Sony ICD-PX370

I bought this as a portable music player (i.e. "an mp3 player"), because I try to avoid using a smartphone as much as possible.

The device is marketed as a voice recorder or digital dictaphone. I haven't used that functionality much. Based on a few minutes of experimentation, the user interface for recording and transcription is really well thought through.

Regardless, the device is really suitable for the way I like to listen to music:

• Buy music on bandcamp, rip it from CDs found around town, or copy it with youtube-dl.
• Pick a few albums I'd like to put into heavy rotation for a week.
• Copy to an SD card on the command line, with descriptive filenames (ID3 tags are too much of a hassle).
• Put that SD card in a device in a dedicated music player, and use that music player the whole week through whether I am at my desk working on going for a walk.

I also love the aesthetics of the unit: matte black, dedicated buttons for all important features, postage-stamp-sized LCD display. Its weight is pleasant in the hand. It's comfortable in a pocket. The dedicated hold switch clicks into place securely.

One neat feature of this unit is that it has a built in USB dongle, through which you can access both the SD card and built-in memory. I'm glad it has an SD card, because it should still work if and when the internal memory fails (as it inevitably will, after many read/write cycles).

Minidisc comparison

On whole, my motives are the same as those who use minidisc: it's a format minidisc as a format that encourages deep engagement with a recording.

They like the frictions associated with transferring music to the format, and the physicality of switching discs. For me, using a device like the Sony ICD-PX370 introduces enough friction to nudge me toward repeated engagement with album length works. Minidisc is somewhat appealing, but I don't love the idea of building habits around a fragile mechanical device unlikely to last another decade.

Solderpunk on the charms of the Sony MZ-R700 (zaibatsu.circumlunar.space)
cobradile on minidisc (cobradile.pollux.casa)
nytpu on minidisc (nytpu.com)

One advantage the ICD-PX370 shares with these minidisc players it that it can record, from the built in microphone or through a sixteenth-inch jacket at mic levels.

Clip Jam Comparison

I used to use the San-Disk "Clip Jam" portable audio player for this. It has two major faults:

• It has a tendency to eject SD cards at the slight provocation (I've lost two this way).
• The rechargable battery is not replacable.
• Even if the battery were replacable, I've never had one last an entire year.

I've only had the Sony unit for a week or so. I expect it could last a decade or two with care. A pair of AAA batteries should last multiple weeks, and swapping them takes a minute at most.

Usage Notes

One drawback is that it only supports MP3 playback, and quite a bit of my collection (from youtube-dl) is AAC encoded (i.e. "m4a"). I transcode with:

for i in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -ab 320k "${i%.*}.mp3"; done

I personally don't really care about the hypothetical degradation of audio quality. At 320kbps, I'm not sure I can even tell. If you do care, you can buy a slightly more expensive model in this range of products that will support AAC and WAV (the ICD-PX470).

I transfer the audio with something like ("trinidad" is the volume name of the SD card):

rsync --copy-links -a --info=progress2 *.mp3 /media/bjorn/trinidad/MUSIC/$ALBUM

See Also

2022-03-05 Gadgets for those who avoid smartphones
Gadgets