A Brief Guide To Using Devices You Wouldn't Think Of As MP3 Players

After I wrote a post about how you too can be the friend without Spotify, I wanted to talk about various devices you can use as MP3 players that, strictly speaking, aren't MP3 players. There's a ton of handheld and portable devices that can play music, and I feel like a lot of people have at least one. Obviously anybody can buy an iPod or a Walkman or a... Zune? and just pump it full of music. That's what they were made for. But what if you have a device lying around already that would work perfectly fine? I've done this with a few devices, so I wanted to compile my experience using them and offer a few tips for anybody looking to do the same!

First of all, I want to give an honorable mention to some devices that I've messed around with, but wouldn't actually recommend for regular listening. Obviously this includes the DSi Sound app on Nintendo DSi, which can absolutely play MP3s and at a decent quality, but not great quality, not to mention the notable difference in size between a DSi (especially an XL) and your average MP3 player. Also if you're traveling with your laptop or similar, that obviously works, just plug in a pair of headphones and you're good. Situational, obviously, but also totally doable. For the longest time, I used literally just an old iPhone. I've had this iPhone 3GS lying around ever since my mom got rid of it. It was her first iPhone, and when she upgraded, I got the old one. It hasn't had a working data plan for the better part of a decade, I dropped it on the bathroom tile once and the top is missing a piece (it doesn't lock manually anymore), and the battery has been slowly dying over the course of a decade, but... it sure can play music! It's super easy to repurpose any old smartphone as an MP3 player! Especially iPhones, because you'll largely just treat it like you're setting up an iPod. You have to use the proprietary iTunes app (and likely manually update the built-in drivers so the app can recognize older device...) but from there you can add any music you want, videos of the proper resolution (480x320 to be specific), and even upload photos if you need them! It has no use for the Internet anymore, so I keep it in airplane mode, but I'm sure there's still some stuff out there in the World Wide Web that would work on an old Apple device like this. It's really versatile, and I enjoy using it. It's sleek, functional, and pretty easy to add/remove/edit everything once you get iTunes running and become familiar with its idiosyncrasies. It's mostly a backup device and for nostalgia, but I love keeping it around!

Now onto the actual list. First, and perhaps most obviously, is any given smartphone. VLC Media Player is available on literally everything, including iOS and Android, so all you have to do is download the VLC app and use your computer to upload your files to your phone's storage. I use this for videos more often than I do it for music, but this is easily the fastest and most convenient way to listen to your offline music collection. I mean, it's VLC, what more can I say?

Now, using your phone (new or old) may be simple, but it's pretty boring, no? We are here to talk about more dedicated music devices, right? (Or at least pretty close.) So, let's talk about the big item on my list: the Sony PlayStation Portable. Back in the 2000s, Sony was really pushing for PlayStation to fit in with their other lines of tech and be multimedia centers in addition to game consoles. This ultimately led to the PS3 lagging behind Microsoft's Xbox 360 at the start of the seventh generation, and when the two companies swapped their priorities later on, it let Sony take the lead. Despite this, the PS3 and PSP were always great at being both game consoles and multimedia devices through their entire lives, and that wasn't a thing that stopped being true after they were discontinued. The reason I bought my first PSP a couple years ago was actually to be an MP3 player to replace my old iPod nano! I wanted a sleek little music device, and it also enabled me to finally play PSP games. Win-win, right? The PSP isn't compatible with the more popular lossless formats like FLAC, but it plays standard MP3 of any bit rate, MP4 video (when of a compatible size and encoding, more on that later), and WMA, which formerly required you to connect online to get Sony servers to activate the WMA compatibility, but can now be manually activated with standard CFW installs.

Now, the PSP is a pretty old system, and its media functions are a little rudimentary in some ways, especially in the sorting and categorizing sense. Albums must be placed in their own separate folder within the [Music] folder (i.e. all the tracks for an album must be in a folder of their own) but it can then be titled whatever you like to control the sorting order of everything! That is, of course, assuming you transfer everything manually, which is what most people do. By this method, you'd be unable to create playlists for your music, because Sony apparently decided that you aren't allowed to create playlists on the PSP itself? You have to either use a PS3 to transfer media, or Sony's media management app, Media Go.

If you store all your music on the PS3 anyway, then maybe that would be a fine way to transfer content? My main issue was that when you create a playlist on PS3 and transfer it to the PSP, it literally just copies all of the music and places it in a folder, which is the lazy method of playlist creation that can be done by hand on your computer anyway. Essentially it's a glorified mixtape of MP3s dumped into a folder. That's not really what I was going for, since this takes up a ton of space and doesn't really create a proper "playlist".

The other option is to use Sony's now-discontinued software, Media Go. Back in the day, this was used to purchase games, music, movies, and shows on PlayStation Network and download them to your PSP. It's kind of like Apple's iTunes app you have to use to add music and stuff to an iPhone or iPod, except if it was an optional go-between. As I mentioned, it's discontinued, with the last stable release being in October 2016, and it completely being abandoned in January 2018, with a new Sony media management app taking over, though it doesn't support PSP and mainly focuses on the WALKMAN line of media players. You can still use it if you downloaded it before, and there's a massive Internet Archive listing that has preserved major versions of the app, including the final update version and the associated Video Playback Engine that it used to download from Sony post-installation. With both of these, you can have a fully-functioning install of Media Go even in the big 2026!

I was quite surprised to start using Media Go and find that it's a super convenient media manager! After my years of using iTunes with iPods and iPhones, I have an aversion to media managers and have basically been doing everything by hand (which, hey, there's great value to manually encoding metadata in music and video files, so don't let that stop you). But Media Go is actually really nice! iTunes has a better method of manually adding individual folders and such, where Media Go forces you to specifically add them as "libraries" that get scanned for content, which... yeah, it largely does the same thing, it's just a little more clunky in Media Go. But it reads all your pre-programmed metadata, allows you to further edit everything, and categorize videos in your library as TV shows, movies, etc. It's go a lot of great tools for organizing your media, especially video! Connecting your PSP lets you directly transfer content from your Media Go libraries to your console, including playlists! Better yet, if the playlist detects that the songs it cites have already been transfered from library to console, it tells you as such, and doesn't transfer any music, just the playlist itself!!! My music is no longer sorted manually like I had it before, instead Media Go has it uploaded with folders for the artist, with the albums within them. I'm not sure if this is because of how I have my Media Go displaying my music sorted by artist, or if it's just how Media Go transfers stuff every time. It's not really a problem at all, just interesting. It makes it super convenient to keep a specific folder of music designated for PSP transfer, as well as a folder where I can manage all of my PSP-encoded videos.

While I'm talking about videos on PSP, there's a reason I keep bringing up the formatting for PSP videos. The PSP requires that videos be of the right resolution, and encoded with the right audio/video codecs. Normally if you were buying videos off the PSN Store for the PSP, this wouldn't be something you have to worry about, but when you're adding your own videos then you have to do it yourself. Using the encoding program Handbrake, as well as a preset found on PSPunk, you can automate the process and convert everything super easily. I'll link PSPunk's guide on it so you can try it for yourself!

When talking about music on the PSP, there is one other thing I would recommend, and that's a plugin to use with a hacked PSP. It's called Hold+ and through a small set of functions, it allows your system to save as much power as it can when you enable the hold switch normally. There's a combo that allows the hold switch to function normally, but using this plugin gets the most battery life out of your PSP when listening to music, which is great because some PSP models have better batteries than others. The GameBrew page features the instructions to install the plugin on older CFW, but you can read the ARK-4 wiki to see how to install it and set it on modern CFW installations.

My first PSP was actually the PSP Go, which was for a couple of reasons: I really liked the sliding design, it has internal storage in addition to the Memory Stick, and its smaller design is easier to pocket. I imported mine because the PSP is very import-friendly, and once you homebrew it there's really no difference at all. At the time I stored my games on the internal drive and my music on the Memory Stick, though now I have a PSP-2000 which I use for gaming, so the system storage is now for video. The Go is more cramped than the original PSP format, and thus a lot of games are harder to play. It's fine for a lot of the smaller, downloadable PSP Mini titles, like Tetris and Pac-Man Championship Edition, but something like Monster Hunter is a lot harder to play. For game games, I recommend a traditional PSP model, since the media functionality is the same but the format is better for gaming. The Go, in my opinion, is very much for media and smaller, pick-up-and-play titles like Angry Birds or whatever. Jetpack Joyride? It's great to have in your pocket to slide up, play a quick game, listen to your tunes, and put it away. Using Hold+ is essential on the Go to get as much out of your battery as you can, and also underclocking the CPU with CFW settings. It's more than usable, but just keep these things in mind if you're balancing out the PSP versus the PSP Go. I recommend both for different reasons, and I'm really glad I have both! Just gotta remember your pros and cons.

I just wanted to write a quick post here about some devices I've experimented with as dedicated music devices, obviously this isn't the be-all, end-all list of non-MP3 players that you can use for music. It's definitely not the most fully-featured way to do these things either; I've heard that there's some CFW for old iPod models that let it do a ton of stuff, including manage and play FLAC formats. Definitely do your research and pick what's best for you, I just wanted an excuse to talk about my media exploits and maybe inspire someone else out there to pick up a dusty handheld device and give it new life!

Happy jammin'!

~ Alex Amelia Pine