« How to Read Web Comics on a PlayStation Portable. | Main | Review : Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower for the PSP »

More PSP Media Tricks

My last post on how to read web comics on the PSP got on Gizmodo and Diesel Sweeties. That was super cool. So I thought I would illustrate my two other PSP tips.

How to get purchased protected iTunes tracks on your PSP.

I do enjoy Apple's iTunes Music store and I have bought several albums from them. They only sell protected files that can not be played on the PSP. However with a blank CD-RW or CD-R and iTunes you can get some DRM-free MP3 files that are good to go on the PSP. This does not require any real hacking tools and I believe this is OK with Apple's term of use on iTunes. This is pretty simple stuff and for those of you who already know this then skip ahead. Apple is cool with you burning purchased iTunes tracks to a CD and they are also cool with encoding CDs to MP3s using iTunes.

1. Take your purchased iTunes tracks and put them on a new play list called "Tunes for PSP" or something like that. Make sure to keep it under 80 or 72 Minutes of music depending on your CD-R or CD-RW disk.

2. Set your iTunes Burning preferences to Audio CD and set your Importing preference to MP3 Encoder High Quality.

3. Burn the play list to the CD-RW or CD-R.

4. When the burn is done highlight all the audio tracks on the CD in iTunes and bring up the Track Info by Command+I or Right Clicking it.

5. Add a little (MP3) suffix to the album name.

6. Then rip your burned CD into nice and DRM-free PSP ready MP3 files. Since you changed the album name iTunes will not freak out and try to replace the protected album that you already have in your iTunes library.

7. Then transfer your tracks to the PSP manually or with iPSP or PSPWare.

8. Erase your CD-RW disk and wash rinse repeat as needed.

Since you already purchased the iTunes tracks and your not sharing it with others it should all be on the Up and Up. I do warn you that this will really annoy you if you are still using that piss poor 32 Meg Memory stick that came with your PSP. You can't even fit a full album on the card it will really make you want to get a bigger beefier Memory Stick. I am not going to be doing this every day since I have an iPod Mini but it would be cool to have a good album or two in my PSP at all time. It would be really cool if game developers would let you play your own MP3 files on the Memory stick as a custom game soundtrack. It is pretty slick on Xbox racing games and it would be slick on the PSP.

Next up..

How to use your PSP as a Personal Digital Organizer

There a PSP sync tool made by Pocket Mac that can sync personal contacts to the PSP by creating some JPEG files containing the info. This is hardly an origional idea and by using some other programs you can do this yourself.

1. First open up your contact program and export a LDIF file or what every text based file format it uses. I use Mozilla Thunderbird since it rocks so very hard. It is under Address Book : Tools : Export then pick a LDIF.

2. Then open up the exported file into OpenOffice.org Writer Or NeoOffice/J for you OSX dorks. Edit out the lines of text and extra data that you don't need. You can just do some search and replace with blank space. Format it with a nice san-serif font and a small size that is still readable on a smaller screen. Make sure you set it to Screen layout so there is no page break.

3. Then export a PDF file out of OpenOffice.org. The reason why we need to do this is that the PSP needs a Jpeg file and OpenOffice.org and most text editors can't export a static file without some serious screen capture work.

4. Take the PDF into a graphics tool like Graphic Converter or Photoshop. I tried to use Gimp but the PDF import did not work. Then crop out the white space and save a Jpeg file called Contact.jpg.

5. Then create a folder called PDA in your PSP photo directory and move it to your PSP memory stick. This works well when you have a text based document that will not fit in a single screen shot.

I also put the Puget Sound ferry times and my iCal schedule on my PSP by just taking screen shots, cropping them and exporting to a jpeg using Gimp or Graphics Converter. It works well for single page documents but I would not want to try to read the entire text of Neuromancer on the PSP.I wouldn't put any super private information on a PSP memory stick since there is no password protection or encryption. This is not dynamically synced at all and when you make major changes to your data on your PC or Mac you would need to do this over again.

I just hope that some one get's off their ass and ports Opera Mobile or Mozilla Minimo to PSP. How come the South Korean nerds are going to get a PSP Web browser UMD disk bundled as we are stuck trying to find new uses for small Jpegs?

I know plenty of people like my dad who use their PDAs for reading and retrieving data but use a PC to enter it. The PSP can do that and while it is not a full replacement for a PDA it can do some tasks that you would normally do on a PDA. Oh yeah and games on it kick much more ass than anything on Palm OS or Pocket PC.

I swear I will now start to write about the actual games on the PSP!

Jake at March 31, 2005 Nerd

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.8bitjoystick.com/cgi-bin/mtype/mt-tb.cgi/788

Comments

Posted by: Michael at March 31, 2005 5:00 PM

Posted by: brian kieth at September 29, 2005 9:52 AM

Posted by: 8Bit Jake at September 29, 2005 5:57 PM

Posted by: Daryn at February 22, 2006 8:50 PM

Posted by: vladi at May 9, 2006 10:10 AM

Posted by: nightrider at June 27, 2006 8:06 AM

Posted by: LitliGirL at December 7, 2006 4:10 PM

Posted by: Anonomus at February 13, 2007 5:39 AM

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

Comments:

type the word "joystick" below (required):