After many months of patiently waiting, my Tangara arrived last weekend and I’ve been using it every day since it arrived.
When’s the last time you saw a device that came with the tools you need to disassemble it?
The device requires a full-sized SD card (a MicroSD with an adapter works fine) and a USB-C cable for charging, neither of which is included. I think this is fine since it allows you to decide how much storage you want (up to 2 terabytes) as opposed to my original iPod which came with one of four storage size options (and required minor surgery to upgrade).
(There will be numerous comparisons to my 3rd-gen iPod for obvious reasons).
After copying some music to an SD card and charging the player, the first real problem I ran into was a weird error:
Despite saying that no compatible media could be found, I was able to browse to and play individual flac files on the SD card.
Turns out the problem was that the stock firmware expects music files to be contained in a Music directory on the root of the SD card (the manual mentions this). After adding the Music folder the error went away and all the music on the card was indexed correctly.
With that resolved listening to music was a completely reminiscent of using my old iPod. The device fits comfortably in my hand and is easily used one-handed. Playback is error free and audio quality is excellent.
Tangara fits perfectly in this little pocket next to the aux jack in my Subaru Outback; coincidence?
I tested the Tangara using my Grado GW100x headphones. As you would expect this works effortlessly with a cord but I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get them working over Bluetooth as well. The interface is simple, toggle Bluetooth in the device settings menu, tell the headphones to pair, select the headphones from the device menu, and you’re all set.
I’ve been listening to music all day long for the last few work days and after 8 or 9 hours of constant playback the battery has plenty more to give.
I haven’t had enough time to see exactly how long the battery will last, but it easily eclipses my old iPod even after upgrading its battery twice.
If this was all the Tangara did I’d be satisfied, but there is so much more. Being open source, you can of course customize both the hardware and the firmware, but even if you don’t want to rip into the devices source code you can customize the interface by just writing a little lua, and there is a serial control interface you can access as well. I haven’t experimented with this yet because I’ve been busy simply enjoying listening to music again, but I plan to dig into all these areas in the near future.