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.