Indeed. My first portable music player was a walkman, not a sony I think, but anyway, a portable cassette tape player.. I made my own mixtapes from other tapes, cd's and ozzy ossbournes "bark at the moon" vinyl.
The next device was a portable CD player, I got a CD burner quite early on, damn, at that point in time, my harddrive was only maybe two hundred megabytes larger than a cd.. But it was good, I could do (sometimes less than perfect) cd-to-cd copies, and when I got MP3 files, I started being able to fit enough songs on the harddrive to make mix-cds..
The next device was my last portable music player, it was a "King" brand "mp4" player, which was a, still, tiny little 512 mib flash based device with some hardware buttons and an early oled color display.. I still have it, I don't use it too often, because I almost never need this type of device anymore, I listen to CDs in the card and at home I listen to CDs, vinyl and flac.. and at work it's a "hifi" headphone setup.