My Devices - Handheld gaming and music jukebox

This is post 2 in a sporadic series about the various devices I have around the house and what I use them for. In this post I explain how I’m using a Moto G6 Play as a music jukebox in the kitchen and a Redmi Note 7 as a dedicated handheld gaming device.

The goal here is to show how devices are being used to trigger the imagination of myself and others for various projects to do as a hobby. In the first post I talked about using a Galaxy Tab 4 (with a Pillow Pad) for watching various TV shows at night while falling asleep.

In this post I have two more Android devices I use for entertainment.

Kitchen music player

I have mentioned repeatedly that I don’t listen to music much. Being very hard-of-hearing makes music sound like unintelligible noise. This is not true for my wife. She loves to have music on while working in the living room or kitchen or just on breezy Spring days while the kids play.

For a long time she would pair her phone with a no name bluetooth speaker from Amazon. Yet, it had a couple papercuts.

First, it didn’t have FM radio. As an elder Millennial/younger Gen X my wife and I grew up on nothing but the radio. Being both from the Bay Area, we spent many days and nights listening to KMEL, particularly Chuy Gomez in the afternoon. Listening to the radio is more than just music, its a nostalgic comfy feel.

Second, the speaker routes all of her phone audio through it. So notifications, phone calls, etc. also play through the speaker while connected. What she wanted was a dedicated device just for music. It also makes it so she can use her phone without interrupting the music.

So, I set that up for her using a Motorola G6 Play. Originally released in 2018, I picked this up with the intention of running a few custom ROMs, but quickly learned they won’t work with the “Play” edition. Its just been sitting in a drawer. Since I can’t install a custom ROM and clean it up, I used Universal Android Debloater to remove essentially every application and then installed three apps for music.

1. FM radio. FWIW this is why I chose this phone for this project as it has a built-in FM tuner. Its one of the few apps I left installed that came with the phone.
2. Ultrasonic. This is an app on F-Droid for playing music from a self-hosted Subsonic or Subsonic-compatible server. I am using Navidrome as the music server on my homelab. Ultrasonic makes it easy to listen to the music on that server.
3. Spotube. This is a fun app that uses Spotify for playlists and song recommendations, but plays music from YouTube. It essentially creates a free Spotify streamer.

I have the G6 Play on a Dollar Tree phone stand with a long headphone cable attached for the FM antenna that snakes up the wall for better reception. The phone then connects to that no-name bluetooth speaker and is now a dedicated music jukebox. Anyone can walk up, tap a few times, and have music playing.

Dedicated handheld gaming

Late last year we upgraded my wife’s phone from a Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 to a Samsung Galaxy S21FE. The Note 7 had stopped receiving updates on the LineageOS install and needed something with better support.

However, I still love this phone. The Redmi Note 7 is still a fantastic device that supports a ton of custom ROMs, UBPorts, and has a community edition of PostmarketOS. It has a 6.3" HD screen with 6GB of RAM. I find uses for this device all the time.

Recently I started playing Slime Rancher 2 as I loved the first game. The problem is I don’t have a PC that is capable of playing this game and it is not available for the Xbox One. So, the only way I can play this game at the moment is to stream it through Xbox Game Pass. This isn’t a problem as Game Pass streaming has become pretty good. For $16 I can play it as much as I want this month and stream it to any device.

Most of the time I play the game on my Xbox One and stream it. Yet, there’s lots of small windows I have to play here and there, just not on the TV. So, I used the Note 7 as a dedicated handheld with a Razer Kishi V1 I got as a gift a couple years ago.

For this setup I removed the stock MIUI Android launcher the Note 7 comes with and replaced with an old LineageOS build based on Android 10. I then used the above Universal Android Debloat tool to remove essentially every app except the browser, file manager, and Play Store. Last, I installed the Microsoft Game Pass app.

This makes the Note 7 a distraction-free handheld gaming device I keep on the couch. The battery on the phone lasts for 3+ days and the 6 inch screen is perfect for this setup.

Obviously, this same setup could be used with RetroArch for retro gaming, or any other game streaming service, including Steam in-home streaming. At the moment, all I care about is playing Slime Rancher 2.

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