First Impressions: Sleevenote music player, the square $349 bet that album art deserves its own scre...
Tom Vek, who co-created Sleevenote, has said the tech trend he’d most like to see gone is the crop of new retro CD and cassette players. Then he shipped a chunky offline music player with no streaming apps on it. Odd, until you look at what the screen does all day.
Sleevenote is square because album covers are square, and the four-inch 720 x 720 panel is sized to a sleeve rather than to a phone. It plays music you bought and downloaded, nothing else. Vek’s shortest pitch for it, a Kindle for music, undersells him. The claim buried under the hardware is that people can be talked into paying for downloads again.
All 100 Day One Edition units are gone at $349 in the US and £249 in the UK (sold to two countries only, because certification and shipping electronics abroad got in the way). So whether anyone wants one has been answered. What nobody knows yet is whether the idea survives being built a second time, cheaper.
Domino’s sleeve art shows up on the device
Load the James Ellis Ford album that went up with full official sleeve art, and the reverse of the sleeve comes with it, credits and all, swipeable while the record plays. Spotify has never once told me who engineered anything I’ve listened to on it. Artists can supply animated covers if they want, and Vek would rather they didn’t bother. Same.
Buy an album inside Sleevenote Manager, and it downloads straight onto the device. Which is the part I keep coming back to. Vek calls Manager the iTunes to their iPod, and the Bandcamp hook reaches further than any player app I’ve bothered with. The 256GB of fixed storage is plenty for a library assembled one album at a time.
You drag a slider down the alphabet until Tirzah appears. There is no search box to type into, and that was a deliberate call rather than an oversight. Vek has posted video of the slider moving through a large collection quickly. I’d still want to watch it handle a few thousand albums before trusting it.
Some chargers won’t wake it up
Sleevenote‘s own launch post says not every adaptor works with the unit. I had to read that sentence twice. A player you might find flat in the morning is a player you stop reaching for, and reaching for it is the entire proposition. Vek also calls the unit a fairly chunky boy, his phrase rather than mine.
Wireless listeners get SBC or AAC and nothing above it, so the 24-bit DAC may as well be absent until you plug into the 3.5mm jack. Vek says the Bluetooth range is short anyway. £249 and $349 bought a prototype. Vek talks about $199 once volume arrives, and that’s the figure I’ll be checking. Sleevenote reports Day One owners buying more digital music, which comes from the brand and from 100 buyers who queued up to believe in it.
About that Bandcamp folder
Buying from Bandcamp usually ends with the files downloaded once and the folder never opened again. Sleevenote is aimed at that folder. Its promotional shots keep returning to Dummy by Portishead, which is an album nobody should have to meet as a filename. You’ll get the argument fastest if you already spend money on cardboard and inserts. And the cost of it is a second device in your pocket.
My take for now
I’m into Sleevenote, with the caveat that I’d wait for the one after this. The software argument is running ahead of the hardware carrying it, and a $199 version that charges off any brick would be an easy recommendation rather than a curiosity. A battery that quits mid-album is what would turn me off it.
