SHANLING M0 Pro Hi-Res Portable MP3 Player, Bluetooth Music Player, Support USB Type-C 3.5mm Jack, 1.54" HD Touch Screen, 8-Hour Long Lasting Battery, Compact Digital Audio Player, Red

I orderd a Fiio M11s and was completely disappointed. First of all, the device is quite literally, as big as a brick. It's basically worthless if you want a player you can take anywhere. If you regularly carry a phone and wallet in your pocket already, the M11s will not fit in your pocket along with those items, and if you put it in your other pocket, along with your keys, I hope you enjoy having your pants weighted down. On top of this, the sound quality was unimpressive for a $400 player: NO BASS, and had to turn the volume way up to get it to a listenable level, even with lower impedance headphones. It also skipped at the beginning of every track when listening to an album, and sometimes skipped randomly during tracks. Unacceptable for a $400 player. On top of all this, to add or delete music from this player, I had to remove the SD card, put it in an adapter, and plug it into the computer by itself, in order to add or remove songs from this device. If I plugged the player into my laptop with the SD card in it, the player would not load in my computer/would freeze up trying to load it in my computer. If i tried to eject the player, it wouldn't properly eject. If I tried to shutdown the laptop, it would stick on "logging off" and never shut down, unless I held down the power button. Also unacceptable for a $400 Player! Yes, I updated the firmware, yes the device driver installed correctly, and I did everything else I should have tried doing, but this dumb, clunky machine would freeze up Windows trying to load it as a drive. Enter the Shanling M0 Pro. I decided the M11s was not for me and to return it, and began looking for a different player. After realizing the current trend is these bigger players and that there aren't as many smaller options out there anymore, I found the M0 Pro (Previously chose the M11s over the M3 Ultra , but know now that the M3 Ultra would also have been too big for my uses). I am continually impressed by the sound quality of this little player. It has no problem driving Sennheiser HD 280 Pro, 380 Pro, 300 Pro, as well as Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro 32 Ohm. The M11s didn't sound great on any of these headphones, and had no bass on any of them. The M0 Pro sounds great on all of these phones, and has plenty of bass. On top of that, it's tiny and ultra portable. If you don't care about streaming stuff and only want to listen to your own collection in the awesome quality, in an extremely portable package, get this player. I have a 1 TB SD card in this thing, and it runs fast and smooth with NO LAG. The Fiio M3K I replaced this with would lag heavily with a 1 TB card. This is smaller and sounds better too. Overall, I am just extremely impressed with the value and performance of this little player. It sounds better than the $400 Fiio M11s and has none of the aforementioned glitches that the Fiio had. It plays all tracks in crystal clear clarity and transitions from one track to the next without any skips or hiccups. If you want an all purpose, truly portable device, with audiophile sound/are looking for an upgrade from a Fiio M3K and/or are considering the Fiio M11s vs. The Shanling M3 Ultra, save yourself the money and the trouble and just buy the Shanling M0 Pro. If you aren't using headphones that are considerably more powerful than those I mentioned (Ohms wise), you will be more than pleased with this awesomely tiny device. PRO TIPS: IF you have difficulty reading the song titles, you can see the full titles on the "now playing" screen and use the skip back and forward buttons to skip to the song title you want. I would also recommend using the "folders" menu to find the artist and album you want to listen to rather than the "my music" menu.

Revised--- My original experience with this device was less than perfect. Since, customer service reached out to help me resolve the issue (see last section). After very helpful feedback, and some back and forth troubleshooting, it seemed like the best course of action was to have it replaced. There was some concern that the headphones that I was using were not compatible with the device. I was using a set with a three-band, 3.5 jack. This was for playback control and a microphone for hands-free communication. We came to a conclusion that this might have had some effect on the performance of the device. I would recommend that you avoid this if possible. As far as my experience with the device; I love it. I know there are more expensive options, with more robust operating systems. There are some quirks with the OS for the M0 Pro, and I will explain those later. As far as my experience with sound quality, it works great. I have some experience with audio, having sold audio equipment for years, and the sound is great. It won't drive larger headphones, and I'll talk about that later as well. Pros: - Great sound - Lightweight, sturdy - Great storage - Built in DAC for phones, PC, etc. - Bluetooth receiver and transmitter Cons: - OS is a bit too responsive. I wish that scrolling through albums was a bit less responsive, since I can mistakenly scroll to the bottom of my album list by mistake. - Small screen is a bit difficult to manage - I wish it had a queue, and that I could add songs/albums to the queue - Even though I have a lot of experience with audio equipment, I have no experience with balanced output. More information about how this works, and perhaps input about types of headphones and adapters would be nice. Love the device, great sound, I recommend this for the money paid. Try it! Love this little guy, but low stars because whenever I switch headphones I have to do everything but stand on my head to get the thing to start playing again. Will play for hours, but the minute I unplug it from my stereo and plug in headphones, no output. Very frustrating! Tried rebooting, selecting different track/album, different volume settings (basically almost every setting in Setup and Playback). You might want to wait for some kind of firmware update before picking one up. Speaking of firmware, an “add to queue” would be nice…

I’ve used the Shanling M0 Pro daily at the gym for 30 days and have mixed feelings. Coming from a Sansa Clip, I appreciate the modern build quality, USB-C charging, and the solid 1-week battery life. Bluetooth connectivity with my Shokz earphones has been flawless even with the device in my pocket. However, the user experience is a major letdown for anyone exercising. The tiny screen relies heavily on swipe gestures that are poorly implemented—sideways swipes often fail to register, and vertical scrolling "flicks" too fast, making it nearly impossible to navigate folders accurately while moving. Speaking of folders, the UI doesn't scroll long names, so if your organization relies on folder names, they simply get cut off. The sound quality is decent but felt like a step down from my phone’s output; I found the default EQ better than any of the presets, which all sounded worse to my ears. Finally, the lack of physical playback buttons makes pausing or adjusting volume a chore compared to the tactile buttons of older clip-style players. If you need something for stationary listening, it’s a nice piece of hardware, but for the gym, the UI frustrations make it hard to recommend. I am returning this in favor of a less premium model. My thoughts: If one must suffer the flaws, at least one can do so spending considerably less.

Edit on 8 August 2024: The device has pretty much become unusable for most use cases. It appears that there are further issues with the battery. Unless the device is plugged into a power source, it will work for about 1-2 minutes before performs a hard shut down. If you turn the device back on, it will remember the track position and eventually start playing again, but only for a minute or two before repeating the process. Extremely disappointed, especially after doing a fair amount of research on this product. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Note: I used an iPod Nano to compare the user interaction. TL;DR: battery life falls off quickly, difficult to control, user interface (software and hardware) has to be accommodated for, rather than serving the user I’ve used the M0 Pro for about 2 months now, for reference on my level of experience with it. Pros: - Sound quality (headphone jack): the sound quality from the headphone jack seems pretty good. The output is powerful enough to power HD58Xs, with the volume level being at 65/100. I also purchased the 3.5mm to 4.4mm adapter – I honestly can’t tell any difference with the balanced output, so maybe save yourself the 20 bucks on that. But it works all the same. - Sound quality (Bluetooth): BT is good on this – modest range and there is an appreciable difference between BT headphone performance on Spotify on a smartphone and playing FLACs on the M0 Pro. However, when you change the volume on the device, it takes 1-2 seconds before the headphones respond. So you don’t crank the volume up if you think that the headphones didn’t respond properly – they’re probably just lagging. - Customizable: There are a lot in the settings menus – a lot to play with to be able to dial in the device to perform the way you want. This assumes that it works. Unfortunately, this is where the positive comments end. Cons: - Value: If this device was 50 USD, I would not even bother writing this review. But given the amount of money you have to put into this thing, as well as the amount of time you have to spend reading the mediocre documentation, I think that you would be better off spending more on a device that will support your needs for longer than 2 months. - Battery life: After 6 weeks of use, the battery life has tanked. I bought this device to use as a higher-audio-quality iPod. I assumed I could throw it in my bag and, over the course of a work week, I could pull it out and use whenever I wanted. Given this expectation, I was very disappointed to see that the battery barely holds a charge for 48 hours (and I mean in standby mode, not 48 hours of continuous use). I can use it for 1-2 hours, leave it overnight, and the battery is completely dead in the morning. The battery life completely undermines the utility of the device, unless you’re going to consistently use it near a power supply. - User interface / touch screen: This device, as others have said, has a very small screen (kind of the point right?) but navigating through the menus is difficult. If you are used to the smooth and slow scroll from an iPod, this is going to be difficult to adapt to. It is a lightning fast scroll, where you can easily get from A to Z in one swipe (see video). This makes casual scrolling very tedious (ie not casual). Besides that, some of the shortcuts don’t work as expected. The “quick adjustment” menu (swiping from the bottom of the screen) only works on non-vertical scrolling menu screens, which is just the main menu. Kind of defeats the purpose of “quick”. The “press-and-hold” feature which should return you to the main menu works, but not consistently. Also, I should mention that if you are planning on using this in your car, Bluetooth is pretty much the only way to use it. If you expect to plug the device into your vehicle via USB, the device is treated the same as a USB thumb drive – you cannot pick up playback from the song you were listening to before getting into the car, it pretty much acts as a blank slate. And if you do use Bluetooth in the car, make sure to turn it up all the way on the M0 Pro. But then, you have to remember to turn it back down to an acceptable level before using headphones – unless you like having your eardrums assaulted. I have tried to go through the setting menus and online documentation (which is not easy to find) and I can’t figure out a way to remedy this situation. Other nit-picks include: - Use the volume wheel lock and set a max volume limit (I would recommend under 30/100 if you are using IEMs). Otherwise, you’re run the risk of blasting music just by putting the device into your pocket unlocked (the volume wheel can freely move very easily). - Make sure the meta data on your music files is perfect – otherwise, it can be very difficult to find your music. Specifically, make sure each track has the “Album Artist” field filled. Luckily, you can use “Folder mode” to view the file directory of the SD card in the device.

If you’re old school and want to load up an SD card with high resolution music files and play them through a portable player, this is a great choice. Sound quality is excellent, the compact size makes it super portable, and the solid machined aluminum body offers excellent durability. Battery life is also great. One negative: every time you plug it into a USB cable, whether it’s just for charging or connected to a PC, the players boots into a routine where it refreshes the music library. This is frustrating because it happens even if there are no new music files on the SD card. It appears to be an automatic feature baked into the operating system that cannot be deactivated. So for example when you get in your car and plug the thing in to charge it up and play some music through your stereo, you need to wait 4-5 minutes for it to scan every music file before you can play anything. Aside from this annoying and unnecessary procedure, this is otherwise a great device. The price of around $100-125 is also very affordable for a legitimate audiophile grade portable music player that is solidly built and generally works very well.

I needed a bluetooth receiver with tone controls (eq) to fix my hot Fiio F9's, so got this. What no one mentions is the eq only works with local files, nothing external. Strike one. Bluetooth has no noticeable lag in receiver mode, but reception starts to sputter from one end of my apartment to the other just using sbc codec. I have much cheaper receivers that stay connected crystal clear. Strike two. The volume level is high enough in low gain (could be louder), and it sounds good off a standard 3.5mm connector. The battery lasts 6 to 9 hours (low gain, sbc receiver mode). The only notice it gives that the battery is low is the visual one of the battery status turns red, which I far prefer to cheaper receivers that give audible prompts. Also, it would have been great if they put a lanyard hole somewhere (I almost dropped it once already). I connected it to my PS5 and it switches to USB DAC mode, but my PS5 doesn't detect it, so I should probably return it. The only thing that might make me keep it is having a screen that shows what's playing, and pick the bluetooth codec. Plus it does seem to sound a bit better than my cheaper bluetooth receivers.

Pros: 1. Balanced output. 2. Good sound quality. 3. Extensive Bluetooth support. 4. Could be used as a DAC. 5. Small. 6. Supports very large cards and large music collections (like mine). 7. Quite fast. 8. Reasonable price. Cons: 1. Interface. After a stroke, I am 3-5 times slower than a healthy person and have problems with exact movements. Alas, I cannot double click or ensure that my finger does not move when I click. There is no way to increase deration of "short" click or duration between clacks in a double click. It took me 2 (two) hours to install firmware updates. Dah! Which was kind of frustrating. 2. Interface. "Long 2 second click" to cancel the last change and return to a root menu (if menu entry allows multiple changes, only the last one will be rolled back) does not work if you press in the wrong place. To make everything more interesting, most places are wrong ones. 3. Interface. "Swipe to the tight" to ACK the changes and return to previous menu just does noy work. At least I could not make it work. Not even once. No kidding. 4. Interface. By default, the device uses Chinese. If you are not fluent in Mandarin, good luck. You will need it. On the good side, the player supports -- correctly, as far as I can tell, -- insane amount of languages. 5. Interface. Instruction manual is very laconic. In particular, it does not say a word how to change the language. You can read Chinese easily, do you? -- you will need that skill to navigate though menus. At least once. And what "Volume L" means is everyone's guess. 6. Interface. Only restart can get me out of the screen saver. Probably I should use non-existent "swipe right" feature? 7. Firmware. It came with version 1.3. The current one is 3.6 (!). 8. Battery life is 4-6 hours only (another side of being tiny, I guess). Conclusion: returning.

Good quality mp3 player, but I’d rather have manual buttons than a touchscreen. Pretty expensive mp3 player. Lightweight and small, good for runners.