Tom Kiss

How to import an iTunes playlist to your PlayStation 3

Saturday 24th March 2007

If you're like me (rather anal about your iTunes collection, ensuring every single track has album artwork) then the task of transferring that precious data to your PlayStation 3 could be quite a predicament. Making sure all those valuable hours spent organising your music collection are not wasted is vital.
So, after some hunting around I figured out how to do the one thing I wanted - create a playlist and transfer it to my PS3. I guessed most people might be interested in this, so I've written the following guide on how to do it using a Windows PC. Enjoy.

Things you'll need:

• A USB HDD big enough for your music playlist, and compatible with PS3 (IE: FAT32 formatted, how to format a drive as FAT32 in Windows)
  
• iTunes
• Some music in iTunes! (note: protected tracks or file formats not compatable with PS3 will not be playable)

And now for practical bit.

1. Open up iTunes and create a playlist called PlayStation 3. Inside that play list, place all the music you wish to transfer on to your PlayStation 3.
2. Check all the music in your playlist has the correct data: artist name, album name etc and of course, artwork (Right click > Get Album Artwork often works). Also - make sure that there are no weird characters in artist names, album or track titles. If there are, the PlayStation 3 unfortunately simply will not display that music when grouping by Album Name or Artist. My copy of Gling Glo by Björk Gudmundsdóttir & Trió Gudmundar Ingólfssonar was nowhere to be seen.
   
3. Once you're ready, Right Click on your playlist and select Export Song List... Choose a place to save it to and remember where this is. When done, close iTunes.
4. Plug in your USB HDD to your PC. Create a folder on it called 'iTunes'.
   
5. You need to open iTunes again (you should've closed it by the way), only this time, hold down SHIFT+click iTunes from your Windows Start Menu. Make sure you keep SHIFT held down until you see an iTunes dialog box. Click on Create Library. This will display a file browser box. Browse to the 'iTunes' folder you just created on your USB HDD. iTunes will now open a fresh, blank library on your USB HDD. (To open your original iTunes Library, use SHIFT+click method and select the location of your original iTunes Library).
   
6. From the iTunes main menu, choose Edit > Preferences and click the Advanced tab. Make sure the check box that says Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library is checked.
   
7. From the iTunes main menu, choose 'File' and 'Import'. Browse to where you saved your playlist .txt file and select it. The playlist will now be imported in to your new USB HDD iTunes Library. This may around 15 minutes for a 30Gb library and does not display a progress bar - so be very patient. Don't hit cancel!
8. When this is done, you should see your playlist in your PlayStation 3 playlist in your USB HDD iTunes Library. But we still need to transfer / duplicate the music on to the USB HDD. From the main menu, choose Advanced > Consolidate Library. This will copy your music over to the HDD.
   
9. Once done - you're almost there. Unplug your USB HDD library, and plug it in to your PlayStation 3. From the XMB menu, browse to Music. You should see the HDD pop up. Select it in the XMB, and press Triangle, choose Display All. You should see your folder called iTunes, press Triangle again and choose Copy.
10. Your iTunes playlist is now being copied to your PlayStation 3. This is probably the longest wait, what with the PlayStation 3's 5400rpm drive but once done, you're sorted.
    

So. It's not that complicated but I've tried to make this a dummies guide. Good luck and happy listening!