How-to: Podcatching and audio autofill for your PSP without iTunes
iPSP offers an easy way to sync video and music to your PSP on the Windows side, with one drawback: its music management functionality is tied to iTunes. If you don't use iTunes to manage your music collection, you might want an alternative way to automagically transfer new audio content to your PSP. This is a fairly simple method of getting your fresh podcasts and tunes onto your PSP, without being tied to any particular music management software application.
Ingredients
Windows machine
iPodder (optional if you're only autofilling with your own music library)
U-Robot folder scripting utility (free, and also optional for pure autofill)
How it works
Earlier this week we blogged about Shuffler, a handy little tool that was designed to free the iPod shuffle from iTunes for music management. It essentially provides the iTunes' new "Autofill" feature for use at the file system level, for those who don't want to use iTunes or who prefer the drag and drop method of getting music on a digital audio player (as well as adding a handy two-way sync feature, for getting new files off the DAP and onto your desktop automatically). Since the utility theoretically works with any MSC-compliant device (i.e., it shows up as an external hard drive on your computer), we thought we'd give it a try on our PSP to see if we could bypass iTunes and iPSP altogether. It worked beautifully, and with a bit of extra tinkering we set up a nice little system to automagically collect new podcasts and MP3 files in a source folder that gets shuffled and synced to the PSP whenever we plug it in. Plus, it's a two-way sync, so if we've collected tracks from other computers or locations, we get a nice local copy of those files on our desktop when we plug in the PSP.
Ready to give it a go? Let's get set up.
Setup
So first up, go and download Shuffler and unzip it. Before launching it, you'll want to make sure there's a formatted memory stick in your PSP. It can have other files on it as well, as long as it's got the proper file structure already established. When you launch Shuffler for the first time, it will prompt you to make sure your PSP is connected to your computer via USB, so go ahead and hook 'em up:
Since it's the first time you're launching it you'll be prompted to set up some configuration details. First, we'll choose the Source folder from whom all MP3s flow. We've made a folder cryptically named SOURCE on our desktop for this purpose:
Next we find our destination folder, which is located on our PSP currently connected as an external drive (on our system it's drive F, but will probably be different on yours). The proper place where the PSP looks for your music files is inside the MUSIC folder which is inside the PSP folder in the root directory of a properly formatted PSP memory stick:
Next we'll choose a quota size, which defines the maximum amount of "stuff" that will get synced to your PSP. This will obviously depend on the size of your memory stick. However, in practice, we found that this parameter doesn't really matter all that much. We just set it to 1000, and Shuffler pretty much fills close to the size of whatever memory stick we throw at it. This way, we don't have to reset the quota for each different size memory stick. We actually find underfilling to be an issue sometimes, whereas overfilling never presented a problem. Shuffler tends to leave a bit more space left over on the PSP than it should, which we assume has to do with whatever randomization is going on in the script. It usually comes pretty close, though.
The next dialogue box is basically asking you if you want to enable the two-way sync function. What this does is copy any files on your PSP that are not already in your Source folder, before doing the actual sync. Saying Yes to this option means that if you bring home a new collection of tracks from a friend's computer on your PSP, you'll automagically get a local copy of all those files on your machine, simply by plugging in your PSP and letting Shuffler do its thing. Verily, we saith yes to this dialogue:
Next you'll be asked to choose if you want to purge the destination folder before performing the sync. It's up to you, but it works well to say yes and get a whole fresh selection. Then you'll be asked whether or not your DAP requires a database management app to run after the sync. You can say 'no' to this.
You'll get a few more dialogues of lesser importance — just set them however you prefer: verbose logging on/off, audible cue on sync completion, and whether or not you want the app to start when you boot your machine. Once you finish the configuration, you'll be prompted for Shuffler's first sync. You can either choose cancel and head on into the podcatching portion of the how-to, or go ahead and do the sync if you just want to sync music from your existing collection to your PSP. Podcatchers, we head into the next section.
Set up iPodder to work with Shuffler
To get iPodder to play nice with how Shuffler works, we're going to have to use a bit of folder automation scripting. This is because iPodder downloads podcasts into separate folders for each feed, and Shuffler chokes on the folder subdirectory organization. We're going to use the free utility U-Robot to monitor the folder structure our podcasts get saved to, and copy the files into our Source folder. This way we get the best of both worlds: podcasts show up on our PSP, but we can also sync our podcasts with whatever other music management software and proper DAP of our choosing. You can use another utility in place of U-Robot if you already use a folder management utility, or write your own little script to do this, as well — otherwise, go ahead and download U-Robot personal edition, install it and launch it.
First we'll set up our copying script. Go to Configure and choose Scripts:
Go to File > New to create a new script, and give it a descriptive name of some sort. Then, choose New > Copy from the Action menu:
In the Copy dialogue that follows, you'll use some script variables to define what to copy and where. You can leave the "From filename" box set to "%F", which denotes whatever file triggered the folder action (i.e. when a new podcast gets downloaded to the podcast folder). In the "To filename" box, you'll want to first find the full path to your Source folder, and end it with the script variable string "%N%E." All told, this action basically says "whenever a new file gets copied to the podcasts folder in any subdirectory, copy that file to the Source folder with the same name." Bingo.
Hit okay when you're done and okay to close out of the scripts window. Next we'll tell U-Robot which folder we want it to watch. From the main menu, choose Configure > Folders. In the next window, choose Folder > New. In the resulting dialogue, all you really need to do is find where iPodder saves your podcasts. For the purposes of this how-to we're assuming you already have iPodder set up and working with another DAP — if you don't, it's very straightforward to go and download it and get it up and running. One of the preferences you'll set is the location that podcasts get downloaded to, and this is precisely the bit of information we need to give U-Robot right now:
Hit okay once you've told U-Robot where your downloaded podcasts live. In the next window, we'll attach the "copy podcasts" script action we made earlier on to this folder — in the "Script for added files" dropdown, select the script you named earlier:
Hit Okay when you're done. You'll be looking at the main U-Robot window now, and we want to enable it to start watching our podcasts folder. Just click on the green "Start button" and the log window will show the program has started watching the folder, just waiting for those unsuspecting new MP3 files to fall into its trap:
Now, let's start up iPodder and refresh our feeds. Go to your subscriptions tab and do a refresh however you usually do, whether selecting individual podcasts for download, updating just the latest few, or updating anything new since your last sync:
After your feeds have refreshed, you can confirm they've downloaded by quickly checking the Downloads tab:
Got some new files? Word. Let's go check and make sure U-Robot noticed and worked its wily magic on those MP3s. Switch over to U-Robot and you should have some messages in your log window reflecting that the new files triggered some copy actions:
Indeed! We can also go ahead and have a gander inside our Source folder and see that our new podcasts are living all happy and intermingled with some tracks from our music collection in a fine display of content integration. Now whenever we next connect our PSP, we'll get a nice and random assortment of new content, music and podcasts both.
Speaking of which, let's get on with that magical moment, already. Hook up your PSP as normal, and you should get the following impending sync message from Shuffler:
You can either hit OK to speed the process, or be on your merry way for a few minutes while Shuffler automagically starts and syncs in 10 seconds. If you do hang around for the exciting show, and you've chosen verbose messaging, you'll get some notifications as Shuffler is copying files:
The transfer itself usually doesn't take very long — only a couple of minutes for a 512MB stick. At the end of the whole works, you'll get a status message that tells you the process is complete, as well as how many files were copied and how much space remains on your memory stick:
Now you can safely disconnect your PSP and check out the random assortment of new content that awaits! Not happy with the results for any reason? Just hook up and re-sync and get a whole new batch. Now, if you'll excuse us, we must be off to work on automating our laundry so we have more time to spend, uh, researching some new exploits in Wipeout: Pure.
