- KORG Digital Metronome MA-30

This is chock full of features and hands-down the best budget portable metronome on the market, with only one caveat which'll be mentioned later. A terrific buy for students.

Battery life is great, getting around 200 hours out of two AAs. The display is clear and easy to read. I've dropped it once and it didn't cause any problems. For a digital metronome, the beep isn't an irritating chirp as some other metronomes tend to be.

It can generate any tone on the chromatic scale for manual tuning, and even allows you to adjust the pitch slightly away from A440 if you need to (sometimes necessary, especially for wind players playing outdoors in the extreme cold)

It can handle 1 - 7 beats per measure, and can give you triplets, 8ths or 16th notes on top of that.

It has a handy tap feature to determine tempo.

This isn't perfect, it's not a Dr. Beat (the best metronome on the market, period). The volume control is very sensitive, and if you have it in your pocket you can easily accidentally blast your ears with headphones on. An LED would be a nice addition.

The caveat mentioned earlier is this: Most people prefer a dial to adjust tempo as opposed to the up and down buttons of this model (The Matrix MR500, MR800 and the Seiko SQ50 have less features and lack a volume control, but do have a dial and LED). Still, for the price and the features, you can't beat it.