Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

Fix “cannot play” MP3 files in PSP and Sony MP3 players

Posted: 25 Sep 2009 03:48 AM PDT

Sometimes even when you transfer MP3 files to the right MUSIC folder on your Sony PSP or MP3 player, the Sony device won't be able to play it. It could be a sampling rate mismatch or the bit rate of the file, so often times you need to convert the MP3 file to a bit rate supported by the Sony player.

Sony also promotes its own music player/converter software for free – the SonicStage. With this tool, you can convert the MP3 file to a compatible Sony-native format called ATRAC3.

ATRAC, according to Sony, is an audio compression technology that satisfies the demand for high sound quality and a high compression rate such as one tenth of an audio CD.

Well certainly we don't want another music format other than MP3, but sometimes for the sake of being able to play them on Sony devices, we need to convert the files to ATRAC format.

SonicStage has an easy to grasp interface. You can add music files to it by simply dragging the files to the "My Library" section. It can automatically tag your files with its integrated Gracenote service so you won't have to manually do it.

To convert a regular MP3 file to ATRAC3 format, right click the file then choose Convert Format…

Choose ATRAC3 or ATRAC3plus (depends on what your Sony device could support so experiment between the two formats first before doing a batch of files):

To verify if you have converted the file, right click the file, choose properties then go to the file info tab. You should see that there are two file file formats saved on different locations.

Make sure to have room for the newly converted files on your hard disk. I prefer to keep the original files just in case I need to play the files in a non-Sony device like my iPod.

If you can not play your music files on a Sony device, try to convert the file first before transferring – this will re-encode the MP3 file with format supported by your device. I have a similar Sony Network MP3 player like the one below and the steps I have shown above are what I usually do to make the files play using this player.