Neil Young's Pono campaign is Kickstarter's 3rd biggest

Neil Young's Pono player has become the third most-successful Kickstarter campaign in the history of the crowd-funding site.

The music legend's campaign for the portable, high-fidelity digital music player closed on Tuesday having raised more than $6.2 million US.

It places behind the $10.3 million US raised for the Pebble Smartwatch and the $8.6 million US for the Ouya gaming console.

In a written message, Young expressed his thanks to fans "for helping us give music a voice ...You have helped to set the stage for a revolution in music listening. Finally, quality enters the listening space so that we can all hear and feel what the artists created, the way they heard and felt it."

• Pono player: Can music fans differentiate between FLAC and MP3?

Supporter donations rocketed the campaign past the initial goal of $800,000 US less than a day after its March launch, which took place during the South by Southwest music festival.

The campaign featured a star-packed video of top musicians, producers and industry insiders including Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Arcade Fire, Norah Jones, Charlie Musselwhite and Rick Rubin singing the praises of the fledgling player.

Young has long been a critic of the highly compressed digital audio formats in which much of today's music is heard and shared.

So, he and the San Francisco-based PonoMusic team created a prism-shaped device that plays FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) and other high-resolution audio formats.

Featuring 128 GB of storage, the new player is slated for an October 2014 release at an expected retail price of $399 US.

A related online store, Ponomusic.com, will charge between $14.99 to $24.99 US per album.