Tangara first impressions

Last year I joined crowdfunding on the Tangara music player. They had many delays and then problems with shipping and I only received it yesterday. This article will try to sum up my impressions and opinions so far.

Packaging

Very nice, professional looking box, a small printed user guide. Very nice. I noticed there is a guide only when putting the packaging away but hey, it is there and has all the regulatory stuff on it.

Setting it up

The package comes with a metal SD card cover/holder and two screws in a separate ziplock bag. I didn’t find what the screws are for.

The SD card cover is supposed to fit onto an SD card and slide with it into the side slot. Well, thus far theory. My SD card did not fit into the holder. I had to brutalize it quite a bit with sandpaper. Are Australian SD cards thinner?

My Tangara had one screw almost completely unscrewed when I removed it from the cardboard wrapper. The construction is weird in that you need two screwdrivers with the small star bit to tighten the screws. There is an allen key for the star screws included, but it stripped immediately.

Still the device didnt sit flat on the desk, and no matter how I tightened the screws, it still doesn’t. Best I managed was that the case got a hair crack in one place.

Form factor

Tangara is a brick. It is 23mm thick. It is also fairly heavy, 133g if the kitchen scale I use for baking bread can be trusted. For comparison, my phone weights 183g and my Sony Walkman from 2011, 56g.

The audio jack is on the top end, which kinda sucks if you want to have it in a pocket with the cable connected (especially since Bluetooth is not so great on it). If you reach into the pocket to adjust volume or whatever, the device would be upside down.

I think it should have had more buttons, there is just the key lock / power off slider and two volume buttons. The touch wheel does not work when locked, and if you enabled it, it’s not tactile so you couldn’t use it confidently in your pocket without looking. With just the two buttons, there are some weird gestures, long press and such, and you make it do things by mistake. Not great. I’m sure this can be improved in software to some extent, but you still have just two buttons for volume, play-pause, skip track etc.

If you wanted to use a smartphone headset with the 4 pole jack, TRRS, and use the button on it, tough luck, not supported. The jack socket is 3-pole only.

The touch wheel probably has some nostalgia factor if you are an iPod user or Apple fanboy/girl, I am neither. It can be switched to D-pad mode, but it isn’t very comfortable to use. Better stay with the wheel option.

The touch wheel has a haptic feedback which is just the vibration motor from smartphones glued on the back side of the PCB. It feels alright. Sometimes I feel like there is a hickup in the firmware and it vibrates longer than intended.

User experience with the firmware

This applies to version 1.3.1. My Tangara actually came with 1.2.1 and I updated it using the Desktop Companion app. Very smooth experience that, btw - don’t bother with the flatpak if you dont have it installed, it can just be compiled from source using cargo. I had to set some GTK flag to run it though - but it tells you which.

If you get a bug where it can’t find the SD card, there is a handy key combo to force a reboot. Sadly I needed it very often. You hold both side buttons while sliding the power switch down and up.

The firmware crashes a lot. I had my Tangara two days and I saw the rainbow splash screen over a dozen times (not counting when it wakes from deep sleep). After a wake up, it sometimes/always starts reindexing the SD card and the whole UI is quite laggy for a couple seconds (depending on your card size, presumably). This is indicated by the DB icon in the status bar, which does not mean Deutsche Bahn.

One quite surefire way to crash it is to keep listening to music for a while and then try to go to the settings to change a theme, brightness etc.

Speaking of brightness, … there is no shortcut for it (or did I not find it?). If you leave your house with the display dimmed and want to adjust the brightness, glhf. You can’t see jack. With max brightness, it is quite usable in daylight, provided you are using the light theme.

Another “success story” for me was Bluetooth. When I tested it for the first time, it worked, but I did just a quick test. Listening longer, my audio kept stuttering despite the player being right in my pocket. The line of sight range is maybe 4 meters, then it started dropping out. (This test was done with Airpods.) Tangara has a real hard time connecting to the paired headphones, too. I think this can be blamed on the Espressif Bluetooth stack.

Language support - I loaded some music with Czech diacritics and these show as squares on the display. There is a patch already that should fix it, currently unreleased. I am staying cautiously hopeful.

To give it credit, the music indexing seems to work fine and browsing by artists and albums works well. There is also a directory browser, sadly the files are not sorted and you can’t add a whole folder to the queue, so it is rather useless.

Playing music through wired headphones works very well, there is no stuttering, it just works. One problem is if your headphones are somewhere between shitty $2 supermarket headphones and audiophile gold plated directional cable ones. The mid range earbuds can pick up static noise from the amplifier (?). I had this with my Sony in-ear earbuds, over Bluetooth it does not happen and with my room stereo or studio monitor headphones, there is no problem either. The Tangara project website shows a mod where you solder on attenuating resistors that should fix this.

Navigation

Clunky. Everything is done with the touch wheel. Maybe there is some shortcut but I couldn’t find a quick way to e.g. get to brightness adjustment from the music player, beside navigating through all the menus back to the home screen and then to the settings menu at the bottom. Where it sometimes shows a blank screen, or crashes. Anyway .. yeah. I’m sure this is a work in progress and will improve with time.

Theming

You can write your own color schemes for the Tangara. There is documentation. It is quite detailed but not detailed enough to write a new theme from scratch. I think you have to read the source code to really understand what you are doing.

Best I could do is take the stock High Contrast theme (from the Codeberg git repo) and adjust the colors. It’s pretty basic but still feels nice to have the player customized. The campaign said you will be able to program the user interface in lua, too. I did not try that yet, maybe it’s possible, it would be neat anyway. I’m no fan of iPods.

This is now my custom theme: theme lua file

Price

The player costs 250$. You can buy a very nice commercial device for that, which works better out of the box. Any random player on AliExpress will probably work better if you just want to play some music over wired or Bluetooth headphones. They will also be lighter and smaller. You can’t flash them with esp-idf or theme in lua, of course.

I guess Tangara is more about the idea and story than the actual device. It allowed the team to try their skill at designing and manufacturing a product, taking it through the compliance testing and all the trouble of mass production, Q/A, packaging, logistics. That is what this is about. Further, it is open source, so in theory someone can take the schematics and code and make an improved version. I can’t say I’m not tempted.

Regarding the buggy firmware… I have my own experience with Espressif SDK and can just say this can be expected from it. The WiFi stack is quite flaky at times, too. Getting the audio decoding work so well is no small feat and with the DAC it works surprisingly smoothly. It’s just a shame that all put together it makes for a rather poor experience and more of a devkit than an appliance.

The Tangara Vibe

I don’t want to only write how the device sucks. It has a certain appeal even in the current version. It’s quite comfy to use when it cooperates. Plugging wired headphones in it, finding some music, hitting play and then not touching it again and just reading a book or whatever, this puts Tangara in its happy mode where it does not crash and just works. And it feels good, looks quite good too. Especially if you print a nicer coloured case or dye it. (and I think there are print files available). The wired audio is clear and it can probably go on for hours with that huge battery.

If the firmware becomes more stable in the future, this love-hate relationship could tilt to the former. Presently, I think it’s destined to live in a drawer most of the time, or as a player for the home stereo.

btw … the ESP32 can connect to WiFi and you can even run a web server with SSL on it. There’s so many weird things you could try with this hardware.