At the request of a friend.

I’m sure there’s all kinds of ways to do this. Here’s how I do it.

First, of course, you need a Playstation Portable, and the correct kind of USB cable. Next you need iPodder, which is free software that sits on your computer and checks your subscribed podcasts from time to time, downloading MP3’s to a folder on your hard drive whenever somebody posts a new podcast (if you’ve subscribed to it, that is).

The next thing you’ll need is PSPWare, software for syncing audio, video, photo, and game save files to your PSP. It’s not free, but it’s worth the $15 — especially if you plan to use your PSP for viewing any videos you’ve ever downloaded of the ‘net (otherwise you’ll have to become the master of a million encoding standards, and cross-encode your videos until you just happen to get it right — PSPWare takes care of that for you — but that’s got nothing to do with podcasts, and is a subject for another day).

So PSPWare, once installed, sets up folders on your hard drive called “Dropboxes” where you can place MP3 files, properly-encoded videos (again, another day, another day), photo’s, and so on. Whenever you sync using PSPWare, all files in these folders will be moved over to your PSP. Assuming you’re on a Windows computer, the “dropbox” for MP3 files is here:

My Documents/PSPWare/Dropboxes/Music/

Got that? Okay.

Open iPodder, and click “File” in the menu, then choose “Preferences” from the dropdown. In the first tab of the “Preferences” dialogue box (labelled “General”), you’ll see a text entry area and a browse button at the bottom. The browse lets you navigate to the folder where you’d like for iPodder to save your MP3 files. Click it. Navigate to your “My Documents” folder, then to the “PSPWare” folder inside there, then to “Dropboxes,” then to “Music.”

Done.

Now you just have to find some podcasts to listen to. Once you’ve found them, you can subscribe to them in iPodder, like so:

In the main iPodder window (not the “Preferences” dialogue box you were in before — close that if it’s still up), you’ll see several tabs running along the top. Go to the one labelled “Subscriptions.”

Now you should see several icons running under the tabs — one of which is a green circle with a plus sign. Click that.

This will pop up a dialogue box with two text entry fields: Title and URL. The “Title” will fill itself in automatically later, so don’t stress that. Go to the URL field and enter the full URL to the RSS feed of a podcast you like. Here’s one that I like:

http://www.digitalstrips.com/digitalstripsrss.xml

Copy and paste the above into the “URL” field.

Click “OK.”

Now you’re subscribed to the “Digital Strips” podcast, one of the first podcasts specializing in webcomics (more info here).

Whenever those guys post a new show, it’ll be downloaded to your hard drive automatically. And, because you cross-linked iPodder and PSPWare, whenever you sync your PSP using PSPWare, the show will automatically be put into the “Music” directory on your PSP.

Hope that helps.

And if you don’t have a PSP, you can still use iPodder to subscribe to podcasts, and either listen to them from your hard drive, using your boring plain-old computer, or put them onto some other MP3 playing device. It’s particularly easy if you actually have an iPod. Which I don’t.

So anyway.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 16th, 2005 at 5:11 pm and is filed under General, Non-Comics Related. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.