It hasn’t been a full month since my Tangara first arrived, but I have a few minutes now so I don’t want to wait.
Since my last post I’ve switched to a full-sized 128GB SD card which holds all the music I currently have in FLAC format. I think I will need more than this once I finish re-ripping my CD collection (~400 discs to go) but this will keep me busy for awhile and was cheap enough that I didn’t have to over-analyze the purchase (if I invest in a terabyte+ card I’ll want to make sure it’s the right one).
Having a sizable chunk of my music collection on-hand (literally!) has changed the way I listen to music and brings me back to the experience of my first iPod. That was only a 40GB device, but before lossless codecs and so I was able to fit all the music I had at the time on it. The ability to simply flip and switch and have all that music available with no apps, no ads, no “swaparoo”, not even a network to get in the way or interrupt the music has been transformative.
The only real problem I’ve run into so far is loading files on it via USB. When I attach it to my laptop (System76 Pangolin running ElementaryOS 7), I can mount the Tangara as a disk and brows the files, but when I start to copy some, I get an error. I posted about this to the forum and the developers have been very responsive but no solution yet. I’m not sure if this is something Linux-specific or not (I haven’t tried any other computers) but since it’s just as easy to pop the SD card out of the Tangara and pop it in the laptop I haven’t had a lot of motivation to dig into it.
I also began to dip my toes into modifying the device (really just customization) and tried creating a new theme (I prefer to call them skins) for the UI.
It’s fairly simple but also easy to shoot yourself in the foot and choose colors that make it hard to switch back to the default theme. At some point I might make a little “preview” tool to help notice those problems before installing it on the unit.
Other than that there’s not a lot more to say, because the Tangara simply does what it was designed to do, reliably and as simply as possible. In an age where every device tries to do everything and does a half-assed job at it, this is revolutionary.