Hello, Spotify? Are you on? Perils and pratfalls of own-brand hardware

I want a standalone player again

What I want is a small standalone device for playing music.

Basically, an Ipod Mini that fits in the cash pocket of my jeans, but for spotify.

It could sync to my phone to update playlists etc, but have untethtered offline playlists. That way I can use my phone for phone stuff, and have my music separate, and not have my battery being used up.

Downloads?

Go on, tell us what you'd do.

Offer FLAC downloads of tracks mastered before the loudness wars.

Or, if you prefer, WAV, or any of the other lossless formats, compressed or not, so long as it has a flexible metadata system.

I know this is a licensing issue, and not a technology issue, but it saddens me to see ever more ingenuity and effort going in to selling tat, when there are no hindrances to the good product being available, other than the greed of the intellectual property owners (who are usually not the musicians).

Too many people make unreasonable amounts of money from the current system for there to be any near-term prospect of change, but there are other models that allow music creators to get paid without artificially restricting the distribution of their works.

Take the money and run

Take the IPO billions, sell my shares ASAP and retire to listen to my vinyl collection, leaving the dying husk of the mono medium wave-only tranny to shrivel to a price where it gets bought by Google and closed down a few years later as they mismanage the sh1t out of it.

That's what I'd do if I was Mr. Spotify!

offline voice activated

A voice activated player that plays my unsorted music collection from a NAS, on my hifi, and does not ever ever send what it hears on the mic to the Internet would be nice.

Random mode with voice activated

"What is this again?"

"Who wrote this?"

"What label is this on?"

"Where did you find this?"

"How long since I last listen to it?"

"Have I got any remixes?"

Would be handy for an addled ol raver like me.

Perhaps AI mode could try to answer

"Why on earth did I pay good money for this?"

Gotta laugh

I remember , on another forum , I said I'd rather have a single mono hifi speaker rather than two crappy stereo speakers .. wooohaaay mono is back. Everything that is old is new. I still stick with stereo rather than 4.1/5/1/7.1 or other newer speaker . I am amazed nobody mentions that to these speaker mfrs ? mono ? sirirllsy?