💾 Archived View for bjornwestergard.com › notes › sony-icd-px370.gmi captured on 2022-04-28 at 18:37:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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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:
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).
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
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.
I used to use the San-Disk "Clip Jam" portable audio player for this. It has two major faults:
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.
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