22 Jul 2025 ------------ My MP3 player is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W. I paired it with Pimoroni's Pirate Audio headphone out HAT and Geekworm X306 18650 UPS board to give it enough portability. The Pirate Audio application is very easy to setup on Raspberry Pi OS, so I didn't spend too much time making it work. I started with the Raspberry Pi OS lite. After installing Pirate Audio and put the FLAC/MP3 files in, I turned off swap and set the clock speed to slower at 600Mhz. The Priate Audio software uses Mopidy, so it has a web interface to manage playlists or skip to the next song, etc. To make good use of it I have setup a hotspot so that I can connect to the board and access it through the browser. I have also setup the buttons on the HAT to be play, next, volume up and down, so that I don't need to always go into the web interface for simple operations. Once everything is done, I turned on the read-only Overlay File System option using raspi-config. Hopefully it will reduce the read-write on the SD card and extend its lifetime. Of course it can't be taken outside as a bare board, so I learned how to make STL files and asked a local shop to 3D-print a case for it. Although in the end I might have spent quite a bit more than an MP3 player of similar quality in the market, you know the feel is very different. :)