the retro movement it's kind of insane. plus with an ipod you can't use flac files and there is no last.fm or listenbrainz scrobbling or bluetooth audio. (maybe you can get better deals if you decide to mod one yourself by buying a broken one but that is out of my skillset)
huawei p30 running niagara launcher
then i realised something. an old android phone can do a lot of what i'm looking for. so i grabbed my mom's old phone (a huawei p30) and aggressively debloated it with adb until only the essentials remained on the device.1 i downloaded poweramp2, panoscrobbler, slapped on niagara launcher and i've been using it exclusively for listening to music for the past couple of months and it's going really smoothly. IT EVEN HAS A HEADPHONE JACKKK!!
huawei p30 and it's headphone jack in all it's glory
the files
i get most of my files through soulseek using nicotine+ then pass them through beets for tagging. for syncing i tried to get syncthing to work but it always ended up crashing my phone. i searched around for answers and saw other people who ran into the same error with syncthing but i don't think anyone is working on fixing a crash on a phone that came out in 2019.
in the meantime i'm manually syncing my files through usb and it's not that big of a deal, my library doesn't change as much as it's used to.
the headphones
i had sony xm4's for listening to music but i also got kz zsn pro 2's from a friend for a really good price and they sound really good. it's great for the current summer weather when i don't want to put on a headphone and sweat all over it.
kz zsn pro 2 earphones
conclusion
old android phones are surprisingly good as separate music players. they have most of the modern features you want and also a headphone jack. also you are actively keeping them away from landfills so that's always a plus in my book.
poweramp running on the huawei p30
poweramp now playing page
poweramp synced lyrics
for the debloating i used xda forums. they have a lot of forum posts about what is safe to remove from any device but as always be careful. don't try to remove gpu drivers or something. update: i came across universal android debloater recently and it seems to do a great job at debloating. would recommend that over scouring xda forum pages.↩
honestly poweramp is such a good app. it is the thing that makes this project and it's worth every penny i spent.↩