I don’t remember how old I was when I got my first Walkman, but I remember everything about it. I got it along with three cassette tapes: Beach Boys – Endless Summer, Heavy D & The Boyz – Now That We Found Love (single), and C+C Music Factory – Things That Make You Go Hmm (single). What a great collection.
My kids are getting old enough that I want to give them the same gift of music and control over what they listen to, but I wasn’t sure how to do it in the age of no-physical-media without also giving them access to all kinds of music that might not be appropriate for kids. (In other words, I didn’t want to given them access to all of Spotify.) However, it also feels silly to invest in something like a CD player and all the things needed to provide music on CDs.
The Mighty music player is exactly what I was looking for. It lets me select which playlists to sync to the device, and play all the songs offline. So I’m able to put music from Frozen 2, Tangled, The Descendants, and Weezer (my daughter’s favorite) all on the device, and she has all the freedom to play her own music. She uses it all the time.
You use the Mighty app to sync to your Amazon Music or Spotify account (subscriptions required) and choose which playlists to transfer. The device is then connected to your phone via Bluetooth to transfer data. The experience of syncing music wasn’t great. It would hang or stall a lot, and I needed to restart it. But once I got it set up, it was exactly what I wanted.
Once synced, the songs are good for offline play for a month at which point you need to re-sync the device. I’ve only done this once so far, and the experience was similar to that first sync. It stalled once, and I needed to restart, but once it was done we were back to good.
Despite the sync problems and frustrations I’ve had with the app, the device itself is really awesome. It holds something like 1000 songs, and having all of Spotify’s library to choose from is pretty incredible. My daughter loves it!
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