Recommendations for an mp3 player in 2023?

I haven't been paying attention to any kind of music organising software or player since I had iTunes and an iPod. I would like an mp3 player to take around with me separate from my phone, and some kind of software to organise playlists etc - pretty much what iTunes did before it became unusable. I have a Windows PC and Android phone. What should I be looking for? Are mp3 players even a thing any more? I basically live in 2006. Any help appreciated. Oh and I have a Sonos system at home if that affects anything.

ha - just last night I was rummaging through my junk drawer and came upon an old silver iPod. It probably still has ghostly songs from 2008 on there, but I don't have the power cord

apparently Sony still makes a Walkman for MP3s that gets pretty good ratings on amazon:

Sony NWE394/B 8GB Walkman MP3 Player

The market is heavily dominated by cheap Chinese MP3 players. They all work, but beware, the software is poorly designed and their playlist management is very badly designed. I make do with 'em because I'm not very picky.

People who are a bit more demanding than I am seem to like the SanDisk players OK, but I can't say if they'd meet your needs.

that sony is pretty good but i think it's limited to 8GB of storage. sandisk also has a line of mp3 players that has expandable storage which is good.

as far as music management though, not sure if there's something good. itunes sucks now and i suspect the default behavior of these mp3 players is that they'll just act like a removeable drive, and you'll have to drag/drop folders etc., although i'm sure there's software out there to create .m3u's and such.

itunes sucks now and i suspect the default behavior of these mp3 players is that they'll just act like a removeable drive

Yeah this is what it's looking like. I pretty much just had one 'ipod' playlist anyway of my favourite albums and random mp3s so tbh I think I might have to make do with drag and drop.
I still want a decent music player app to use on my PC in general though, I guess they aren't necessarily linked to the actual mp3 player devices as I had expected.

google helpfully autocompletes my question and tells me that 8gb is approx 2000 songs which sounds ok.

Get a Walkman that allows a flashcard thingy, I think I have a 1tb card in mine.

I bought two different off-brand Chinese players that both shit the bed after a few months. In both cases the batteries swelled up and eventually cracked the housing. They both got great reviews because they worked really well at first.

I love my walkman.

I've still got a 12 year old Sandisk Clip that is in perfect working condition. I really like the Sansa mp3 players, the newer ones not so much though because they seem to die faster. My more upmarket mp3 player is a Sony NW something with a 64 gig card in it, it's really good - but I only deal with folders so don't know about its playlist capabilities.

Also is DRM still a thing? Itunes started kicking me out of my music that I owned and repeatedly asking for passwords so lots of my playlists have music that's disappeared.

as far as computer players go, "roon" is the one that audiophiles use but it's a subscription model. search for 'roon alternative' on reddit etc. and you'll find some freeware options. 'logitech media server' (mysqueezebox) looks promising.

myself, i have a sony nw-a55, but i had to download custom firmware etc. etc., it's all a little bit involved.

the nw-a55 is the one I have as well, it's nice!

This is a mess for me too, I listen to much less music in the car because of it (almost entirely podcasts, except for DJ mixes that come in podcast form or easily downloaded mp3s).

I guess I could use Spotify and download albums, but I try not to have the app on my phone (for one thing it loves to start playing random songs at seemingly random times), or use the Bandcamp app. But I have lots of non-streaming music that I'd love to listen to in the car again...maybe I'll just dropbox it and download the mp3s on my phone (and then dig around in the Pocketcast app).

Anyway will be monitoring this for good solutions. I think a lot of people use an old ipod touch for this?

FYI, iphones can still be music players, and you can actually use Finder to manage the files on them instead of the bloated Music app, iirc

if you're technically inclined there is a big ipod modding community https://www.wired.com/story/ipod-modders/

my solution would be an old Samsung phone with an SD card, the Samsung Music app is still the best one I've used, even if it doesn't seem to be installed on new Samsung phones.

I still have my iPod nano in my car! It works fine although I can only have it on shuffle as the car's player doesn't seem to organise the files the same way - it gives them random filenames so I can't really search for anything - which is why I am terrified of having any future car without a CD player so I can listen to actual albums if I want. The wheel on the ipod is fucked though so can't take it out and about.

The way our music is stored at home (on a separate server) it looks like getting any new actual 'music library' software is going to be a huge PITA if I can't tell in advance how it organises mp3s and playlists etc. It's all linked up with my partner's computer, the sonos...

xp not a bad idea.

after my last beloved apple touch bricked, i decided to give the nw-a55 a shot and really like a lot about it. expandable 16gb, sounds great, handles wav/aiff/flac easily, has a radio! have never and probably won't mess with firmware. it does take a bit of getting used to as far as ui. the one thing i def miss is the ability to create playlists on the mac and drop 'em in. it's a bit tedious to do it in the box. but otherwise no real complaints.

I'm happy with my Sansa Clip...
Installed third-party firmware so I can use folders/files... not into playlists...

That modded transparent iPod with 3P firmware thing

what iTunes did

Not sure this bit really got addressed. Last time I tried to mess with a Windows desktop collection manager and player in one, I really liked MusicBee. Is this still the go-to? It has good functionality for sending any of your collection to a connected MP3 player, including playlists you put together. So I think that's good as your iTunes replacement. If there's any MP3 player hawking its very own desktop management software, it's probably not going to be very good.

Foobar?

I always found the sound was better on the old iPods than the phones but hard to prove

thanks maffew, I was looking at that one.

Oh man, those Sony Walkman MP3 players look great. Seems they're out of stock everywhere right now though, bummer. I guess that's how it is with niche electronics these days.

I won my Sony NW-A55 in an e-bay auction for a ridiculously low price, I think it was about £110. The previous owner had dropped it and it had a tiny little blemish on the casing but otherwise was good as new and barely used. It's still working perfectly.

the newer sansas, the ones that look like the clip zip but aren't, have dropped ogg support which is a must-have for me (also not rockbox-able).

i bought my mother a £35 no-name player last year and, yeah, software a bit of a let down, and it's the one thing you can't get a feel for in the adverts. odd things like the shuffle always starting with the first track (which i got around by adding a silent 5s track). and no alphabetical artist list. and truncating the track names. oh, and some cover images it just didn't like. but it played things well enough, had external speaker so she could listen to it in the garden and was pink.

i started using my phone and haven't really looked back. it came with more storage than i really needed and an hour or two's walking around doesn't drain the battery too much. but these days i don't really use my phone as a phone and i don't have to worry about the battery letting me down when i'm out somewhere (because i'm never out anywhere)

(actually, finding a new phone with an earphone socket might be a problem these days. and mine is currently having charging problems because the socket has become a bit loose - cable looks like it's in but it doesn't charge)

Oh man, I hope Sony doesn’t stop making Walkmans. The only downside to using the flash drive card thingy is that over a certain number of songs it only functions well using the folder system. But that’s what I like anyways. I am bummed that playlists don’t move over.

I agree with koogs, I can't be doing with carrying two devices around whilst on the move so I have my entire music collection (150gb) on my phone - backed up of course. I use the paid poweramp app and it's easily the best music player I've ever used. As for earphones, definitely go with bluetooth. I have a pair of Sennheiser Momentum TW3s and they sound incredible.

I've always like my Fiio X1, which has lasted well though it's not the most "organised" (that might be me more than it).

It did prompt a "young person" to say "Is that an iPod? Cute!" in the most patronising manner possible.

"yeah yeah the honeys won't stop blinging my iphone"

the sony aw-55 you can buy on ebay from japan, there is a firmware tool that allows you to set the language to english.

the newer sony mp3 players run android and therefore the battery life isn't great, it's more like a phone. the aw-55 goes something like 20-30 hours off a single charge.

I'm still stubbornly clinging to my beloved iPod Classic. After my last legitimate model crashed, I found someone on Etsy of all places who constructs and sells what are essentially new versions of same but with a SSD installed. It's worked well so far! And I still use iTunes, as well. The trick is to download an older version and never allow it to update to the new and unusable version. Greetings from 2006, people of the future!

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/502d756fe4b0ad2559801b56/1553230280887-YWBJA4M895VIJAUUQ1NA/Cowon+Plenue+D2-12.jpg?format=1000w

Which my husband bought me a few years ago after I left my beloved iPod classic 120gb in a taxi.

Stuff in there is organised into folders and you can make on the fly playlists, because I mostly use it on random play I’ve never worked out the playlist function.

Count me as another vote for the Sony NW series. I own both an A45 and an A55 (had the A45 for a couple of years when it started having difficulty holding a charge, so I thought it was dying and bought a newer model — on eBay from Japan as others have described — and then the A45 staged a miraculous recovery). I think I might prefer the A45; the functionality is pretty much identical on both, but for some reason if I don't use the A55 for 24 hours it goes into hibernation and has to be rebooted when I turn it on, which takes about a half hour. But the use of a card for storage capacity is great, it has playlist functionality (though it's somewhat labor-intensive to make them)...it's not as smooth and perfect as an iPod, but it's damn close.

I'm also still very happy with my Plenue D but it seems like newer models (in case this one ever dies) aren't available anywhere anymore (at least, none of the shops listed on cowonglobal.com in the countries around me seem to carry any Cowon products nowadays)

I'm trying to connect my walkman nw-a55 to a sony portable speaker (srs-xb13) for the first time. I have never tried to connect it to anything with bluetooth before and I generally don't understand bluetooth. I think I'm following all of the instructions: the speaker appears to be in pairing mode but it does not show up for the walkman. It will show up on my iphone, so I am assuming the problem is the walkman. I don't know how to test the walkman, I don't have bluetoothy things lying around my house. Both have a full battery charge. I am considering hurling the speaker into a neighbor's yard, maybe they can use it. But the speaker is waterproof and I thought it would be sweet to shower while listening to sweet jams.

I hate bluetooth, this is making me angry. Any ideas?

I left my beloved iPod classic 120gb in a taxi.

Ouch.

I used to use a Rockboxed Sansa Clip with an SD card, but honestly with so much now being wireless I just use my iPhone. I miss the old iPod classic, and my listening habits have surely changed as a result of not using a dedicated player, but I don't miss the maintenance that came with the iPod.

xp you're going into settings and scrolling down all the way to "connect to/add audio device" under Bluetooth?

but for some reason if I don't use the A55 for 24 hours it goes into hibernation and has to be rebooted when I turn it on, which takes about a half hour.

go into settings -> device settings -> auto power off -> off

XP THANK YOU THANK YOU

go into settings -> device settings -> auto power off -> off

This worked — thanks!

: “After 309 days locked in a 9 x 7 concrete box: books taken away; mail held; no phone calls, & 6 years on the sideline – there are few who understand the same level of consequence and failure, and absolutely no one who wants it badder.”

Lol whoops meant this for Fyre thread

6 years of only transparent cassette Walkmans and Ja Rule tapes. Imagine.

Nice work 龜!