Sony Media Manager

news via palgn

Sony has just released its own software for easily moving music, movies and more to your PSP. The program comes on a CD and with a manual, which basically explains how to connect your PSP up to your computer. The first thing you'll need to do when you insert the CD is install the Media Manager. Installation is relatively painless, and only takes a couple of minutes. After you've installed the program, it advises you to connect the PSP up before starting the Media Manager.

When you first begin the Media Manager, it will recognise every file you've currently got on the PSP and quickly import everything. The bottom left hand corner of the Manager is divided up into six categories: bookmarks, documents, game saves, music, photos and video. You can add bookmarks to your PSP by simply typing in a URL, and the media manager will retrieve the title of the page off the web automatically, which is extremely convenient.

Under the documents folder all you have to do is drag a document over to the PSP and the Media Manager will quickly (under 10 seconds for a 200k file) encode the file so it can be viewed on the PSP. The document gets saved as a HTM file, and can be viewed in the PSP internet browser by going to your bookmarks and then selecting "my media manger" bookmarks. I found my documents by trial and error though, so it would have been good if it was explained a little more where you could find them.

Next up is the game saves option. As soon as you push the game saves button, the Media Manager automatically loads images of your save files and alphabeticises them for you. You can easily drag save games over to the Media Manager if you want to import them. Dragging music and photos over is simple, and doesn't require any encoding at all. You can add shortcuts to the Media Manager so that you can transfer your entire MP3 folder or only transfer a few songs. With only a few clicks, you can actually display all of your songs and import however many songs you want.

The final option on the media manager is video. Once again, all you have to do is drag a video file and the media manager will encode it. A 5.2 MB file took 1 minute to encode, and came in at just over 6 MB, so the file size didn't really get any smaller. Despite the high price tag, the Media Manager is just about a vital application for anybody with a PSP. There are numerous free alternatives out on the web, but Sony's official application is just so incredibly simple to use. It's certainly taken a long time for Sony to bring out the Media Manager, but it makes everything so much easier.