The Sony PSP is a remarkable device. However, it does have shortcomings, especially if you compare it to an iPod as a portable music player. The three most noticeable negative points are its weight, battery life and storage capacity. Lets face it, you’re not going jogging with your PSP. However, the PSP has other features that make it stand out. But if you are using your Sony PSP to listen to music on the go, storage capacity is the biggest problem. I soon filled it with songs from my iTunes library (that weren’t DRM protected AAC formated songs). What if I wanted to get more songs from the playlist when I was at the public library, or at the coffee shop? I couldn’t take ALL my iTunes music with me on my PSP. A 1 gigabyte memory card costs in the range of $100, a 2 gig memory card costs over $300. I wondered “Wouldn’t it be great if I could just delete some songs and and ad new songs from my iTunes library, wherever I was using the WiFi internet connection?” It can be done, for a small cost (about $22 U.S.)
Three things are required. A Mac running at least OS X 10.3, a spiffy little shareware application called Dot Tunes and a PSP with the 2.0 firmware upgrade.
Dot Tunes looks at your iTunes library and generates a simple web page based on Album or Artist listings that can be accessed across the internet. Once you have generated the web page, it’s a simple matter of bookmarking the page in Safari and syncing that bookmark to your web browser on your PSP. You can then access your itunes library with the Dot Tunes web interface and easily navigate to a specific song by artist or album listing. Dot Tunes’ simple web based interface is ideal for navigating to a song from the tiny screen of your PSP’s web browser. You can then download the song to your Music directory on your PSP.
Here is the catch. The PSP is picky about what media is in what directory on your PSP. When you select a song to download it will ask where to save it. If you want to play the song you’re downloading you will need to save it in the Music directory under a pre-existing playlist folder. So simply navigate to your music folder, enter into a pre-existing play list folder and hit save. You will also need to rename the extension of the file from .m4u to .MP4 for the PSP to recognize it. You do not need to rename the extension of a .MP3 file.
Now you can delete old songs and ad new ones on the go, anywhere you have access to a WiFi connection on your PSP. An interesting feature is that if you subscribe to podcasts in iTunes 4.9, you can include the podcasts in Dot Tunes sorted by the Artist (creator) or Album (name of the show) and they will appear in the listings in Dot Tunes on your PSP.
Keep in mind that your Mac will be acting as a web server, to serve your Dot Tunes page to you across the web. You will need to make sure that your Mac will ‘Wake for Ethernet network administrator access’ under your Energy Saver preferences if you have it set to sleep after being idle. You will also have to make sure that the port your Dot Tunes page is being served on is on an open port, not blocked by your ISP, and not blocked by your Mac’s or your router’s firewall. You may also want to password protect the connection to prevent anyone from helping themselves to your non-DRM protected iTunes libraries.
Enjoy!
-digiDAD
