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Sharon asked: “I would like to know the best tablet on the market to store music files. I want to play music from my tablet and I’m going to connect it to speakers or other devices to play it through. but I wanted to know the tablet that could store the most music and play it back.”
Sharon, if you’re only going to use the tablet for music and want the one that you’re going to be able to store the most music in, you’re in for a premium price.
Music, and any kind of media for that matter, will be a memory hog, so you’re looking at tablets with plenty of storage and those are not cheap.
Your best bet may be to skip iPads and any Android tablet without an SD card option and choose an Android tablet with SD storage instead. SD cards are not as fast as internal storage, but that shouldn’t matter for songs, they’ll be plenty fast for that and you won’t have any performance issues.
For example, you could look into an ASUS ZenPad 3S 10, it will only come with 32GB of storage, but the SD card slot will fix that problem and you can get it for under $300. For closer to $500 you can get a Samsung Galaxy Tab S3.
You can expand the memory on either of those and pay a fraction of what you’d pay for, say, an $800, 256GB iPad Pro.
You can expand the memory on either of those and pay a fraction of what you’d pay for, say, an $800, 256GB iPad Pro. Having said that, if you think 128GB will cover your needs, a 128GB iPad is actually cheaper than the Samsung Tab S3 with 32GB. It just won’t give you the option to expand the memory up to 256GB like the Samsung will.
You have another option that may be worth considering. You can use the web to either store your songs in someone’s cloud, or pay monthly for an on-demand service.
Either option may cost you some money, and they will both require web access to access your entire library.
If you choose an on-demand service like Spotify, Google Music, or Apple Music, the fee will add up quickly, those subscriptions rarely dip below $10/month unless you’re a student.
If you choose online storage only, you may have charges too but they’ll likely be less even if you, and they’ll depend on how much music you need to store.
Google Music is very generous, they will actually let you store 50,000 songs for free, if you need more than 50,000 well… you probably shouldn’t complain about having to pay a few dollars.
The advantages of a service like that are that you won’t need to buy a tablet with very high storage capacity, you won’t have to transfer your music collection if you switch to another device, and you should be able to access your music from any computer, phone, or tablet.
The disadvantages are monthly fees if you exceed the limits, and the need for a connection to access your full collection (you can usually download some songs you want to play on the go, so you won’t lose access when you’re offline).