There have been several guides to putting Music and Video on your PSP. However, many of them recommend programs which either cost money up front or require funds to keep it or enable all the features. However, if you are like me, money is not not plentiful after your purchase of a PSP.
Up front, I will tell you I am a Windows XP Media Center user, though not by choice. When are MMO's going to REALLY support Linux? But until that day, I will probably be a Windows user still. I can't help much with Macs, but many of the resources are available to both parties.
It is because of that I am going to share what I have learned from my journey of bringing 3000+ songs from CD onto my hard drive, all with Open Source or Freeware Software. I have not gotten too far into the video yet, but I will. Till then, this will cover moving the files onto the PSP and you can check out guides section on link for great instructions on how to rip a DVD into an MP4 format and some of the other guides on PSP411 for the appropriate naming and formatting steps. Especially important there are instructions on how to pull JUST the movie and audio track off of a DVD if that is all you want.
Starting
First, for the n00bs out there, like I realize I was to begin with, let me give you a few background terms. I am getting these from Wikipedia.org, where you can find further info if you want to know more about any of this. I don't want to take up a bunch of space here for those that know some of this, so I will be VERY brief and let you read the articles on Wikipedia for more details.
Terms
Audio data compression
"Audio compression is a form of data compression designed to reduce the size of audio data files. Audio compression algorithms are typically referred to as audio codecs. As with other specific forms of data compression, there exist many "lossless" and "lossy" algorithms to achieve the compression effect."
The difference between the two, in the simplest terms, is that lossless formats retain all aspects of the original recordings at the cost of being much larger files and lossy formats are smaller, but you are sacrificing quality for compression.
Codec
"Codec is a portmanteau of either "Compressor-Decompressor" or "Coder-Decoder," which describes a device or program capable of performing transformations on a data stream or signal." This is important to know because, whatever format you want to use, you will have to have the codec installed to use it and you will want to make sure you are using a good version of the codec for encoding purposes.
The PSP supports the following Codecs so you will want to select one of these. Check out Wikipedia:PSP for this list and links to full descriptions.
Audio
• MP3- lossy format
• ATRAC3- lossy format
• WMA- lossy format and requires firmware v2.6 and acceptance of license agreement on the PSP to activate it
• WAV- lossless format, but VERY large files.
• MP4 (Container format- format that can hold various types of data)
• AAC- lossy format
Video
• MPEG-4 - set of different lossy video codecs, Part 2 and Part 10 are different variations of the codec.)
• MPEG-4 Part 2
• MPEG-4 Part 10
First, I needed to know what method to use. After poking around, I found the Hydrogen Audio Forums and BOY do they take the digital music seriously. After reading several comparisons, I found that the dominant choices were FLAC for lossless and the MP3 LAME codec for lossy audio. I was trying for something that, should I get another Digital Audio Player in the future, would still work for that. So a common format that retained quality but still kept the size down was for me. It sounded like MP3 to me, so that is where I started.
Next I had to figure out which programs to use. For encoding, I found that both CDex and Exact Audio Copy (EAC) were very popular. Both use the LAME MP3 codec but there are several versions of it too. I could not tell a difference, though those Hydrogen Audio people can. Personally, I thought that the EAC is pretty good and is more versatile of a system, but the CDex program is really easy, so it is up to you which you want to use.
You can get links to EAC and CDex, and a ton of other Open Source programs at Open Source CD. There are a bunch of other places to look too, such as Sourceforge.net and Freshmeat.net. The amount of Excellent software out there is amazing. I used to have pirated software about 10 years ago. Now, I don't need to pirate anything as I can find everything I need as Open Source, but see any of the other sites for discussions of that.
Now that we have our tools, let's rock that PSP!
Now, I am not going to tell anyone how to get ILLEGAL music. I personally ripped every song I have to my hard drive, giving me, lets see, 3,742 files coming in at just under 20gigs of space. Some of those are playlists, but that is over 3,500 songs off of my 20+ years of collecting CD's.
With that much music, I really did not feel like hitting every MP3 with the tags manually so I could see what I was listening to. I have tried using something like the Windows Media player to pull the data, but it seams to be wrong about a 3rd of the time. I need a better option. With that in mind, we reach our hand back in the hat and...
Out we come with MusicBrainz Tagger and MusicBrainz Picard. Picard is beta, so crashes sometimes, but I have had no problems other than having to restart it. If beta software makes you jumpy or if crashing software makes you aggravated, then do not use Picard, use MusicBrainz instead. Mac users can get iEatBrainz, which is a sister program for the Mac. Go to MusicBrainz.org and get one of these so you can get the BEST, IMHO, mp3 tags on your music.
Again, pretty hardcore people there, but that is usually good. If you have a CD, there is a really good chance that someone else has imported it. The one thing I will say about them. If you want to change something, you can, but others get to vote on if it goes through. Make sure you KNOW what you are doing before you change the database online, because these guys put a lot of work into keeping the quality of the project and info together.
Ok, now I have my CD's and my software. After I got it all installed, now what? I have to set my preferences first on my ripping software. Well, I want good quality, but my headphones are not like a direct line into my noggin, so it does not have to be 100% the same for me. I opted for 192 minimum bitrate with a Variable Bitrate (VBR.) Uh oh, time to define another term.
Variable bit rate
"When referring to codecs, variable bit rate encoding varies the amount of output data in each time segment based on the complexity of the input data in that segment. The goal is to maintain constant quality instead of maintaining a constant data rate. VBR is preferred for storage (as opposed to streaming) because it makes better use of storage space: More space is allocated to more complex segments while less space is allocated to less complex segments."
This means that a solo singer with a single instrument will take less space than a full symphony as there are fewer variations to capture. This is good as it minimizes the loss for each bit of space you save, but it does not help much with classical or big band music as they tend to have so much occurring that it does not help much in way of space.
Feel The Marathon Burn
Now, I am ready to get down to the meat of pulling the data to disc.
Before I go any further, I will mention one option you may want to consider if you wish to keep these files archived or if you travel a lot (or if you just never want to do this again.) Today, you can purchase an 80 gig external hard drive for a very reasonable amount. Considering how long it will take to pull in all of this, I would recommend it. Especially before you buy your next computer. At the very least, consider DVD/CD backups of the files when you are done. DVD's can hold over 4 gigs each, so you could get quite a bit on there.
First, if you are going to use my Rip-ID-Save process, which I will outline below, I would recommend looking at the FILENAMES and DIRECTORIES options in your Ripping and Tagging softwares. I chose to use the following:
CDex rips to the directory:
My DocumentsUntagged Mp3s
Then I used the file name setup:
AlbumArtist-Track (you would enter that in CDex as %2%1-%4)
This groups each album together and gives the tagging software that will get other details (release date, etc.) enough to go on for figuring out which tracks to match to the song.
In the Tagging software, I set my preferences to a similar setup, but then realized that I needed to keep a tighter structure, since the directory would be so big. Because of this, I decided to set another flag which will use the first letter of the artist's "Sort Name" from MusicBrainz. For example, Eric Clapton would be Clapton, Eric and filed under C for my drive. It keeps you from having thousands of groups under "The..." Trust me here, you want to use that if you have lots of songs. You can also set MusicBrainz to Move the songs to another directory and build the directories that you want there, deleting the directories that you empty in the "Untagged file."
Ripping all of these will will take a while, but hey, you have a PSP to keep you warm in the meantime.
• Put CD in tray
• Pull up CDex with the preferences set
• Pull info from the FreeDB CD data base to try and match some of the info for the tags.
• Rip CD.
• Play games till it was time to swap CD's.
• Scan CD with MusicBrainz software. (This gives the best match possible for the songs you tag.)
• Swap CD's.
• Repeat 2-4.
• Instead of 5, you can run the tagger till the next CD swap is needed if you want.
You could just tag your songs all at once, but I would rather do them as they are finished, so I can put them in storage.
Now, you would think that it would be best to do this in order of favorites. This is fine, unless you want to leave it half done. When you get to the last set of CD's, you will either give up or plod through, but if you want them all ripped, you should mix the good with the not as good, or you might as well trade in the ones you don't like now. I am looking at 15-20 CD's on my desk that I cannot bear to go through ripping, so to the trade store they go!
And remember, as I am sure you ALL will, that it is only legal to have all of your CD's ripped to hard drive as long as you own the CD's. Before you use any of them for coasters or science projects, remember that something could happen to your digital copy too.
All of this I have told you how to use what you have. You can also find some good stuff online, but some of it will be unknown bands. Every band started unknown at one point though. So your mileage may vary. One starting point would be ghacks.net. Here is a December 2005 list of free music.
Should you find yourself in a situation where you have a file that is unlabeled, and you cannot remember what the heck it was, there is a solution. There are a couple of programs that will try to id the song just from what it sounds like. You can find details on them and how they work here and here.
Where does that go again?
Well, we have a BUNCH of music ripped now. What can we possibly do with all of it. Of course, there is the excellent article on streaming the music to an RSS feed which TheMarsVolta has written called Streaming PC to PSP Guide. The only thing that I would change on it is the software. WAMP5 will install everything you need except for the RSS feeder for the PSP. Apache 1.3.31, PHP5, MySQL database, PHPmyadmin and SQLitemanager are all included in it and together, you also get nice easy install an user interface for all of it together. TheMarsVolta has a link to the RSS feeder and set up instructions, though it would change a bit with this setup. I am working on that right now, so I will probably write up the config I use and post it to the comments on his Guide when I get it working.
Say you don't have WiFi or you don't want to set up a server. In that case you need organization techniques/programs.
PSPWare is nice IF you want to run Itunes, but I am not fond of it. The reason that I do not suggest using iTunes is that, according to comparisons, the mp3 encoder is sub standard. (See Wikipedia:Itunes:File format support for details) Also, last time I used it, it ERASED all 3000 MP3 tags. (*@%(#@&%@*%). So, yeah, I am unbiased about it.
There is a very easy way to do it yourself though. You can just make directories with the same structure as your PSP in a folder, fill them and drag and drop them into your PSP card.. The easiest way is to copy your entire PSP card into a hard drive folder and then delete everything except the directories that you want. Deleting your saved folder and system files off of the copy on your PC will keep them from being over written, but you may want to copy them to a separate folder first to make sure you know it will work first.
PSPNuts has a good explanation of the structure, but here is a simple look at it. (tree taken from PSP Nuts.)
What I do is to make a folder on my PC for each configuration with the following structure with the PSP card 1.
Desktop
--`psp card 1
------`-- MP_ROOT
------| `-- 100MNV01
------`-- psp
----------|-- game
----------|-- music
----------`-- photo
Then put the movies in 100MNV01 and the music/photos in the music/photos folder. You could even put shortcuts on your Desktop or in your music folder to drag/drop into them. Make sure to COPY, not move, as you may want to just clear the data in those folders. However you do it, I would recomend making a blank copy of this directory tree. That way you can just copy and paste a new one if you want to make different ones
Depending on how you like to organize things, I actually use the following system, but I am here to tell you how I do it, not how you SHOULD do it. Find your own system and be ready to make some changes to it.
I run a Windows Search for MP3's on the My Music Directory, then sort by Artist/Genre/Etc. Then I drop into folders I create along the bottom of the desktop organized by Genre. There are some good alternate methods out there, but whatever will work to get those files into the PSP Music directory is what you want. If anyone knows of a good alternate to Windows Explorer that works for sorting files, I am willing to give it a go, except for Google Desktop. It talks to other systems too much.
This is all that most software does. I know PSPWare has a converter in it, but I don't know what conversion format it uses, and I have been working with my MP3's to get them JUST the way I want them, so no thanks.
When you have your setup done, you can grab everything inside the PSP card directory and drop on top of your PSP's card. Do not grab the top level one. you need to grab the MP_ROOT and the PSP directories. Otherwise you will drop everything down a level and it won't work. I would look like this.
/mnt/psp (or Removable Disk J: in my case)
`--Memory Stick 1
---|--MP_ROOT
---|--`-- 100MNV01
---`--psp
------|--game
------`--music
Your PSP would never be able to find the music then.
You may need to clear old files first, which I find easiest by doing a Search on the card for *.mp3 or whatever your music is and just delete them.
Now, there is no firm reason not to use many of the other softwares out there for organization. However, I would rather do it myself. I have read too many "MUSIC IS GONE YOU %@$%^%$!" posts in the past. PSPWare seems to be a good program, I even paid to register, it is the iTunes that makes me want to beat it to death. The Drop boxes it creates do pretty much the same thing, but I would rather just drop them in the PSP than in the PSPWare then have it move them.
Finished
Well, that is pretty much it. Now you know how to get the music you want in the place you want it for a price you like. I am still learning some things about the process myself. Here is a list of what I have to figure out still. Let me know if you have answers, or want to work with me on it.
Actually, I have found out a couple of things since just the other day. Apparently, you can put a number in the filename of the song and the PSP will use that to order it within the folder it is in. This means, if you have a "playlist" of songs, you can rename the files with the #'s in the order you want them in the filename and the PSP will show them in that order. The taged info will still show on the screen though, so the song title won't be "Israel Kamakawiwo'ole-Somewhere Over The RainbowWhat A Wonderful World" It will still show up as "Israel Kamakawiwo'ole" for the artist and "Somewhere Over The RainbowWhat A Wonderful World" as the song. I just need to get a good file renamer that will let me do that.
Another thing. I just found out that Microsoft, of all people, has a really good synch tool called SynchToy. It works by matching directories and you can set it up to run several different ways.
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