Tangara
I bought a Tangara!
I doubt anyone thinks that I get free things for the purposes of review, but for the elimination of doubt, I paid for this with my own money and the thoughts are all my own.
Why?
Possibly the idea of such a “retro” device is a little foreign to some people. In the age of cheap, ubiquitous internet and streaming music services, why would anyone want such a thing?
There are multiple answers to this question. One aspect is the enshitification of music streaming services. Today Spotify are well known for paying artists a pittance and using “ghost artists” to pad out their collection and reduce the amount they pay real musicians even more. AI will accelerate this trend.
I’m picking on Spotify, but enshitification is inevitable with any large company.
By the same token, streaming services are going to feed you music based on an algorithm. Despite their claims, this algorithm will be to serve them, not you. You’re never really in control.
If a music service offers you a way to purchase music, it will only be in the form of a license, which could be revoked at any point.
What I’ve found (or perhaps more accurately, been reminded of) is that there is a joy in doing your own curation of your collection. You can fit an astonishing amount of music on an 64Gb SD card, you certainly don’t need to feel like you’re missing out on variety by forgoing a streaming service.
An unexpected side-effect of doing your own curation is that it’s now more “ergonomic” to directly support artists who offer their own DRM free purchase and downloads. Previously, things I’d purchased from sites like bandcamp were stuck in a special “limbo” - files on a drive somewhere which were less convenient to listen to than the streaming service. But by curating my own collection, everything is in one place. My place.
Lastly, as an open source product, both hardware and software are hackable and repairable by anyone.
What’s it like?
I ordered mine on the 31st of January and received it on the 9th of April. This was about how long I expected, I’d missed the first batch of production and had to wait for the second. It is possible that future supply will be faster.
The initial impressions of the thing are that it has some “heft” - in a good way. It feels solid and well made. It’s smaller than a phone, but thicker (roughly 2x). Not so thick that it won’t easily go in a jeans pocket, but you’ll notice the difference. The feeling in your hands is good, and one handed operation is easy (even for me with my comically childlike hands).
When shaking it you can hear a minor rattle, but it is only the buttons - nothing internally is moving. The surface is very pleasing to touch - less glossy slick than most modern phones which is good - it doesn’t feel like it wants to expensively launch itself out of your hands.
I have some concerns about the screen protection - as far as I can tell the screen is directly exposed and subject to possible damage. Of course, since the design is totally open sourced, it would be easy enough to swap out the screen - it is a readily available part.
First use and impressions
I prepped an SD card and ran into my first problem. The Tangara comes with a little plastic “cover” which slides over the end of the SD card. When the SD card is inserted it is flush with the side of the case. This is a neat pragmatic solution, much simpler than some sort of “door” or leaving a larger gap for dust ingress.
However for some reason the little plastic cover simply would not fit on the SD card. I eventually stopped thinking I must be doing it wrong and used a different SD card and it fit perfectly. This is quite perplexing, I got out my digital calipers and measured both and there are no significant thickness differences. It’s possible that I needed to apply more force, but I was worried about breaking it.
The new SD card is bigger than the first one, so it’s a non-issue.
I also downloaded the Tangara companion app and it worked first try, updating the firmware flawlessly.
Mission successful, and I enjoyed some tunes on the way to the coffee shop.
Sound quality wise - let’s just say that my ears are not that discerning. I wouldn’t know my frequency response from my total harmonic distortion. It sounded great to me.
I’ve used it with AirPod Pros, a pair of Edifier over-ear noise cancelling headphones and my ancient-but-awesome wired Koss Porta-Pro’s.
Earbuds tend to fall out of my ears, and over-ear headphones make my head sweat when I’m walking, even when it’s cold (gross). Using these old-school Koss wired headphones probably makes me look like a time travelling nerd, but they sound great and I don’t give a shit what people think :-)
I’ve had these headphones for about 18 years, I’ve replaced the earpads twice but otherwise they are still going strong. Score one for longevity and repairability.
User interface
The touchwheel took a little getting used to. It is not as sensitive as I had expected it would be. Tweaking the settings went some way towards alleviating this. I need to use a little more pressure than I expected to. I think that there is a good chance that it’s actually normal - and just not the same as what we’ve all become used to with phone touch screens.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s no need to use an uncomfortable amount of pressure, just a little more than you would on a phone. This is just a learning curve thing.
On a related note, each of the four cardinal directions on the touchwheel has a “long press” function, and it is easy to accidentally trigger those while scrolling until you are used to it.
I was a little surprised at how nice it was to queue an album, have the Tangara play it through and at the end… it just stops playing. I know this seems trivial and silly, but it was nice to have it cemented in mentally that there was no algorithm making a choice for me about what I was going to listen to next.
Implications of a dedicated music player
Part of my purchase decision was around having a device to take places that was single-purpose. I want to be able to digitally disconnect, go for a walk without the distraction of my phone. But I’m not a complete barbarian, so it’s nice to have something to listen to (and headphones make a good barrier against unwanted social interactions).
It also turns out that a credit card fits nicely against the back of the Tangara, you can hold it in place with a stout rubber band. This removes the last reason I might need to take my phone with me, and means I don’t need to take an entire wallet. It might be good to get a stick on credit card sleeve, but I already put a nice sticker on the back.
Cost
The price is $249 USD. With shipping and taxes to Australia, it ended up around $470 AUD. There’s no doubt this is a lot of money, and out of reach of many.
Additionally, the carbon cost is very high. The product is assembled in Australia, presumably from parts sourced in the US or China, then shipped back to the US for shipping fulfilment. Meaning in my case it got shipped back here to Australia.
I did ask if it was possible to short-circuit that last step, but (understandably) it is not feasible at this time - they have their hands full just with assembly and testing without having to do shipping logistics as well.
I was happy to support what I think is an awesome project, built by a bunch of awesome people. It seems feasible the cost will be lower in the future because of the open source nature of the project.
All that said, this is not an unreasonable price when you start looking at comparable products. It is a niche field, and as a consequence prices tend to be higher.
Problems
The only real problems I’ve had have are most likely all software related. The firmware is still new and under active development, so nothing here really concerns me. After using it a bit more I will try to reproduce what I can and file bugs, though I think there is a good chance a lot of these problems will get fixed soon anyway.
USB mass storage
This doesn’t seem to work on my Mac. I think I saw someone else refering to the same problem. At the moment it’s easy to pop out the SD card and just copy music directly, so this doesn’t bother me at all. The full size SD card makes this easy and it’s probably faster overall anyway.
General crashes
I’ve managed to crash the device quite a few times. This generally seems to be bluetooth related. It reboots within a few seconds, so not a big problem. Crashes are almost always while “doing stuff” in the UI - once it’s actually playing music I don’t think I’ve had a single crash.
Stuttering
Occasionally the music will stutter for a few seconds and then recover. I’m not sure if this is only with bluetooth or with wired headphones as well. I’m listening to only mp3’s with the same bitrate (my collection is mostly flac but I use beets to convert them all while syncing to the Tangara SD to save space).
Bluetooth pairing/unpairing
Switching between bluetooth devices seems kind of fraught. It’s not always clear if it’s correctly switched to a new device or not, and you don’t really find out until you try to play music. If it doesn’t work, fiddle with it some more (switch bluetooth on/off, etc). This is where the aforementioned crashes tend to occur.
I can fairly reliably get things going by rebooting (I discovered that holding both volume buttons and switching the hold switch seems to do this).
Another slightly annoying bug is that one of the bluetooth devices I target is my TV soundbar. This works fine (and sounds great). However the Tangara seems to “hold” the bluetooth connection to it - even if it’s not playing and the hold switch is set. As a consequence if I start watching TV, within a few seconds the soundbar will say “oh, Tangara you want to play something?”, and it will switch back to bluetooth. This results in CEC switch my TV inputs as well, so it’s extra annoying!
My workaround here is to deliberately turn off bluetooth on the Tangara, but it seems like this should be unnecessary.
Alternatives
While waiting for the Tangara, I bought a cheap MP3 player from AliExpress. Partly as a point of comparison, and partly to try to wean my 10 year old off listening to Spotify via a very unwieldy iPad.
Something like this:
It’s very unbranded, and you can find dozens of sellers of this and various similar devices on AliExpress and other marketplaces.
It is very cheap, around $50.
It is … really not very good. The sad thing is that as far as I can tell the hardware is actually pretty nice. It sounds fine, it’s physically robust. The buttons are only so-so and the wheel thing is quite useless.
But the software and user interface can only be described as execrable. It doesn’t want to play songs in album order, they don’t even appear sorted (despite everything being tagged correctly). Everything is truncated, to a much shorter width than the screen requires.
It has utterly useless features like a photo viewer and an ebook reader. The UI is very slow to respond to button presses.
There is a firmware update feature, but it seems unlikely that I could find new firmware, or that anyone is developing for it any more. Given it doesn’t even have a clear model number, investigation is difficult.
However, this does make me feel good about the future for Tangara. With the open hardware and software it feels like it becoming an unsupported dead-end product is unlikely.
Tags: music tangara open source