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A pocket player, so the track leaves the kitchen
Three ways to get your exports off the laptop and into a walk or a car, where you actually hear what is wrong with them.
Lesson 7 ends with homework: play the track to one person. The reason is not encouragement. It is that you cannot hear your own mix on the headphones you made it on, in the room you made it in, at midnight. You hear what you intended. You need somewhere the track is just a track.
A phone does this job. It is also the device that interrupts you, and the one where your exports get lost among everything else. A small player that holds nothing but your own work turns a walk into a listening session, which is the cheapest studio upgrade there is.
What matters here is simple: it holds WAV and MP3 without fuss, the battery lasts a walk, and it has a headphone socket.
The video review
The same export on all three, walking the same street.
What we would actually buy
Start here
The one that does the job and nothing else
Under about C$80 you get a clip-on or stick-shaped player with a small screen, a microSD slot and no pretensions. The interface will annoy you. The sound is perfectly honest, because at this price nobody is spending money on colouring it. Drag your exports onto a card and walk.
Our pick: [model name] · [price] · Where to get it
The one most people should buy
The one you will keep using
Around C$150 to C$350 buys a proper screen, a battery that lasts, and enough output to drive real headphones rather than just earbuds. This is the tier where the thing stops being a novelty and becomes part of how you work: export, copy, walk, come back and fix the two things you heard.
Our pick: [model name] · [price] · Where to get it
If you already know you care
The one that is also an amp
Past about C$350 a player is really a portable amplifier with storage attached, and it will drive demanding headphones properly on its own. Worth it if you listen on the move constantly and want one object instead of two. Not worth it if the walk is the only time it leaves the drawer.
Our pick: [model name] · [price] · Where to get it
Some of the links above are affiliate links, and some of these are products sold through this shop. Either way the price is the same for you, and nothing is listed here that we would not use ourselves.
