Here’s a quick review of the [tag]PSP Media Manager[/tag].
The interface is cool, clean and effective. All the options are well placed and at sight, lacking just a right click menu, but then again why complicate what is so simple. Starting with the Photo managing, you can transfer photos from your “My Pictures” folder and choose, in the settings menu, if the resolution should be changed when transfering. Simple, effective. Just drag to the lower pan and it transfers the photos to your PSP photo folder. You don’t have to connect the PSP to your PC to use the Media Manager. I have a memory card reader and it works very well and the tranfer rate is even faster than the [tag]PSP[/tag].
Next, the Music. You can choose from the [tag]iTunes[/tag] folder (including Podcasts), “My Music” folder and [tag]SonicStage[/tag] if you have it installed. You can always preview the media you want to transfer, the software launched the default system application for the media you want to preview.
The Video pane. Like the other panes, you can transfer videos stored in the “My Videos” folder. All the videos are encoded to AVC at 4:3 which meaning its not full screen (widescreen) its just normal TV style. There is no option to encode for widescreen either, Sony still doesn’t allow videos played from the MS to have [tag]UMD[/tag] quality. The quality is good and is the same as the videos you download on yourpsp.com. Sony can make some improvements here.
The CD pane is where you can rip and encode Music CDs to your PSP. Strangely Sony has not included other formats than mp3. The PSP supports mp3, [tag]ATRAC[/tag] and WAV so at least ATRAC Sony’s own audio format should’ve been included. The Gracenote engine is usefull, providing all the info on the CD, but a album cover thumbnail was welcome.
Feeds. Here you can subscribe to audio and video casts as well as import and export data from and to an OPLM file. The PSP Media Manager comes with a podcast and vidcast directory with a few sites you can subscribe. After subscribing, you can choose the media you want to download. As usual, the media is downloaded and converted to the right PSP formats. PSP formated magazines can also be subscribed and downloaded from here.
Game. You can use this pane to backup your PSP save games and / or transfer them to another memory stick.
Backup. Backups all the data in your PSP.
Settings. This pane has settings for all the other panes do check this pane before using the software.
My 10 cents:
As I said before, I bought the new PSP Media Manager. With the $20 software, I can transfer videos, music and photos, as well as subscribe to podcasts, vidcasts, manage save games and backup all the data in my PSP. The software is worth $20 but [tag]Sony[/tag] should give this away with the PSP as other companies do with some media players. Anyway, is good to see that Sony is working to support the PSP in all its features, not only as a games machine but as a portable media player. You can check some screenshots here.
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