Sunday, July 29, 2007
Media Monkey or What To Do When PSP Shuffle Doesn't Work Anymore
For the most part, I still listen to albums (set compilations of music sequenced by the artist, traditionally sold on a vinyl or plastic disc), when listening to music on my PSP. Often times, say when doing my food shopping, laundry, or just when I feel like it, I prefer not to make any set choices and listen to random songs from my music collection.
Unlike the higher end iPods, which have hard drives as large as 30-60 Gigs (more?), PSPs are limited to external memory via Memory Stick Duos. I think the largest capacity released thus far is the 8 gig. I have a 1 GB, 2 GB, and a 4. This limits what I can keep on my PSP at any given moment. This is especially true since other data is stored on the memory stick. Game saves, game demos, ISOs (games), emulators & ROMs, photos and of course videos (usually two or more 45 minute Wu-Xia TV episodes*).
I normally have space left over for anywhere between 2-6 albums worth of music.
The PSP has a shuffle feature that randomizes whats on the mem stick, but only within each folder (each folder normally representing an album or otherwise group of songs). That's pretty useless. In other words, the PSP will shuffle tracks from Cntrl-Alt-Delete-U (The Paper Chase), move on to EP C (Battles) to do the same, and then Planet Earth (Prince). When not listening to albums as originally sequenced (or newly sequenced by myself or others), I'd prefer to shuffle tracks from all folders on my player.
When PSP Shuffle came around (or when I finally found out about it), it was great. It scanned all the music on my PC, and whenever I wanted to fill up my memory stick with random music, it did it's thing, and I was good to go. I disabled the photo and video feature. Throwing random photos from my PC onto the PSP wasn't a good idea (for a couple of reasons). The only video that can play on the portable is video specifically encoded for use on it or similar devices. Still, I mostly watch serialized material, that works best in chronological order. Sometimes I encode YouTube videos to show friends at work, and those are chosen specifically.
PSP Shuffle cleared out the contents of the mem stick before filling it with music. Even though I set it to only import music, it would erase all videos and photos as well as music (after giving a warning). This wasn't a big deal to me. I would use a mem stick that didn't have any current videos on it and game data was untouched.
At some point (I don't recall when), PSP Shuffle stopped working. I attributed it to a problem with my PC. Something I installed or un-installed. Who knows? The program acted like it was working, only much faster than usual. It would erase the mem stick, but not fill it with music. I tried uninstalling and re-installing, adjusting what little settings there were and then just gave up on it. I figured that maybe a firmware update might've had something to do with it.
When hooked up via USB, it used to be that music was found in "drive letter"/PSP/MUSIC, but fairly recently (don't remember when) the music folder was placed on the root of the PSP (as was VIDEO), so it would be found on "drive letter"/MUSIC. The old music folder is still there and still works (still needed for 48 Hour Pong), so I don't know if one thing has anything to do with the other.
A few attempts were made using Google to solve this problem with no success until a couple of days ago when I came across a guide to using a program called Media Monkey with the PSP. Media Monkey is primarily a music organizing tool that looks like it's inspired by iTunes. I've used iTunes to convert CDs to MP3s and M4As, but not much else, since I don't have an iPod. The free version of Media Monkey does everything I need it for, but I'm tempted to pay for a license, because it's so good at it. For one thing, it's not as CPU hungry as PSP Shuffle was. For another, it doesn't automatically erase the memory stick, of other music, video, etc. All the other stuff it may or may not do (I'll find out later) is gravy.
On the guide, where it addresses synchronization options, Kingbee116 suggests synchronizing tracks to \PSP\MUSIC\"artist"\"title".mp3. He correctly points out that once in MUSIC, you can only go one folder deep. I would normally put the music in \MUSIC\"album"\"title".mp3, preferring to name the folder after the album title rather than artist name, which can usually be seen on screen. Also using the root MUSIC folder as allowed by recent firmwares (official and custom).
Since the main purpose of this program (for me) is to randomize tracks, I avoid sub-folders altogether. I set it to \MUSIC\"title".mp3 so that the MUSIC folder is not filled with other folders with music in them, but with tracks from all over my computer. And rather than play these tracks in alphabetical and numerical order, I then use the PSP's shuffle feature, and everything is as it should be.
I still have to edit my music library inside of Media Monkey, as I have samples, program sounds, podcasts, DAW tracks, unrecognized (on the PSP) formats and other audio I consider undesirable for this particular task.
*At the moment, I'm watching Jubei-Chan, soon to be followed by Jubei-Chan 2. These are Anime, not Wu-Xia. Soon as I'm done with those, I'll finish watching Return Of The Condor Heroes (2006), which is Wu-Xia.
Unlike the higher end iPods, which have hard drives as large as 30-60 Gigs (more?), PSPs are limited to external memory via Memory Stick Duos. I think the largest capacity released thus far is the 8 gig. I have a 1 GB, 2 GB, and a 4. This limits what I can keep on my PSP at any given moment. This is especially true since other data is stored on the memory stick. Game saves, game demos, ISOs (games), emulators & ROMs, photos and of course videos (usually two or more 45 minute Wu-Xia TV episodes*).
I normally have space left over for anywhere between 2-6 albums worth of music.
The PSP has a shuffle feature that randomizes whats on the mem stick, but only within each folder (each folder normally representing an album or otherwise group of songs). That's pretty useless. In other words, the PSP will shuffle tracks from Cntrl-Alt-Delete-U (The Paper Chase), move on to EP C (Battles) to do the same, and then Planet Earth (Prince). When not listening to albums as originally sequenced (or newly sequenced by myself or others), I'd prefer to shuffle tracks from all folders on my player.
When PSP Shuffle came around (or when I finally found out about it), it was great. It scanned all the music on my PC, and whenever I wanted to fill up my memory stick with random music, it did it's thing, and I was good to go. I disabled the photo and video feature. Throwing random photos from my PC onto the PSP wasn't a good idea (for a couple of reasons). The only video that can play on the portable is video specifically encoded for use on it or similar devices. Still, I mostly watch serialized material, that works best in chronological order. Sometimes I encode YouTube videos to show friends at work, and those are chosen specifically.
PSP Shuffle cleared out the contents of the mem stick before filling it with music. Even though I set it to only import music, it would erase all videos and photos as well as music (after giving a warning). This wasn't a big deal to me. I would use a mem stick that didn't have any current videos on it and game data was untouched.
At some point (I don't recall when), PSP Shuffle stopped working. I attributed it to a problem with my PC. Something I installed or un-installed. Who knows? The program acted like it was working, only much faster than usual. It would erase the mem stick, but not fill it with music. I tried uninstalling and re-installing, adjusting what little settings there were and then just gave up on it. I figured that maybe a firmware update might've had something to do with it.
When hooked up via USB, it used to be that music was found in "drive letter"/PSP/MUSIC, but fairly recently (don't remember when) the music folder was placed on the root of the PSP (as was VIDEO), so it would be found on "drive letter"/MUSIC. The old music folder is still there and still works (still needed for 48 Hour Pong), so I don't know if one thing has anything to do with the other.
A few attempts were made using Google to solve this problem with no success until a couple of days ago when I came across a guide to using a program called Media Monkey with the PSP. Media Monkey is primarily a music organizing tool that looks like it's inspired by iTunes. I've used iTunes to convert CDs to MP3s and M4As, but not much else, since I don't have an iPod. The free version of Media Monkey does everything I need it for, but I'm tempted to pay for a license, because it's so good at it. For one thing, it's not as CPU hungry as PSP Shuffle was. For another, it doesn't automatically erase the memory stick, of other music, video, etc. All the other stuff it may or may not do (I'll find out later) is gravy.
On the guide, where it addresses synchronization options, Kingbee116 suggests synchronizing tracks to \PSP\MUSIC\"artist"\"title".mp3. He correctly points out that once in MUSIC, you can only go one folder deep. I would normally put the music in \MUSIC\"album"\"title".mp3, preferring to name the folder after the album title rather than artist name, which can usually be seen on screen. Also using the root MUSIC folder as allowed by recent firmwares (official and custom).
Since the main purpose of this program (for me) is to randomize tracks, I avoid sub-folders altogether. I set it to \MUSIC\"title".mp3 so that the MUSIC folder is not filled with other folders with music in them, but with tracks from all over my computer. And rather than play these tracks in alphabetical and numerical order, I then use the PSP's shuffle feature, and everything is as it should be.
I still have to edit my music library inside of Media Monkey, as I have samples, program sounds, podcasts, DAW tracks, unrecognized (on the PSP) formats and other audio I consider undesirable for this particular task.
*At the moment, I'm watching Jubei-Chan, soon to be followed by Jubei-Chan 2. These are Anime, not Wu-Xia. Soon as I'm done with those, I'll finish watching Return Of The Condor Heroes (2006), which is Wu-Xia.
Labels: downloads, good deal, music, PSP, solutions?
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