Back in January I wrote about an MP3 player I had purchased and rambled about my dislike for the device. Since then, I had repurposed an old phone as a dedicated music player — which, mind you, is a nice thing to do. However, with my entire music library at my disposal at any moment, I found myself falling back into my old music listening habits (back when I used to stream music) of skipping most songs and not finishing them at that, and so on and so forth.

Thus, I thought I’d give my much-loved MP3 player another try. Now, I use it EXACTLY how you’d use an iPod back in the day. I use it only with its built-in 4 GB of storage, manage my music library on my computer, and load only a few albums at a time onto the device.

The benefit of this is that you actually end up listening to your music! 2 reasons for this.

One: There are only a few albums at any given moment available for you to listen to. If you want to listen to something, you’re going to listen to one of those albums. If none of them tickle your fancy, tough luck!

Two: The MP3 player I have specifically is somewhat inconvenient to use. I mentioned a few minor niggles I had with the usage experience in my previous article and they do still hold.

• Volume control is rather odd. You have to hold down on the VOL button for a few seconds, then adjust. It’s not that bad, but trying to adjust volume while the thing is in your pockets is a bit finicky.
• Navigating the menus is not very nice. Only on the main “home” screen do the front buttons act as you would expect: press up to go up, left for left, right for right, down for down, and middle to select. In your menus, however you press left and right to scroll up and down a list. You press VOL to go back, and M for a context menu. I’m not exactly sure how else they should have done this (maybe a software back button, and hold the middle button for a context menu), but it’s not that bad once you get used to it.

They aren’t the end of the world BUT they are hinderance enough to stop me from constantly fiddling around with the device.

Since I started doing this, I’ve gotten through a number of albums in my catalog I’ve been sitting on for well over a year and have gotten through other albums I probably would have left to rot were it not for this.