Use your PlayStation Portable (PSP) to listen to podcasts.
Sony’s new PlayStation Portable (PSP) unit can play MP3 audio files stored on its memory sticks. You can use this feature to listen to podcasts on the device.
Attach the PSP to your computer using the USB cable. Then select USB Connection from the Settings section of the Home menu. On both Macintosh and Windows the device will appear as a drive. Double-click the drive and navigate to the PSP directory. Cards that haven’t been used in a PSP will not have a PSP directory yet, so just create one.
Once inside the PSP directory, create a subdirectory called Music, and another subdirectory within the Music directory, called Podcasts. The name of the Podcasts directory is really up to you, but the names of the other two directories must be PSP and Music.
Your can download the podcast .mp3 files to the PSP/Music/Podcasts directory using the Finder (Mac OS X) or Windows Explorer. Or, you can set your podcatcher to download to that device directly by specifying that as the storage path for the enclosures. On Windows, the full path will be <drive>:\PSP\Music\Podcasts, where <drive> depends on what the operating system allocates.
On Macintosh, the full directory will be /Volumes/<Card Name>/PSP/Music/Podcasts, where <Card Name> is the name you gave to the card in the Finder. This is Untitled by default. If you want to check the path for yourself, use the Go to Folder command in the Finder’s Go menu and specify / Volumes.
Once the .mp3 files are downloaded to the card, just stick the card in your PSP and use the system menu to navigate to the music icon. Once there you should be able to specify the card as the storage device and see the Podcasts directory. Click the Podcasts directory to see the podcast files. Click whichever you want to play.
If you see the “There are no tracks” message, you have put the files in the wrong location and you need to ensure that the directory structure is PSP/Music/Podcasts, from the top level of the directory structure down. Check your owner’s manual for more specifics if you are still having trouble.
Any audio you want to play on the device will have to be encoded as MP3 or Sony’s ATRAC3plus format. You can download photos to the device as well by storing them in the /PSP/Photo directory. Video can also be encoded for playback. PSP Video 9 (http://pspvideo9.com/) is a freeware Windows application that converts video from AVI or MPEG into Sony’s MPEG4 format for playback on the device.
Tip
When downloading photos from the Macintosh to a memory stick, the operating system will place thumbnails in the PHOTO directory that will confuse the PSP. Use the Terminal to find the .jpg files that start with a dot (.), and delete them.
“Listen to Podcasts on Your PDA” [Hack #8]
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