CD Collection, PS3 & External Hard Disc

[Bobby Henderson]

Playstation 3 can work with certain USB 2.0 connected external hard discs. But I'm not sure of how best to copy my CD collection onto one and get it to play properly from the PS3.

Here's what I want to do. I want to burn CD images of all my music CDs onto an external hard drive and have the PS3 be able to properly see all the songs and play them just like any separately inserted music CD. It would be great if the PS3 would automatically retrieve album/song title information just like it does when a physical music CD is played.

I'm thinking I need to burn full images onto the disc in order to make the PS3 preserve transitions from one song to another without inserting any breaks between tracks. Quite a few music CDs have songs that fade into another without going completely silent.

I'm not interested in creating lossy MP3s of all this stuff. I want LPCM 2.0 audio on the disc.

Anyone else have experience doing this?

I'm leaning toward getting a 320GB Western Digital MyBook drive. They're usually already formatted for FAT32. I was looking at a 500GB Seagate Free Agent disc, but would need to use SwissKnife to reformat the NTFS volume to FAT32. Would SwissKnife successfully create a 500GB FAT32 volume on that drive? Would XP recognize the entire volume? The limits with FAT32 are kind of confusing.

[caliminius]

Originally Posted by Bobby Henderson

Playstation 3 can work with certain USB 2.0 connected external hard discs. But I'm not sure of how best to copy my CD collection onto one and get it to play properly from the PS3.

Here's what I want to do. I want to burn CD images of all my music CDs onto an external hard drive and have the PS3 be able to properly see all the songs and play them just like any separately inserted music CD. It would be great if the PS3 would automatically retrieve album/song title information just like it does when a physical music CD is played.

I'm thinking I need to burn full images onto the disc in order to make the PS3 preserve transitions from one song to another without inserting any breaks between tracks. Quite a few music CDs have songs that fade into another without going completely silent.

I'm not interested in creating lossy MP3s of all this stuff. I want LPCM 2.0 audio on the disc.

Anyone else have experience doing this?

I'm leaning toward getting a 320GB Western Digital MyBook drive. They're usually already formatted for FAT32. I was looking at a 500GB Seagate Free Agent disc, but would need to use SwissKnife to reformat the NTFS volume to FAT32. Would SwissKnife successfully create a 500GB FAT32 volume on that drive? Would XP recognize the entire volume? The limits with FAT32 are kind of confusing.

The short answer is that you are SOL trying to do what you want to do. The PS3 is not going to read the ISO or whatever disc images you were planning on using.

And, unfortunately for you, the PS3 doesn't support any lossless audio file formats. The best you can do is convert your CD's to mp3 or AAC files at a bitrate that is high enough to make the difference between the original and lossy file unnoticeable.

If you were buying a new drive, I don't know why you wouldn't just use Windows built in disk formatting software as opposed to SwissKnife but whatever makes you happy. FAT32 will have no issue with either the 320GB or 500GB, though it won't support files over 4GB in size.

[Bobby Henderson]

Why wouldn't the PS3 play LPCM files ripped from a music CD? It can read the same LPCM files from the music CD disc?

[Clark Kent]

I don't believe the PS3 can currently read .wav files (which is what the basic format straight off a redbook cd is) unless it is read directly from an actual cd. Lots of people have begged Sony for the ability to read and playback lossless audio options like wav files and flac files straight from external media but it hasn't shown up yet. I think the best you can do is stream the lossless audio files from your computer to the PS3 with WMP or Tversity. It does do that quite well.

[WriteSimply]

Originally Posted by Clark Kent

I think the best you can do is stream the lossless audio files from your computer to the PS3 with WMP or Tversity. It does do that quite well.

Stream the lossless files? If the PS3 won't read lossless AAC or FLAC, it won't read streamed lossless AAC/FLAC.

For now, this won't work. If FLAC or lossless AAC is enabled, a better system is created to manage music on the PS3, then I'm all for it. I'd have to buy several TBs of HDDs though...


fuad

[Teazle]

First of all, YES, PS3 absolutely CAN play .WAV files ripped from CD. I have been using a setup mostly like Bobby describes for about 18 months now.

I have a 320GB external HDD, formatted for FAT32. To get the music on there I plug the USB cable into my PC and use a freeware program called Spesoft Free CD Ripper. It gets the album and track info automatically from an internet database. (AFAIK this cannot be done on the PS3 unless you want lossy.) To play back I swap the USB cable over to the PS3, navigate to Music on the XMB and hit Triangle then "Display All". PS3 then recognizes the file structure with no problems.

I have not tried to preserve song segues or thumbnails of album art.

PS3 does not support FLAC but it shouldn't be needed anyway. HDD space is cheap.

Best part: using a PSP and "Remote Play" you can navigate your music collection without turning on the TV -- use PSP as remote. Set Audio Output under Remote Play Settings to PS3.