Playing Audio Files on the PSP

Somewhere on your Memory Stick Duo are a bunch of audio files, waitingjust totally waitingfor you to play them. That's easy enough to do.

To play a single music file, navigate through the PSP's home menu to the Music section, and select the Memory Stick Duo option. Shazam! There, displayed for you in all their glory, will be the songs and groups you created (Figure 8.5).

Figure 8.5. The Music area of the home menu shows your songs and groups.

You define a group of music either by stuffing a bunch of music into a subdirectory (as I instructed you to do with various albums earlier in this chapter) or by creating an M3U file (in Windows Media Player 10 or another MP3-friendly music program). When you select the music on your Memory Stick Duo, you'll see all the individual tracks that are in the Music folder, as well as the subfolders and all the M3U files.

To play a single audio file, just select the track. It'll start playing automatically. You can control the music through an interface eerily similar to that of the movie interface (discussed in Chapter 5), right down to the A-B loop mode.

The PSP, however, has some audio controls that you invoke with the triangle button (Figure 8.6) and that aren't in the movie control panel. One of these controls, which looks like a little square in the bottom-left corner, is called Group Mode.

Figure 8.6. The onscreen control panel for audio appears in the bottom-right section of the screen. In the bottom-left corner of this control panel is the Group Mode toggle.

The instruction manual that comes with the PSP tells you a little about Group Mode. Having read that cumbersome thing, I can tell you that Group Mode is simpler than the manual makes it seem. Group Mode means this:

The PSP will play music in the group that you select.

That's it. If you turn Group Mode on (Figure 8.7) and then select a track, the PSP will play all the tracks in the group. If the track you select isn't in a group, the PSP will play only that track. If you turn on Shuffle or Repeat, that mode will apply to the group the PSP is currently playing.

Figure 8.7. When Group Mode is on, the PSP displays an icon in the bottom-left corner of the screen.

When the PSP is in Group Mode, you can use the left and right trigger buttons to jump from track to track.

You can also enable various modes, such as Shuffle and Repeat, by invoking the control panel (triangle button) and then selecting P-MODE (Play Mode). Keep selecting P-MODE to scroll through various modes.