So every time they announce any kind of new PS3 bundle at all, it makes me pull my hair a little bit, because it's invariably a better price or a bigger hard drive, or both, compared to the one I shelled out for. This time, it's 160 gigs for $499 -- which means it's twice as big as the one that I paid that same amount for not all that long ago, though I can't for the life of me remember exactly when I bought the PS3.
I digress, however. Sony says this new PS3 with the hulk-sized storage capacity has a twofold purpose -- first, fit more downloadable games. Second, to better leverage the console as the all-important "Media Hub."
We hear Sony talk about this a lot, right? PlayStation 3's a veritable entertainment center! Now, I'm one of those staid types who very rarely uses any of my next-gen consoles to do much more than play games, whether disc or digital. All my music is on my computer. I use iTunes so that I can put my music on my iPhone, and I buy most of my music in iTunes -- often, I do this even when I already own the disc, because it's rather a pain to move music around that you didn't buy through iTunes. I used to have so many MP3s that it was more trouble than it was worth to move them when I bought a new computer, and moving CDs into iTunes repeatedly? Like, forget it, man, I'm a busy chick.
My new laptop, while being very awesome, has shit for speakers, and when cleaning house on the past weekend, I realized I can't hear the songs if I leave the room. That's when I noticed my PS3 gleaming at me, looking for all the world so much like a media hub that I remembered the words of Jack and Kaz and decided to use my PS3 for my Family Entertainment Center.
I spoke out loud to the PS3 and asked it what I need to do to evolve it from a mere game console into a media hub. Needless to say, it did not answer. So I managed to figure out, after maybe fifteen minutes of messing around on the internet, how to get the PS3 to recognize my new laptop -- which has, like, four days of music on it or something ridiculous -- as a "media server." I began to get excited. I had my Media Server and my Media Hub and they were talking to each other (I am not hardware-savvy, mind).
This is when I find out that the PS3 arbitrarily divvied my collection up into folders called F01, F02 and F03, and inside them were a list of tracks with names like NOPHXLT or whatever. Apparently, it was able to recognize and play only about five tracks out of my entire music collection (aside from the twelve abysmal WMA tracks that come with Windows Media Player 11).
I looked at my gleaming PS3, glittering like the future, and I said to it, "I can't believe I'm about to use you as a glorified iPod dock." But I did, after seeing some message board threads that said such a thing would work. In fact, the message board threads I found made it seem to me like more people simply just docked their music players rather than try to set up a media server. I plugged my iPhone into the USB. The PS3 does not know what an iPhone is. I still have my iPod, so I tried that. This time, the PS3 could play fewer tracks than before -- and, implausibly, different ones, from what I can tell.
It's not the console's fault, I know. It's the iTunes media format. But, I mean -- really, I can't even dock my iPod? How am I supposed to use PS3 as a media hub? I'm trying, Jack and Kaz, I really am. Come on, Apple, I'm not trying to copy the music, I just want to stream it. And I bought it, I swear, I did.
After attempting several different strategies over the course of an hour to make sure it really was the file format and not just me Doing It Wrong, here's what I did. I bought nice speakers for my laptop and I downloaded Symphony of the Night on PlayStation Network. I've now purchased that game more times than I have any other title ever, and I own it for every platform for which it's ever been available.
So as of now, my PC is still my media hub; my new speakers are pretty sweet. And my PS3 is still squarely a game machine. Oh, well.
Also, Microsoft would never-never cut a deal with Apple to let iTunes play on Xbox 360s. Sony should. Is this a naive wish on my part? Am I crazy in thinking that the overwhelming majority of digital music users use iTunes, or at the very least, a stunningly significant portion of them? Do people really buy MP3s from websites and play them in Windows Media Player, more people than use iTunes?
