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Games Entertainment

Play MP3s on Playstation 62

Posted by Roblimo from the who-need-a-computer-anyway? dept.
Juan Fernando writes "I just noticed this newsbit over at mp3.com covering an $80 enhancement for 1st Generation Playstations that allows them to playback CDs chock full of mp3s. The product is called PSXAMP/MP3, is made by Fullway, and is currently available in Europa/Asis and soon in the US. mp3enhancer is taking preorders now."
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Play MP3s on Playstation More

Play MP3s on Playstation

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  • Re:Why a box? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The PSX is waaaaaay too slow. Its a 33mhz r3000 with no fpu (and it doesn't help that it has an absolutely TINY i-cache, and NO d-cache). I tried making a software mp3 player for it (as have a few other people) and the closest I could get was still more than 5 times too slow...

  • Hmmm, I submitted almost this exact same story 2 days ago. Interesting...

    Anyhow, in addition to these two hardware based players (which also provide nifty features like cheat codes, and 'mod-card' capabilities (so they can play the CD-Rs), there is/was a software-only based player called PSXAmp. Here's an article in German [gnn.de] about it.

    Unfortunately, the web page that it is supposed to live on no longer seems to exist.

    It's a neat idea. Even better would be to burn the MP3 software onto the same CD as the MP3s, so there is no need to switch CDs. The PSX might not have the horsepower to do this, though.

    However, the Dreamcast actually has the entire OS on the same CD as the game you want to play, and it has plenty of power, so it might be possible to build a decent software-only MP3 player for the Dreamcast. Now I wonder how much a development kit for that platform is...

  • Doesn't seem to say anything about whether or not this little gem takes care of the problem that Playstations only recognize CD's with a black surface....Does this take care of that problem? Do you still need the "ModChip" so that the playstation can read the Cds that you burn? I don't have a playstation but would definitely buy one if this works and well. Nice that they pulled from existing technology for the interface, not much beats Winamps design.....
  • Yep but you have forgotten that all of those people burning MP3's also have friends that don't have a computer or aren't savvy enough to use it to this extent. I also know that my computer is upstairs while my home theater is down stairs, major bummer that way but I haven't figured out much way around that.

  • The Fullway [fullway.com] site has a nice FAQ which mentions this:

    Q: Must I modify my playstation in any way ?

    A: Our MP3 card supports both modified and un-modified playstations. For un-modified playstation, booting with an original CD is required.

  • A friend of mine who did a lot of sonar DSP once told me that 16 bits is generally enough for any job, so long as its the *right* 16 bits at each stage of the computation.

    Surely it is possible to make a 32-bit integer MP3 decoder?
  • You can already import this little number from Hong Kong ... MP3 Station [lik-sang.com] which is a measly $US52 instead of $US80. Not sure on the details of how it connects to the PSX or which PSX's it works with, or if its just a scam, but cool none the less.
  • Yes, this project "supposedly" existed. However after announcing it somewhere and not releasing it yet the author(s) got tons of AOL luser email flaming them for not giving it out; basically people being assholes.

    You can email the author and get a very pissed off response that anybody even asks him about it anymore. (figure out the email address from the link in the german article; if you can't do that, get off the net)

    But with a 33Mhz R3000A, you can't expect good decoding of high enough bitrate mp3s to be worth plugging into a stereo system.

    Go buy an old laptop or cheap $300 computer, it'll work much better.
  • DOH!

    Acronyms curse my head. I'm not sure what RSAC has to do with this.

    My baby was crying all night last night, I got 2 hours of sleep.
  • I seem to remember someone writing something in software that would play MP3's on a PSX with a modchip.. Any one else see something like this?
  • If you had the Pine portable MP3 CD player mentioned [slashdot.org] here on Slashdot last week, you'd be burning CDs like this anyway.

    Also, in my apartment (I know, I'm not a good geek) the TV, PSX and real stereo are in the living room and the computer is not. I suspect I'm not the only one with this configuration.
  • I seem to be missing your point... This isn't about a theoretical Sony product. It's about a Fullway [fullway.com] product, and it's available for purchase now. What does Sony's hypothetical dislike for MP3 have to do with it? They don't have to support the format - they just have to keep selling Playstations.

    BTW, I think the only reason MD hasn't taken off in the states is lack of marketing effort. Sony has never really gotten behind it here - I don't really know why.
  • Just so people know, AIWA is owned by Sony
  • Ok, you're probably right about Sony have problems with mp3, but not for the reasons you mention. Minidisc isn't a failure, it just has been rather slow in sales. What you need to remember is that Sony owns Columbia, Epic, (BMG?) and a whole lot of other tiny music publishing houses. That's the reason I can think they wouldn't be happy with mp3. But who knows, maybe they'll make so much money off this thing that it'll let them forget about the horrors of mp3 for a moment.

    Just a thought.
    -efisher
    ---
  • I've been looking for a cd player capable of playing mp3 cds and audio cds for a long time. I know some are planned, but does anyone know of one that is already available? It's so much more convenient, and headphones generally don't give the best quality in the first place, so who knows if I'll notice the difference..

    -efisher
    ---
  • I'm currently living in a single room appartment which makes it easy to use my PC as a stereo replacement. If I'll ever move I will probably have separate rooms for work, sleep and livingroom. In other words my PC won't be in the livingroom. Yet this is probably the place where I would go to relax and listen to music.

    Of course I could network the whole place and put pcs everywhere but that's a little bit overkill if all you want is to listen music in your livingroom. So for people like me a cd player that understands mp3 is a nice product.
  • But, are we slashdotters really average users?
    I know I'm far above a mere user. I like these
    toys. I like buying stuff for my toys. The more
    hardware, the merrier. Who cares if it costs a
    bit of money, when the novelty probably lasts
    longer than such silly things like food and drink
    :)
  • Firstly Playstation does not have a problem with CD's regardless of thier surface colour. I don't know where you heard this but it is certainly incorrect. Secondly you only need a 'modchip' to play games that are either a) pirated or b) not for your region (ie imports)
  • for a normal, reasonably priced ($300) DIN sized mp3 player for the car.

    yeah yeah.. i KNOW that they make them already.. but for gozakes.. the damn things a) have a stupid control thing that needs to be cheesily velcro'd down b) cost $1000.

    ___
    "I know kung-fu."
  • The problem with any music copy-protection, is that on a computer it can be recorded in transit. You just make drivers that take that data going to your sound card, and write it to disk. You have a perfect digital copy. Until they get rid of this SDMI doesn't matter.

    -RossB
  • not to mention that only geeks will hack it, the rest of the world will just take it up the a$$, pls. excuse my french, but sdmi sucks.
  • total loss for RIAA, IIRC.

    unfortunately it seems like the SDMI is sneaking it and working, dammit.

  • > That's also why the "swap trick" works. You put in a real playstation
    > CD, let it read the code, then swap the cd's before it reads the rest
    > of the cd. It's hard to time right, but can be done (i've only gotten
    > it to happen a few times on my friends system. i don't own one.)


    Nrrrrargh. Ahem. Sorry. That was an expression of disgust at having to do the DAMN swap trick. I can pull it off *maybe* once in ten. This is why you get a GameGenie -- it can be tricked into thinking that an import is actually a US disk. How else are we going to get the cool japanese RPGs that they refuse to translate for over here?

    (Side note: Final Fantasy VIII *rocks*.)
  • It seems like a nice idea, however, since you can get diamond rio at beyond.com for 100$ with a 50$ rebate, as of right now, I think it is somewhat expensive. Also at local Best Buy's you can get Mp3 players for about 130 with a 50$ rebate. That makes two places where players are cheaper that the sony enhancement and are probably better than it too.
  • I totally agree. A friend and I figured this out over the summer: he owned a MD player/recorder, and I had a Rio. We wanted to combine the best features of both devices. The best idea we came up with was a small, portable MP3 player with songs stored on MD's. They would provide 150-170 MB (different for data/audio MD's, and I'm not sure which ones would have to be used) of storage space, much more than any flash ram, they would be cheap, and relatively skip-free. MD's cost only a few dollars, as opposed to something similar like Clik disks at $10 for 40 MB. They can be rewritten any number of times. I would estimate this could be done for about $200-250. It wouldn't have to be a recorder/encoder, it would just have to attach to the computer (usb maybe?).

    Now we just need someone to make them. :)

    (Note: the encoding format used on MD's is called ATRAC. It has an unmodifiable (I think) bitrate of 256 kbps.)

  • In software yes, but hacking a closed hardware system is, em, difficult. Which was my point in the first place.

    -
    /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
  • Does anyone know what ever happened to the NAiAM portable CD/Mp3 CD player? Their site is down, and I dont know if they ever shipped it. I would've bought one because chip based handheld Mp3 players are just too limited in space. anyway...
  • Why??? Anyone with the capability to write a CD filled with MP3's has access to a computer... And it doesn't cost $80 to get a decent sound system for your computer (well it might) so it's more of a stereo. Also, i've heard some of the SFX on playstations... I don't know if it was the TV or what, but they're not so hot.

    Patrick Barrett
    Yebyen@adelphia.net

  • Poit, i was the hardware tech in #psx (EFNet) for a year and a half.

    There are _two_ parts to the CD's protection. One is a country code (either SCEA, SCEE, or SCEI) and the other is sectors 12-15 containg data but zero'd EDC/ECC data

    So basically the firmware of the burners detect that the sectors are marked bad, decides you really don't want to do this, and "fixes" them.

    BTW, these "plug mods" make me sick, it just increases the dumbification of pirates.
    If you want to pirate PSX games, learn to solder. Period. (and learn from a teacher, i've talked to countless people who did things like put the solder on the iron and smear the iron onto the connection..)

  • As for being the "avrage user" many users have thier playstations connected to thier home theater systems. ever play Madden 2000 with Dolby surround? Amazing the realisim... So, this is pretty neet and I will be looking into getting one, now havent looked at it yet, but wonder if it has an optical digital jack...
  • I know just what you're looking for. Wired Global Communications has built a prototype of the CD^3. Basically it's a discman that plays MP3's and regular Cd's too. It costs about $399 US
  • But if you want to play, say, Quake III you might need all the CPU time you can get. You don't want an MP3 decoder eating into it (which is why I'm content to switch CDs every hour rather than encoding my whole music collection onto one CD).
  • Sony Computer Entertainment did not return phone calls.

    Well, Duh.
    This isn't as bad as the mod chip addition, but Sony is probably planning some sort of portable MP3 player itself(MP3Man?). This is probably going to cut into whatever they were hoping to push out on that end.

    About the Playstion2... I doubt it would work on the new system. Backwards compatible doesn't usually mean identical.

  • I'm sorry, consumers don't want MD? Sony are the only company who cares? In Britain any student worth there salt has a portable MD recorder. They don't skip, are small, and not all that expensive any more. As for only Sony, my player is a Sharp, and the Aiwa player is just sublime.

  • From the pictures of the Playstation 2 that I've seen (check out playstation.com for some high-rez images), there is no "paralell port" like on the origional PlayStations... this port is what lets game enhancers, mp3 players, vcd players, etc plug into the PlayStation now. However; I would expect to see those kinds of things for the PlayStation2 after it begins to take hold. It does have firewire and usb on the front, and some kind of port on the back (PCMCIA?).

    MP3 players for PSX have been out for quite a while. You can search around and find them online at places that let you order stuff from hong kong. The unit I want is one that plays VCD's -AND- MP3's -AND- has game enhancer features. Pretty neat.

    jason gill.
  • MP3 is an encoding format. MiniDisc is both an encoding format and a physical medium. There's no reason why someone can't make an MP3 player that uses Minidiscs as the physical medium, and MP3 rather than the Minidisc native encoding. It's something I've been wanting for quite some time, now.
  • This seems pretty numb... what's up with someone making a CD with an executable stub constaining a PSX-native MP3 decoder, that plays back through the standard PSX audio-out?

    You can apparaently burn standard CDs to be readable on PSX, I read on USENET when researching which CDR to buy.
  • From the FAQ link on fullway.com:

    Q: What is the potential market for the MP3 Enhancer?
    A: Those who have playstation, even model of 9000.

    Apparently, you *can* use it with the 9000-series PSX.

    Heh heh... "I am PSX 9000 computer. I became operational at the PSX plant in Urbana, Illinois..."
  • While Sony may lag behind in MP3, I have to disagree with your comments about the minidisc.

    The whole purpose of the Minidisc, IMHO, is not rebuying your CDs, but taking your CD music anywhere with the ability to mix, etc with no worries. Most MiniDiscs players are also recorders(that's why they are expensive), so people can record tracks directly from their stereo/computer right to their MiniDisc. MiniDiscs are rerecordable too. Most MP3 players only allow you to play 40-80 minutes of music. A MiniDisc is 74 minutes multiplied by whatever number of discs you want to carry with you. If I have MP3s, I take the extra 15 minutes to expand them to AIFF and let them record to MiniDisc.

    And although Sony may not like MP3, you can be sure that if people start making money off of players, they will start making MP3 players/recorders or make another music standard that they have control of. That's the way Sony likes to do it. They'll probably get away with it too, because they're Sony.

    remy

    http://www.mklinux.org

  • 3 RSAC execs just had heart attacks.

    434 RSAC lawyers just had orgasms.
  • The only real problem with that is this: People who have PCs to get MP3s probably have an MP3 player handy to listen to them on their PC. In order to use this PSX extension they'd also have to buy a burner to burn their CDs with. So after about $250.00 they can go ahead and listen to MP3s on their Playstation while I play FFVII and listen to them with GQMPEG. :)
  • Doesn't seem to say anything about whether or not this little gem takes care of the problem that Playstations only recognize CD's with a black surface....Does this take care of that problem? Do you still need the "ModChip" so that the playstation can read the Cds that you burn?

    Stick a regular audio CD in there. Works, doesn't it? Good.

    The problem isn't with the black surface. Never has been. The modchips out there are to correct a problem with the fact that you can't copy a playstation CD with most burners.

    The black surface CD's have a country code on them in a place where burners almost always put something else (i'm not fully conversant with all the details). The playstation reads this, notices it's not the right country code, and voila, no game.

    The modchip basically feeds it that code all the time so that it'll still read wrong, but that read data never makes it to the bit where it checks. It's replaced by the correct code.

    That's also why the "swap trick" works. You put in a real playstation CD, let it read the code, then swap the cd's before it reads the rest of the cd. It's hard to time right, but can be done (i've only gotten it to happen a few times on my friends system. i don't own one.)


    ---
  • I bought a PSX within the past month for $99 and it is the 9001 model, which lacks the parallel port. So, this thing won't work on the newer units like mine. My friend's 7501 does have the parallel port, and he bought his maybe six months ago. So, they may still be out there if you look around.

    Look before you buy if you are thinking about it.
  • Guys, sorry to rain on the parade, but I really don't see Sony going out and supporting MP3. Why? One word: Minidisc.

    Sony has LOTS and LOTS of money invested in Minidisc, and unfortunately, they seem to be about the only ones who care about the format. Consumers don't want them (I know a lot of people who hate the idea of having to rebuy their CDs; these people would probably never invest in a Minidisc recorder.) Other electronics manufacturers don't really care, since there isn't enough demand. And retail outlets can't be bothered.

    MP3 is going somewhere, and a lot faster than Minidisc could ever dream. Rio sold like hotcakes, Nomad won't be bad, and by Spring we will be on the verge of REAL mp3 hardware (USB and IBM microdrive...now that would be sweet.)

    In short, expect Sony to seriously lag behind everyone else when it comes to MP3.

  • Read up on SDMI, it uses watermarks, and the hardware checks files of all kinds for the watermarks. Copying the music from the soundcard won't help. Nor will making your own mp3s because future cds will have watermarked music as well.

    Yes, this means degraded quality of cds.

    Making a software player that doesn't give a fuck about the watermark is obviously easy (keep your current mp3 player) but the same cannot be said for hardware.

    Maybe someone will figure out a way to strip the watermark off the file (some sort of interpolation of the music I guess), but I don't know how realistic that is...

    -
    /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.
  • I've heard about this device for a while; at first I was interested but then I remembered how great listening to audio CDs is on the PSX... not the greatest thing. Really, you'd want a nice set of speakers for this, and if you're the average PSX owner you don't have them... and you don't have a CD full of mp3s hanging around the house :)
    For me at least it'd be better to get an mp3-capable CD player, or just use mp3s on my computer :)

  • "SDMI compliant" (Score:3)

    by Hobbex ( 41473 ) on Thursday September 16, 1999 @11:54PM (#1677357)

    Need I say more? Once they start watermarking the cds, you can kiss your freedom to do whatever you like with your music goobye on any "sdmi" compliant hardware.

    Hardware may be ideal for compression schemes, but its also ideal for big money/government extortion...

    -
    /. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.

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