Best MP3 player for 2023: portable music players from Astell & Kern, Onkyo and more,1. YouTube Music
WebFeb 21, · Spotify: Music and Podcasts Spotify is pretty much the defacto music streaming service across platforms, and that's because of its playlists. Spotify builds WebMar 26, · #1) MusicBee #2) Media Monkey #3) Foobar #4) VLC #5) AIMP #6) Dopamine #7) Windows Media Player #8) VOX Universal #9) Clementine Other Notable WebJan 30, · 2. iTunes – Best music app for Windows 11 with iOS sync iTunes has been one of the best-known media players since it was first introduced by Apple. Nowadays, ... read more
The SPT is unconcerned by digital audio file size or type, and it will happily power any headphones you care to mention. The control interface is clean and responsive. The player itself is not so much built as sculpted - though it is too large to slip into your jeans pocket. Even the battery life is half-decent. The M11S is insightful enough to make minor or transient information apparent, and it can describe the most nuanced dynamic variations in a solo instrument with ease. It has more than enough headroom to dispatch the big dynamic shifts with no difficulty, and it can also describe a big, wide and properly defined soundstage. The treble is perhaps a little on the bright side, but not so much that we'd consider it a deal breaker. There's lots to love here including an Android 10 operating system with a touchscreen that's smooth and responsive, a punchy, controlled and detailed sound and a premium build. You've got so many great options, such great sound, and such high-spec parts that it's very easy to look at the saving and decide it's worth putting into a nice high-capacity microSD card instead of its higher-priced rival.
Read our full Fiio M11S review. As well as a new 4. The Onkyo DP-X1A isn't the most compact device on this list, but we think it's one of the best MP3 players you can buy, offering lots of customizability, an intuitive interface, and fantastic sound. The DP-X1A looks a little bit like a phone, but much thicker with two audio ports — one headphone jack and one balanced output for those interested in a cleaner and overall better quality sound. The device has an easy-to-use volume wheel, as well as physical playback buttons and two microSD card slots for those with a sizable collection of music. The player is built with a full version of Android 5. Unlike the iPod, however, the Onkyo DP-X1A is built for super-high-quality audio. Speaking of the sound quality, it's an absolute dream.
It supports a range of music formats, including FLAC, OGG, WAV, MP3, ALAC, and more. In terms of hardware, the device has two chipsets, one to power the overall device, and one to handle the DAC and amplifier — resulting in a noise-free experience. We tested the player with multiple pairs of headphones across multiple price ranges, and were stunned with the clarity and exceptional quality of the audio. Read the full Onkyo DP-X1A review. Apple took us all by surprise when it announced the iPod touch 7 in , the first upgrade to its portable music and video player since And Apple surprised us again when it discontinued it in There are still quite a few available on sites such as eBay, and if you can get one for a sensible price it's not a bad buy. This iPod supports the FLAC codec as well as Apple Lossless, giving you more options than ever when it comes to accessing audiophile-quality music provided you use wired headphones: Apple's Bluetooth doesn't support any hi-res audio codecs for wireless audio.
The strings had a warm and natural quality, while soprano vocal duets soared sweetly above the mix without ever sounding harsh. In our review we also tested out the inbuilt speaker at the bottom of the iPod touch, and it packs quite a punch despite its size. If you need a new MP3 player, and you don't mind using Apple Music, the iPod Touch will do just fine. It's also optimized for gaming, so check out our guide to the best Apple Arcade games. Read the full iPod Touch 7th Generation review. The interface is easy to control. Tap through options using the touchscreen, and select the music you want to listen to. It could be more responsive, but you get used to it. Battery life is around nine hours, which isn't amazing, but not terrible either. Music is dynamic and crisp, with a nice and powerful sound.
The best option for working out, this MP3 player is small and light. Despite being built for sport, it supports a pretty wide range of audio formats — including MP3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, and WMA. During testing, we found the battery life is impressive at 20 hours. Because it has recently been superseded by the MKII variant above which tweaks the build ever-so-slightly and adds a 4. With an off-center design and aluminum body, it certainly looks the part, and its touch screen is bright and easy to use. With Wi-Fi connectivity, you have access to streaming services including Deezer and Tidal , while Bluetooth aptX ensure listening with wireless headphones needn't sound inferior to wired connections. Looking for something else? We haven't tested the MP3 players below ourselves, but we'd still like to recommend them based on their excellent specs and customer reviews. This is a small, light and stylish MP3 player with a simple matchbox-like design and a big, wide screen.
It's an upgrade on Cowon's previous MP3 player model, this time with a volume dial, Bluetooth and more features. It offers exceptional battery life. You'll get 45 hours of playback time with regular MP3 files and more than 30 hours with high-res files — which still beats most of the competitors on this list. It supports a huge range of formats, including DSD DFF, DSF, ISO , FLAC, WAV, AIFF, ALAC, APE, MP3, WMA, OGG and DCF. Music sounds brilliant and with Bluetooth, you can listen on a range of different devices. Although there's no Wi-Fi streaming available. This MP3 player is short on storage with only 16G internally. But with a MicroSD card you can bump that up significantly. It boasts an impressive 45 hours of battery life and supports a wide range of formats.
Sound is clear and powerful and although it might not be the best out there, it's a huge improvement over listening to music on your phone. Find out more about how we test. So how do you select one? Well, you're in luck. Because the market is increasingly geared towards the audiophile the kind of people who won't touch Spotify's lossy streams , firms are constantly innovating. These days, ever improved sound quality, hi-res audio support and seriously impressive built-in DAC s Digital-to-Analogue Converters are making already impressive players even better. And there's style to match the substance, with manufacturers also competing on design to deliver players that look as good as they sound. Fan of brutalist architecture? Something a bit more colorful? See SanDisk or Sony. Want something about the size of a matchbox? Cowon's Plenue D3 is the one — see them all in our guide above.
We test dozens of hi-res portable music players every year at TechRadar, and that means we know exactly which features, specs, file support and wireless audio codecs to look out for. It's important for us to compare the performance of these players against the claims made by their manufacturers, which is why we take the time to make sure the stamina, durability, connectivity and sound quality claims are legit. We make sure to test each product against its chief competitors too, so you can be sure that if we say so, the product is the best bet for the money. We live with these players for well over a week and run them in religiously so that the components have 'bedded in' before we commence our tests, and we don't finalize our testing until we are certain of the sound quality.
On this, we test the audio performance using a range of musical genres, using both wired and wireless headphones and streaming or downloading music from various sources, to ensure that these products can handle everything from thumping dance tracks to softly-spoken podcasts in whatever format we throw at it. After more years in this game than we'd care to admit, we are truly confident that our star-rated reviews are the best indication of the quality of the hi-res MP3 players in this list. There are no sales teams involved in our verdicts, which means if we don't like it for sound, design, usability and features, we simply won't recommend it here. An iPod is a type of MP3 player. It's the name for Apple's range of portable music players, but you'll find plenty of other MP3 players from other brands — many of which are listed in our guide below.
There are lots of very good reasons why people still use dedicated MP3 players and similar devices. One is sound quality: depending on the device, you can listen to much higher quality versions of tracks than anything you'll find on streaming services — especially if your device has a headphone jack, which many phones lack. For serious music fans that's a major consideration: Bluetooth audio quality is getting better, but for full hi-res audio you still need your headphones to be wired. Even Apple's most expensive headphones, the AirPods Max, can't do fully lossless audio wirelessly. Another reason is that not everything you might want to listen to is available on the various streaming services — and not everything that's there today might be there tomorrow, because songs and even artists come and go. By synchronising an MP3 player with your desktop music collection you can always be sure that you can hear what you want to hear. A big bonus for many people is that with your own music collection, you don't need to pay a monthly subscription to listen to it, or to listen to it without advertising.
Although it's less of an issue than it used to be, another reason many music fans preferred MP3 players is because they were designed to do one thing and one thing only: play music. Most smartphones weren't, and audio performance of some of them wasn't brilliant; battery life and storage space weren't always great either. And MP3 players don't require you to have a mobile phone connection to get your music, so you can happily wander far from mobile signals and Wi-Fi without losing your soundtrack. Whether you should buy an MP3 player or not depends on what you want to use it for. If you're trying to avoid being glued to your phone, checking social media or taking work calls when you want to relax, an MP3 player can be a great option to listen to music while staying cut off from all of the distractions of your phone — and the rest of the world. Some people enjoy listening to MP3 players when they work out, so they don't have their phone with them.
Whether that's also to keep calls and messages at bay or keep their phone safe. Others might not have a great deal of space on their phone if it's an older model, so want to store music elsewhere, and some people might not want to use up battery or data when they're on the move. MP3 players won't suit everyone, many prefer the convenience of having all of their music on their phones, but there are plenty of reasons why an MP3 player is a great idea for some people. The short answer is no. Certain players are offline-only; see the Sony NW-A55L for starters. The lack of Wi-Fi rules out directly streaming networked files and from music services, but its absence is hardly surprising given its budget price-tag, and because there is a Bluetooth receiver, you can pair a laptop or phone and play its music content through this, Sony's much newer Walkman.
The beauty of offline players is that they will not be thwarted by guest Wi-Fi networks, Siri misunderstandings, Spotify Free playlists, Bluetooth dropouts, ads, app updates, an incoming phone call, a Google notification or an important email. But if you want to make full use of your Tidal HiFi Plus subscription, you'll need something that can jump online too. Don't have that kind of money? Isn't it always? You can't buy what you can't afford or, so they say so as rudimentary as it may seem, do keep the maximum you're comfortable spending in mind when searching for the DAP of your dreams. You can pick up a cheap portable MP3 player for roughly the price of a coffee, but these will be quite basic affairs that might house just 32GB of MP3-quality music and play for perhaps three hours before needing to be charged — but if that's good enough for you, we support you all the way.
Yes, really. The point is, there is a product for every budget, so don't assume that your desire for hi-res files will totally bankrupt you. We wish you a long future of musical contentment with yours. After all, my iPod Classic and I have been going strong for 15 years, and we're very happy together…. Sign up to receive daily breaking news, reviews, opinion, analysis, deals and more from the world of tech. Becky is a senior staff writer at TechRadar which she has been assured refers to expertise rather than age focusing on all things audio. Before joining the team, she spent three years at What Hi-Fi? testing and reviewing everything from wallet-friendly wireless earbuds to huge high-end sound systems. Prior to gaining her MA in Journalism in , Becky freelanced as an arts critic alongside a year career as a professional dancer and aerialist — any love of dance starts with a love of music.
Becky has previously contributed to Stuff, FourFourTwo and The Stage. When not writing, she can still be found throwing shapes in a dance studio, these days with varying degrees of success. Open menu Close menu Tech Radar Tech Radar TechRadar The source for Tech Buying Advice. opens in new tab opens in new tab opens in new tab opens in new tab. US Edition. North America. News Best Reviews Opinion How To Deals More Versus Appliances Audiovisual Cameras Car Tech Computing Coupons Downloads Entertainment Fitness Laptops Phones Smart Home Tablets TVs Wearables About Us Tech Radar Pro.
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Considering a dedicated portable audio player? Love that. Maybe you have a blossoming collection of FLAC files which don't ever seem to play nice with your phone or simply eat up its storage to the point that you're choosing which app to ditch , or maybe you no longer want to be interrupted by phone calls or WhatsApp notifications when trying to enjoy tunes? We applaud you. We are here for you, and so are the best MP3 players currently on the market — by which we mean portable audio players that play far more than lossy old MP3 files. While streaming from Spotify is all well and good for a quick music fix, hi-res audio digital files stored on a portable music player often shortened to PMP or digital audio player you may hear it referred to as a DAP can sound so much better, and they care not whether you're online — or whether your Tidal or Apple Music subscription is still valid.
That said, there are players that'll access your streaming service of choice. But let's not get ahead of ourselves…. And the portable audio experience will be especially good if you plan to use your shiny new player alongside some compatible over-ear headphones — as long as your DAP is powerful enough to drive them. Again, more on this later. But which player to choose? Don't fret, we can help, because we love these things and we want you to love one of them too. Full disclosure, I still own an iPod Classic , and while it has no hi-res or Bluetooth support and you can't really buy them from established online retailers these days, I love it dearly. Do you own a collection of digitally-stored music, or do you plan on streaming it all? We probably all know that keeping downloaded hi-res files on your phone tends to start eating up its onboard storage, and the same is true where portable music players are concerned.
Now, if you plan on streaming all of your tracks from your pick of the best music streaming services , built-in storage will be of little concern, but if you're packing files, it's worth considering the figures. I, for example, saved up my pennies back in for the bigger GB iPod storage option, just because 40, songs seemed a mind-blowing figure; it still does today — I've never managed to come close to filling it — albeit with AAC, AIFF, ALAC and my dear old friend MP3 aka Lossy but Little music files. But if there's no struggle, there's no progress, and progress has certainly been made to squirrel more storage and hi-res file support into portable players. Removable microSD cards are one way, and it's worth checking whether the player you've got your heart set on comes with a little slot for one. Buy a 1TB microSD card, slot it into its rightful place and have at all that glorious extra storage.
The gloriously bijou Cowon Plenue D3 also boasts 64GB of built-in storage, which is expandable to GB with the addition of a GB microSD card — note that it cannot take a 1TB card, so you do need to check the spec sheet of your potential player to avoid disappointment if you've already bought one of the more accommodating microSD cards yes, I speak from personal experience here. support for double DSD, but not quadruple DSD. Now, the chances are that if you've not heard of DSD until now — it stands for Direct Stream Digital and was created by Sony — you won't miss any lack of support for it. However, if you paid extra to get all of that glorious additional audio information in digital form a DSD album is about 8GB, so it's a data-heavy purchase you'll absolutely want to be able to enjoy it at its best. As mentioned, my old iPod Classic only supports AAC, AIFF, ALAC and MP3 files and, because FLAC is now such a popular format, that list is more than a little dated in You'll likely need to head over to an auction site to nab one, but if an Apple-centric and dare we say it, slightly retro?
vibe is your thing, it might be the one for you. Essentially, what we're urging you to do is to check the file support on your potential player, folks…. My old iPod Classic is a relatively basic beast. I cannot come at it with a pair of even the best wireless earbuds. There is no Bluetooth receiver chip nestled within it. There is, however, Bluetooth support within newer iPods the 7G iPod Nano, the 2G iPod touch and later all support Bluetooth , but that's only part of the story. Certain players are offline-only; see the Sony NW-A55L for starters. The lack of Wi-Fi rules out directly streaming networked files and from music services, but its absence is hardly surprising given its budget price-tag, and because there is a Bluetooth receiver, you can pair a laptop or phone and play its music content through this, Sony's much newer Walkman. The beauty of offline players is that they will not be thwarted by guest Wi-Fi networks, Siri misunderstandings, Spotify Free playlists, Bluetooth dropouts, ads, app updates, an incoming phone call, a Google notification or an important email.
But if you want to make full use of your Tidal HiFi Plus subscription, you'll need something that can jump online too. Don't have that kind of money? Isn't it always? You can't buy what you can't afford or, so they say so as rudimentary as it may seem, do keep the maximum you're comfortable spending in mind when searching for the DAP of your dreams. You can pick up a cheap portable MP3 player for roughly the price of a coffee, but these will be quite basic affairs that might house just 32GB of MP3-quality music and play for perhaps three hours before needing to be charged — but if that's good enough for you, we support you all the way. Yes, really. The point is, there is a product for every budget, so don't assume that your desire for hi-res files will totally bankrupt you. We wish you a long future of musical contentment with yours. After all, my iPod Classic and I have been going strong for 15 years, and we're very happy together….
Sign up to receive daily breaking news, reviews, opinion, analysis, deals and more from the world of tech. Becky is a senior staff writer at TechRadar which she has been assured refers to expertise rather than age focusing on all things audio. Before joining the team, she spent three years at What Hi-Fi? testing and reviewing everything from wallet-friendly wireless earbuds to huge high-end sound systems. Prior to gaining her MA in Journalism in , Becky freelanced as an arts critic alongside a year career as a professional dancer and aerialist — any love of dance starts with a love of music. Becky has previously contributed to Stuff, FourFourTwo and The Stage. When not writing, she can still be found throwing shapes in a dance studio, these days with varying degrees of success. Open menu Close menu Tech Radar Tech Radar TechRadar The source for Tech Buying Advice. opens in new tab opens in new tab opens in new tab opens in new tab.
US Edition. North America. News Best Reviews Opinion How To Deals More Versus Appliances Audiovisual Cameras Car Tech Computing Coupons Downloads Entertainment Fitness Laptops Phones Smart Home Tablets TVs Wearables About Us Tech Radar Pro. Tech Radar Gaming. Trending iPhone 15 ChatGPT Wordle hints Best phones Best VPN Best air-fryers. TechRadar Newsletter Sign up to receive daily breaking news, reviews, opinion, analysis, deals and more from the world of tech. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors. Becky Scarrott. Social Links Navigation. More about audio visual. Don't want to pay for AirPods? The 3 Bluetooth speakers you should be throwing in your bag this festival season.
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WebMar 26, · #1) MusicBee #2) Media Monkey #3) Foobar #4) VLC #5) AIMP #6) Dopamine #7) Windows Media Player #8) VOX Universal #9) Clementine Other Notable WebJan 30, · 2. iTunes – Best music app for Windows 11 with iOS sync iTunes has been one of the best-known media players since it was first introduced by Apple. Nowadays, WebFeb 21, · Spotify: Music and Podcasts Spotify is pretty much the defacto music streaming service across platforms, and that's because of its playlists. Spotify builds ... read more
So if you like doing things the old-school way, this is as good as it gets. foobar made the move to Android in A big bonus for many people is that with your own music collection, you don't need to pay a monthly subscription to listen to it, or to listen to it without advertising. Deezer and Tidal are also compelling options in this space, while iHeartRadio keeps things old school by allowing you to tune into actual radio stations. When you make a purchase using links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.
It's really that great. Specifications Storage: 64GB. In his spare time he's written a book, 'The Making of Tomb Raider', alongside podcasting and usually found playing best music player pro old and new on his PC and MacBook Pro. Spotify builds playlists from your interests that are often remarkable. Read Next.
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