If it’s truly awful you might be in phone call mode. If the microphone is enabled it switches to the phone call profile which only supports a single, extremely shitty codec, so if it sounds like you’re listening to FM radio with very poor signal, you should probably switch to a microphone not attached to your headphones.

Yeah, pretty much. In their defense they’re more resilient to greasy kid fingers and being dropped behind the couch, but I still wish the data was actually stored on the card, or on some form of local storage. We had an mp3 player with an SD card before that, but then you can’t switch playlist as easily.

Bluetooth audio codecs still leave a lot to be desired, and are pretty far from the cutting edge of compression to put it mildly. You can get good audio, but you have to be very careful with your combination of headphones and output device, because a lot of combinations don’t have the same codecs, and you end up with the lowest common multiple. There are new standards in development, though, so I think this will be largely solved in about 5 years.

My kids have a music player called Yoto. It takes little cards which tells it which playlist to use. This is easy for kids to understand, and lets them listen to stories and music without adding more screen time. The cards don’t actually store the music, just tell the player where to download it from.

My wife recently realized we had quite a few of these cards now. So she bought this:

The future is here, and it looks a lot like the past.