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Technical Details
- Built-in 2 GB flash memory
- Records in MP3 (320 kbps-8 kbps)
- Approximately 72 Hours of battery life (recording)
- Memory Card Expansion Slot (microSD/M2)
Product Details
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Product Description
Record live music, lectures and notes with this digital voice recorder featuring a built-in 2GB flash memory, a memory card slot and an easy-to-read display. Press record and capture every sound. This compact and convenient ICD-PX312 digital voice recorder goes wherever you do to confidently capture and store audio with a built-in 2GB flash memory providing up to 530 hours of recording time, plus additional storage available through the microSD memory card slot (memory card sold separately). With Intelligent Noise Cut technology greatly reducing background sound, your recordings will be crisp and clear in quality. Other features include Voice Operated Recording technology, a built-in speaker and an easy-to-read display. So slip this digital voice recorder into your pocket and know you'll never miss a beat even during the longest of lectures or an epic all-night jam session.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
197 of 200 people found the following review helpful
PROS-
-outstanding voice quality
- Small and light
-unobtrusive
- easy to download recordings to your computer
- Long record time with 2 GB of memory - 22 hours at highest quality. Does anyone need more?
- Memory cards give virtually unlimited record time. I popped in a thumbnail sized 8 GB Sandisk micro sd (about $10) for a total of 10 GB of memory. That gives a total of more then 110 hours of record time at the highest quality level (at lower fidelity levels, record time is higher, as much as 2700 hours with 10gb of memory). Not enough? You can put in a 32GB card, which will give nearly 400 hours of top quality record time. At lower fidelity settings, 32 gigs will give up to around 9000 hours. Amazing, 32 gig in a thumbnail sized memory card.
- recordings are easily transferred to your hard drive
- Simple to operate
The basic buttons are Record/pause, Play, Stop, Fast forward, and Rewind.
-Mike is quite sensitive, but well controlled- able to record well in a conference with many people at different distances.
- Lanyard hole in case - Helpful - Get one or put a string through the hole.
- works with Dragon voice to text software
CONS
- Case is made of smooth slippery plastic. Nowadays you can buy a $1 pen with a grippy rubbery outside. A grippy rubber surface on the sides and back would make this easier to hold!
- a lanyard should be included
- Instruction manual is ridiculously long - this is not a complicated device to operate. The manual is too verbose.
- Cannot modify existing "scene" modes or create my own. A "scene" mode is a collection of record settings geared toward a particular task. For example, lectures, meetings, dictation
- software that comes with it is lousy, and for most people unneeded. You can use your regular file management tools on your computer to name different folders for recordings (very handy), move them around, delete, play, etc.
- The date format is bizarre.
The screen shows, "11y 6m 7d" to show the date we know as 6/7/2011. An annoyance, file dates are, however, properly displayed in your computer
- mike sensitivity setting is buried in too many menus, and there is no scene setting with the mike at maximum sensitivity.
SUMMARY
Recommended. I like it. It works well and can be very very useful. Sony should fix the little things I mentioned. I considered giving it four instead of five stars because of these little niggles. But it is so outstanding in other ways that I gave it five anyway.
-outstanding voice quality
- Small and light
-unobtrusive
- easy to download recordings to your computer
- Long record time with 2 GB of memory - 22 hours at highest quality. Does anyone need more?
- Memory cards give virtually unlimited record time. I popped in a thumbnail sized 8 GB Sandisk micro sd (about $10) for a total of 10 GB of memory. That gives a total of more then 110 hours of record time at the highest quality level (at lower fidelity levels, record time is higher, as much as 2700 hours with 10gb of memory). Not enough? You can put in a 32GB card, which will give nearly 400 hours of top quality record time. At lower fidelity settings, 32 gigs will give up to around 9000 hours. Amazing, 32 gig in a thumbnail sized memory card.
- recordings are easily transferred to your hard drive
- Simple to operate
The basic buttons are Record/pause, Play, Stop, Fast forward, and Rewind.
-Mike is quite sensitive, but well controlled- able to record well in a conference with many people at different distances.
- Lanyard hole in case - Helpful - Get one or put a string through the hole.
- works with Dragon voice to text software
CONS
- Case is made of smooth slippery plastic. Nowadays you can buy a $1 pen with a grippy rubbery outside. A grippy rubber surface on the sides and back would make this easier to hold!
- a lanyard should be included
- Instruction manual is ridiculously long - this is not a complicated device to operate. The manual is too verbose.
- Cannot modify existing "scene" modes or create my own. A "scene" mode is a collection of record settings geared toward a particular task. For example, lectures, meetings, dictation
- software that comes with it is lousy, and for most people unneeded. You can use your regular file management tools on your computer to name different folders for recordings (very handy), move them around, delete, play, etc.
- The date format is bizarre.
The screen shows, "11y 6m 7d" to show the date we know as 6/7/2011. An annoyance, file dates are, however, properly displayed in your computer
- mike sensitivity setting is buried in too many menus, and there is no scene setting with the mike at maximum sensitivity.
SUMMARY
Recommended. I like it. It works well and can be very very useful. Sony should fix the little things I mentioned. I considered giving it four instead of five stars because of these little niggles. But it is so outstanding in other ways that I gave it five anyway.
217 of 229 people found the following review helpful
I just retired my Sony ICD-B600 Digital Voice Recorders (I had several) and replaced them all with this Sony ICD-PX312 unit. When I saw the Amaz. delivery promise for this PX312 had shifted to "1 to 3 months," well I figured the PX312 for out-of-production ... and so this was as low as prices were going to get. So I snagged several off the pegs at WorstBuy.
The primary reason I upgraded is that the PX312 makes it very easy to save audio files on my hard drive. It has a female A-Mini-USB plug on the side and so I can use my Zip-Linq Retractable USB to A-Mini-USB Cable to connect it to the computer. The PX312 then appears on my computer as a plug-n-play flash drive, no software drivers required. Then I can just copy any audio files off of it and on to my computer. The PX312 stores its audio files in MP3 format, so there are no file conversions involved. In fact, there's no software or drivers needed at all for this gizmo. Sweet!
The Sony website offers a download titled "Sony Sound Organizer for IC Recorder v 1.1" to help you do things like create/move/delete folders on the device. I wouldn't bother. My experience with Sony software and drivers is that it's usually buggy-as-cr@p, so why complicate my computer's environment for such trivial stuff. Any recordings made are found in the Voice/Folder1 folder, and that's all I need to know or do to snag them or erase them.
[The B600 had no computer software, no USB, etc. to support sound transfer. The only option for transferring its recordings was to use the speaker/audio out jack. I ended up using Windows Sound Recorder and the microphone in jack on the back of the PC, and even then there was some odd tweaking required to make that solution work. At the time, I would have had to cough up another forty smackers or so to get the model that provided file transfer support ... and it required software drivers to do it.]
The PX312 also has gobs of memory and will even accept an M2 MicroSD card for expansion. When some reasonably sized M2 cards get cheap as dirt, well I'll snag 'em ... but I probably won't even need them.
The weird "hold" button thing that was going on with the B600 is solved. On this PX312 there is a ON/OFF/HOLD slider switch. Pull down to turn on, pull down again to turn off. (You do have to hold it there for a few seconds sometimes.) Pull the slider switch UP for the hold function. That function locks all the buttons while the device is powered up (so you won't accidentally punch one). On the B600 the "HOLD" slider was actually nothing more than an ON/OFF slider. But anyone could have gone crazy trying to find the ON/OFF slider. Since it was cryptically labeled "HOLD."
Also gone with the PX312 is the weird "erase" function that was on the B600. With the B600, if you followed the instructions for erasing a recording, it resulted in the entire recording being played 10 times before it was erased. Why anyone would have a need for THAT to occur is beyond me. But simply pressing the "Erase" button twice in succession while playing the recording would erase the recording instantly. That approach was undocumented in the instructions. With the PX312 it's much smoother. Push the 'erase' button and the recording to be erased starts to play. The screen asks you to confirm the erase. Select "Yes" and it's gone.
Also solved: The PX312, unlike the B600, has an auto-power-off option and the timer can be adjusted by the user.
The PX312 does bring forward some unresolved shortcomings from the B600. The PX312, as was the B600, is way "over-engineered." The basic operation/buttons and the display screens are not as simple as they could be. It took a bit of reading/plowing through the manual (and reading reviews here on Amazon) to get oriented. And there is other functional overkill. I don't need five storage folders (or a way to transfer files between them), an alarm clock (and a way to select a message for the alarm), the ability to go back and splice previous messages, the ability to append recordings to existing recordings and other such what not. All those functions and buttons just complicate the device/screens/menus needlessly, imho. I just wanted a gizmo that would make audio recordings at the push of a button, that would let me move them to my computer for storage and that made them in a format that didn't require any conversion efforts. And I suspect that is just about all most users want out of these devices. I guess Sony thinks it has to load up a bunch of this useless functionality to justify the asking price.
The price of the Sony devices with this level of capability had been steadily dropping, of course, and so these PX312s cost me no more than what I paid for the ICD-B600s a few years ago. Now the ICD-B600s will be sold on eBay ... and so I've upgraded for practically nothing. Double Sweet!!
The primary reason I upgraded is that the PX312 makes it very easy to save audio files on my hard drive. It has a female A-Mini-USB plug on the side and so I can use my Zip-Linq Retractable USB to A-Mini-USB Cable to connect it to the computer. The PX312 then appears on my computer as a plug-n-play flash drive, no software drivers required. Then I can just copy any audio files off of it and on to my computer. The PX312 stores its audio files in MP3 format, so there are no file conversions involved. In fact, there's no software or drivers needed at all for this gizmo. Sweet!
The Sony website offers a download titled "Sony Sound Organizer for IC Recorder v 1.1" to help you do things like create/move/delete folders on the device. I wouldn't bother. My experience with Sony software and drivers is that it's usually buggy-as-cr@p, so why complicate my computer's environment for such trivial stuff. Any recordings made are found in the Voice/Folder1 folder, and that's all I need to know or do to snag them or erase them.
[The B600 had no computer software, no USB, etc. to support sound transfer. The only option for transferring its recordings was to use the speaker/audio out jack. I ended up using Windows Sound Recorder and the microphone in jack on the back of the PC, and even then there was some odd tweaking required to make that solution work. At the time, I would have had to cough up another forty smackers or so to get the model that provided file transfer support ... and it required software drivers to do it.]
The PX312 also has gobs of memory and will even accept an M2 MicroSD card for expansion. When some reasonably sized M2 cards get cheap as dirt, well I'll snag 'em ... but I probably won't even need them.
The weird "hold" button thing that was going on with the B600 is solved. On this PX312 there is a ON/OFF/HOLD slider switch. Pull down to turn on, pull down again to turn off. (You do have to hold it there for a few seconds sometimes.) Pull the slider switch UP for the hold function. That function locks all the buttons while the device is powered up (so you won't accidentally punch one). On the B600 the "HOLD" slider was actually nothing more than an ON/OFF slider. But anyone could have gone crazy trying to find the ON/OFF slider. Since it was cryptically labeled "HOLD."
Also gone with the PX312 is the weird "erase" function that was on the B600. With the B600, if you followed the instructions for erasing a recording, it resulted in the entire recording being played 10 times before it was erased. Why anyone would have a need for THAT to occur is beyond me. But simply pressing the "Erase" button twice in succession while playing the recording would erase the recording instantly. That approach was undocumented in the instructions. With the PX312 it's much smoother. Push the 'erase' button and the recording to be erased starts to play. The screen asks you to confirm the erase. Select "Yes" and it's gone.
Also solved: The PX312, unlike the B600, has an auto-power-off option and the timer can be adjusted by the user.
The PX312 does bring forward some unresolved shortcomings from the B600. The PX312, as was the B600, is way "over-engineered." The basic operation/buttons and the display screens are not as simple as they could be. It took a bit of reading/plowing through the manual (and reading reviews here on Amazon) to get oriented. And there is other functional overkill. I don't need five storage folders (or a way to transfer files between them), an alarm clock (and a way to select a message for the alarm), the ability to go back and splice previous messages, the ability to append recordings to existing recordings and other such what not. All those functions and buttons just complicate the device/screens/menus needlessly, imho. I just wanted a gizmo that would make audio recordings at the push of a button, that would let me move them to my computer for storage and that made them in a format that didn't require any conversion efforts. And I suspect that is just about all most users want out of these devices. I guess Sony thinks it has to load up a bunch of this useless functionality to justify the asking price.
The price of the Sony devices with this level of capability had been steadily dropping, of course, and so these PX312s cost me no more than what I paid for the ICD-B600s a few years ago. Now the ICD-B600s will be sold on eBay ... and so I've upgraded for practically nothing. Double Sweet!!
99 of 102 people found the following review helpful
We have used this little jewel to tape lectures from the back of an auditorium, meetings, as well as online webinars - the SCENE settings allow you to change from interview to notes to lecture to meetings, just with a push of the button. Using an mini-SD chip gives you all-day recording space. Easy on the AAA batteries, too! Way to go, Sony!
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Great for school lectures!
I have never owned a voice recorder before, so I did my research before coming up with the decision to buy this one. Read more
Published 3 hours ago by puffalo5
just what i need
This recorder is just what I need for simple tasks - to make recording and playback. It is now an indispensible part of my audio world. Read more
Published 2 days ago by I. Chu
I use it for lectures
Amazing little device. The lecture size of my classes are about 30 to 40 people. It really picks up the voice of the professor even if I hide it in my backpack. Read more
Published 4 days ago by A.C.E.
Sony Recorder ICD-PX312
I really like it! It's intuitive to operate, yet has many features that can be utilized. It's sensitive enough to record most conversations, lectures, meetings, etc. Read more
Published 10 days ago by A. Dalton
outstanding digital recorder
hello,
as everyone else has mentioned, this sony digital recorder is outstanding. there is nothing wrong with this recorder that a quick read of the instructions wouldn't... Read more
as everyone else has mentioned, this sony digital recorder is outstanding. there is nothing wrong with this recorder that a quick read of the instructions wouldn't... Read more
Published 13 days ago by jnaki
So far so good!
I used this in my law lecture for a review for the final. Put on lecture mode and the sound quality was great. I love having the option to listen whenever I want.
Published 18 days ago by oioi123
easy to use, easy to deal with PC too, useful
As reviewed by others,
- worked with Windows7 64 bit
- recorder can take voices good enough with the default quality. Read more
- worked with Windows7 64 bit
- recorder can take voices good enough with the default quality. Read more
Published 18 days ago by masami
A great tool, well worth the money
(Actually 4.5 Star review)
I bought this recorder because I wanted a voice recorder to record my conversations with my grandfather, but it has become so much more. Read more
I bought this recorder because I wanted a voice recorder to record my conversations with my grandfather, but it has become so much more. Read more
Published 23 days ago by A. J. Pope
Dissappointed
I am disappointed with this recorder. Seems easy enough to use but it lacks in sound quality and volume. AS usual AMAZON shipped on time at the right price. Read more
Published 25 days ago by skiman
Great product
This was a great purchase, the instructions were thorough and easy to understand. Very easy to use after only a few tries. Perfect for simple projects.
Published 28 days ago by IAmJournalism
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