> There is a part of me that wants to abandon streaming services and just buy a couple of albums per month based on what I think might be cool. I find myself enjoying music significantly less now I have unlimited access to everything I could ever want. It’s become disposable; just background noise rather than something I’m actively experiencing.

I strongly prefer the "sit down and listen to a whole album" experience anyway, at least from artists who make a deliberate attempt to put together a cohesive album and not just one or two bangers and a bunch of filler.

Sitting down and listening to a Bowie album or something is a time capsule, and I'm not a boomer so it's not childhood nostalgia either. It's nice to sit down and listen to an hour of music that was specifically curated to produce a certain experience.

> Unfortunately, finding one that both holds a charge and isn’t battered to all hell is quite difficult these days, and even so, it’s much harder to justify a single use device for music when I literally always have my phone with me.

FYI you can replace the battery in an iPod... someone pointed me towards Cameron Sino as being an extremely reputable supplier of replacements (I've known of them for a long time but I had no idea they sold direct to consumer!).

Also, if you are not enamored with needing to use iTunes, the "Rockbox" open-source firmware targets Apple hardware and that should allow it to act like a plain old USB Mass Storage device. I used to use it like 15+ years ago on my iRiver H320 music player.

(the name "iRiver" actually predates the ipod! They were a korean company who became known for making very capable flash and HDD mp3 players for their day, with OGG Vorbis support and line-in recording and many other neat features.)

https://www.rockbox.org/

Also also, if you are interested in improvements, or your HDD died, you can get an IDE-to-CF adapter or perhaps SD/MicroSD or mSATA or M.2 (not sure what's available nowadays) and use a normal flash drive. At the time they were popular this often implied a reduction in capacity, but flash is big now and you can probably get like a 1TB drive and with Rockbox it should recognize it. Not all cards work, but I think the dividing line is often "cards that speak IDE" vs cards that don't - many of the high-spec CompactFlash cards actually have a "native IDE" mode so they speak the same protocol as the original drive did. It also substantially improves battery life, because you're going from a spinning drive pulling a couple watts to a flash card pulling ~nothing.

No affiliation with this site and haven't used them but this is basically what you'll be looking for: https://www.iflash.xyz/ipod-and-sdhc-sdxc-cards/

If your device is physically battered to hell then yeah, not much you can do besides try to find a replacement. But if your ipod is still in decent shape with a fresh battery and a flash adapter it'll be better than new. Do try to minimize the number of assembly/disassembly cycles though, there's lots of little plastic clips in most devices and they won't last forever.

Also, Fiio made some devices with very similar ergonomics to the ipod (eg the scroll wheel) like the X5 and X5ii, although like most others they've gone to android nowadays. I have an X5ii that will take a pair of 128GB microSD cards and it has a solid hifi headphone amp built in.

https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/fiio-x5-2nd-gen-premium-hi-...