Turning my old phone
into a MP3 player

June 2, 2026.

For quite some time now, I’ve stayed away from streaming platforms—though to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever really been into them, especially when it comes to music.

The first music streaming app I used was Deezer, back in 2015, and I used it continuously until around 2017. Despite having ads, you could listen to full songs without any issues; now, it seems you can only listen to a 1-minute preview and have to pay for a subscription to hear the whole thing.

The reason I used Deezer was because Spotify wasn’t available in Venezuela at the time, and it wasn’t until 2021—if I remember correctly—that it finally became available in the country, so I switched entirely to Spotify.

However, I stopped using it almost a year ago, tired of ads and not wanting to pay for a subscription, so I switched to a simple audio player—in this case, Foobar2000—which I still use on my laptop today. That said, depending on my device, I listen on different players; for example, I use Strawberry Music Player on my MacBook.

Even though I use Foobar, I wanted an option I could use without having to carry my laptop everywhere, so I decided to repurpose my old phone—a 2015 iPhone 6S Plus—to use it as an MP3 player, and at the same time, avoid spending money on a new player.

The process was simple, but for some reason, finding a tutorial on how to do this without paying for Apple Music is a bit tricky.

First of all, I use Windows 11 on my main laptop, so I downloaded Apple Music from the Microsoft Store. Once there, I went to Songs and copied and pasted my MP3 files into it. Then I waited a moment for everything to finish transferring.

Next, I also downloaded Apple Devices—this is important because I’ll use it to transfer the files from Apple Music to the app on my iPhone.

I go to the Music section, tap sync, and wait for everything to transfer. I do this every time I want to add a new song: I copy and paste it into Apple Music, then sync it in Apple Devices, and it gets added.

I should mention that for this process, I connect my phone to my laptop via my USB cable, and that for the songs to appear in Apple Music, the format must be MP3. I realized this because I had some songs in FLAC format that didn’t show up; I had to download them as MP3s so they would appear in the app on both my laptop and my phone. 

The main reason I wanted to transfer my songs from my laptop to my phone is because of Last.fm—it’s really important to me to have my songs scrobbled. Sure, if I just want to listen to music, I can download it anywhere and listen to it, but my Last.fm is important to me.

It’s important to note that, unlike Spotify, you can’t sync Apple Music to Last.fm; for that, you need a third-party app to handle the process. That’s why I use SimpleScrob—it’s an old app, but it’s lightweight and available for older versions of iOS. 

Basically, it syncs with your Apple Music library, and once you finish listening to a song, you just open the app and it syncs to your Last.fm. 

Another reason I’m transferring my songs to my old phone is that I use wired headphones, and to use them with a newer iPhone, you have to pay extra for an adapter to connect them—and anything Apple sells here in the country is expensive, so no thanks.

The battery is also old, so it won’t last all day, but it lasts me up to 5 hours when I’m using it—since I just listen to music and don’t do anything else, the battery doesn’t drain as quickly. But overall, for an 11-year-old phone, it works well.

See you in the next one!