Unbricking an MP3 player
Nov 27th, 2025 - scudoLast month I found out that the audio jack of my phone was disintegrated, so I dusted off an old MP3 player I had. There it is, a Philips GoGear SA6085/2:
When I turned it on, it said "Updating player", as this one always does, and then got stuck at 100%. Clearly something was wrong.
Since this player always had problems, I decided to reset it completely and to reflash the firmware. For doing that, there is a convenient software provided by the vendor; Philips Device Manager, of which you can get a copy here (and likely nowhere else since Philips wiped out all of their old stuff from the web some time ago).
For reflashing, you need to boot up the device holding the "volume up" button; the volume buttons on this device never worked well, so I opened it up and put some aluminum foil between the button and the PCB contact, and the volume controls haven't been a problem since.
This is what the reflashing process looks like:
I put some music on it using Windows Media Player 12 on Windows 10 - which is stupidly frustrating for literally no reason - and it has just worked since.
Never throw away old tech I guess...
