The Best Portable Music Players

From small and simple portable music players made with athletes and workouts in mind, to mildly evolved MP3 players suited to those who still thumb their noses at smartphones, to the audiophile ear candy that are high-end digital audio players, devices that do nothing but pump out your jams aren't just still around, I'd argue they're still relevant. Maybe not to everyone, but to more people than you'd think.

And if you're reading this like, What the fast forward button on my Sony Walkman? Are they republishing an article from 1999? Who uses a portable music player anymore? then read on. One of those more people than you'd think may end up being you.

Why Not Just Use My Phone to Play Music?

With WiFi and cellular data, the ability to stream and store music, smartphones are the reason portable music players have faded out like "Hey Jude." But in my opinion there are 3 main groups of people who are better served by a dedicated portable music player than their phone.

1. Athletes, Outdoor Enthusiasts & Gym Goers. When you're running indoors or out, cycling indoors or out, or rowing indoors or out, having your giant iPhone or Galaxy strapped to your arm is a nuisance. Its physical presence is cumbersome. Incoming calls, texts, and notifications during your workout are distracting. And if you drop it or get it wet, phones tend to be a lot more fragile than music players, which are designed with jostling, sweat, and impact in mind. Music players also typically have a much, much longer battery life.
2. People with Extensive Music Collections. Ripped CDs or vinyls, music libraries you inherited from your great aunt who was a Velvet Underground groupie for a few years in her 20s, deep (deep!) cuts you downloaded back in the Napster days. Maybe you don't listen to all of your music all that often, but let's say you're backpacking in Peru for 3 months (where your cell phone won't do you much good anyway) or just going on a long ass flight to Asia. What better time to take an audio trip down memory lane? Various types of portable music players have way more built-in storage or SD card slot space you can suck up with music files worry-free.
3. Audiophiles Who Want Better Sound. In addition to not sucking up your phone's storage capacity and battery, some digital audio players, or DAPs, are designed specifically not to suck up your listening experience either. DAPs that support high-resolution music file formats are able to deliver studio quality playback. The pricy headphones you invested in to enhance your listening experience can't achieve their peak performance if you connect them to a device that wasn't made to deliver high fidelity sound (and vice versa if you get a hi-res, HiFi DAP, and then plug some headphones they gave you on the airplane into it.)

   But the right headphones paired with the right DAP is an audiophile's wet dream of sound immersion, playing back every nuance of the original recording, and giving you access to the subtleties of individual notes, instruments, and voices. Here's how hi-res music file formats compare to your standard MP3s and MP4s, and to each other:

What Types of Portable Music Players Are Out There?

RIP to my OG iPod, lost to the toilet. And to my iPod Shuffle, lost to a combination of the treadmill and my foot. And to my iPod Nano, lost to...I don't even know where I lost that one. It just happened a few weeks ago too, which is what led me to begin researching new options for portable music players.

What I found was a lot of iPod wannabes, Chinese or other no-name brand knockoffs, with touch buttons positioned around the familiar scroll wheel. And that's fine, as long as they're compatible with my music library and various audio file formats. PMPS come with a set amount of built-in memory, an SD card for music storage and transfer that you can upgrade on your own - higher end music players typically support larger or more SD cards - or both.

There are your standard, inexpensive music players, most capable of playing MP3, WMA, AAC, and Audible audio codec formats. More advanced options will also play hi-res FLAC, DSD, Apple Lossless, APE, WAV, AIFF, MQA, etc. files.

The next price tier sees the addition of Bluetooth compatibility to the music player, so you can pair it with wireless headphones or Bluetooth speakers. Many of these are still inexpensive, though they also vary greatly in sound and connection quality. Then you get into the music players that also come with NFC compatibility, WiFi, and access to music stores and apps. Most of these are DAPs that fall into the $150 and up - way up - range.

Portable Music Player Rating System

My assessment of the best portable music players is probably a little different than most others. Rather than focusing on one of the 3 groups of buyers I mentioned above, I've tried to average out the pros and cons of cheap and expensive, phone-sized and bite-sized, and simple and complex DAPs to create an overall rating reflecting how good of an investment they would be to anyone looking for a supplemental music player.

In other words, this is more of a survey course of the best music players than a 400-level graduate study.