🎧 Why I replaced Spotify with a Playstation Portable for a month

If you’re familiar with my previous essay, you know I have mixed feelings on music streaming. Spotify, with its algorithmic recommendations and “gamification” of listening hours, seems purpose-built for constant, mindless music consumption. I was sick of it. Would I enjoy music more if I wasn’t in the Spotify ecosystem at all? This October, I set out to answer this question - the hard way. I blocked Spotify for the whole month and moved my music over to… A Playstation Portable!

The Setup

If you resonated with at least some of my first paragraph, your next question is likely “Why a PSP?”. Many don’t know this, but the PSP isn’t just a game console - it was also a .mp3 player! This was a weird time for Sony. Once the top dogs in the portable tape and CD player markets, Sony was seeing the iPod eat away their longstanding dominance. But could your iPod play Gran Turismo? Or God of War, or Metal Gear Solid? That was the PSP pitch: one device to replace your Game Boy, your MP3 player, even your DVD player!

The PSP was Sony at its innovative peak - my expectations for sound quality and user experience were high. Plus I had one lying around! With the .mp3 player chosen, the next challenge was loading my tunes onto the device.

The Transition

How hard was it to load music onto to a PSP? It’s definitely not as seamless as the iTunes / iPod ecosystem I grew up with. First off, the PSP uses a proprietary memory stick - you’ll need a third-party microSD <> memory stick adapter to hook the card up to a modern PC. There’s another catch - many modern audio file formats are unsupported by the PSP. If your music collection is a mixture of CDs, vinyl, and .wav files from Bandcamp, there’s more work to be done to load these up.

Note - if you don’t care about converting between audio formats, (Hi, Mom!) feel free to skip to the next section.

• CDs: Probably the easiest to convert. Nearly every laptop with a disc drive can (legally!) copy your CD library to a variety of file formats. I’ve had good luck with iTunes, which even extracts track and album names. Some standalone CD players also have this functionality. I used my roommate’s Sony CDP-500, but regretted the device’s 176 kb bitrate which sounded super tinny. I’d stick with iTunes or something!

• Vinyl: This one is tough. Music on vinyl is analog, meaning it’s extra work to convert to a computer-readable file. To start, you’ll need to play the whole album end-to-end, and record the record player’s audio output on your laptop. Some record players (see: AT-LP120) hook up directly to your laptop over USB, letting you record with software like Audacity.¹ Once done, you’ll have one ~20-minute audio file for each side of the album. From here, It’s on you to split it into tracks and export them as individual songs.

• Other digital files: Open Source Software to the rescue! FFMPEG is a completely free library to convert from nearly any encoding to .MP3. I wrote a quick script to iterate through a folder, converting each song to .MP3 and numbering them correctly - try it out!

#NOTE: need to set paths and extension of source file here
path="/mnt/c/Users/ethan/Music/Ryo Fukui/SCENERY"
extension="flac"
echo converting files in "$path" from "$extension" to mp3.

for songpath in "$path"/*; do
	# https://kevinboone.me/clh_tags.html
    # great resource for mp3 tagging 
	# update - need to quote variables in bash. i keep forgetting!
	#echo $(ffprobe -i $song 2>&1 | grep track*)

	# basename command makes this a lot easier! taking slashdot out of filename
	song="$(basename "$songpath")"

	# extract track number from metadata, add leading zero
	tracknum=$(ffprobe -i "$songpath" 2>&1 | grep track* | awk '{ print $3}')
	if [[ ${#tracknum} -eq "1" ]]; then
		tracknum=0"$tracknum"
	fi
	echo $tracknum

	#some songs already have track number baked into the song title
	#for this, just set track number to empty string
	#tracknum=""

	sourcefile="${path}/${song}"
	destfile="${path}/${tracknum} ${song%%"$extension"}mp3"
	echo Creating: $destfile
	#echo "ffmpeg -i ${sourcefile} -acodec libmp3lame -b:a 320k ${destfile}"
	ffmpeg -i "${sourcefile}" -acodec libmp3lame -b:a 320k "${destfile}"
done

Once you’ve got your tracks, it’s relatively simple. Put all of the songs in a folder named after the album title, the put these albums in another folder named after the artist. Dump these artist folders into [MUSIC] folder on the microSD, pop it into your PSP and voila! You’ve got 32 gigs of songs in your pocket!

Jamming like it’s 2005

First and foremost, the PSP is a game console. As a result, there are some quirks that make it a bit of a pain to use as a .mp3 player.

1. There are no dedicated play / pause buttons.
2. Volume controls are tiny, and nearly impossible to adjust from your pocket.
3. On the other hand the track skip buttons are massive, and frustratingly easy to fat-finger. Sony attempts to mitigate this with the “input lock” switch, preventing any button presses from registering on the PSP. But even this is clunky.
4. That same input lock switch is shared with the power switch, meaning there’s a 50/50 chance you accidentally reboot your PSP instead of cranking up the tunes.

Sound quality wasn’t life-changing. Frequency response was flat and consistent through my Moondrop Kato IEMs. High-end clarity left the most to be desired, though. It’s easy to point the finger at the .mp3 encoding - after all, these files were only 44100 kHz @ 320 kb/s. Since these same files sounded fine on my laptop, I suspect the PSP’s audio chip. Sony developed a bunch of custom chips for the PSP, including a GPU (CXD1876) and CPU (CXD2962). But there’s no Sony secret-sauce for audio; they instead opted for an off-the-shelf Wolfson codec.

The WM8973G (datasheet) pitches itself as a “low-power integrated codec” and… yeah. Trade-offs were definitely made with sound quality here. I can’t say I’m surprised. The PSP was, first and foremost, a game console. Gamers likely wouldn’t have valued higher quality audio if it killed their battery life. Nowadays we’re spoiled by tiny DACs that far outperform audiophile equipment from twenty years ago. Overall, the PSP sound quality isn’t great, but to my ears it’s definitely enough for portable listening.

Side note - an original goal for this article was to upgrade the PSP’s audio capability like I did for the Boss GE-7 a few years ago I was going to blue-wire a newer codec like the TAC5112 and A/B test the audio performance. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any newer devices that are pin-compatible with the Wolfson codec - if anyone has ideas I’d be happy to hear them though!

Conclusion

Dang, Ethan! Loading songs are a pain, it doesn’t sound great, and the user interface is clunky at best. Sounds like you hated this month with the PSP. Nope! In fact, this month away from Spotify utterly changed the way I listen to music. I think it boils down to this.

When you stream music, the music itself is almost never the focus. Most people, myself included, seem to use Spotify as a “background noise generator”. We need a constant stream of non-intrusive something, never really caring what that something is.

But with the PSP, that all changes. A .mp3 player won’t force-feed you the same 50 songs until you’ve listened them to death. You couldn’t doomscroll on a .mp3 player if you tried. These aren’t limitations, they’re opportunities! Using a .mp3 player forces you to engage with the music, because there’s nothing else you CAN be doing! Something funny happened while writing this article. As far as hours listened, I probably heard less music this October. But without Spotify, I definitely listened to more.

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1. There have been some debates of late about whether Audacity is spyware. Not going to take a stance here, but since it’s the only processing software I’m fluent with I’m going to stick with it for now. Form your own opinion from the public git repo here: ↩︎