One of the most frequent questions I see asked is how to get music onto the PSP. This is a fairly simple process, and requires a PC (or Mac), a PSP, and a USB cable. I have written this with the assumption that you are using a PC running Windows.

Connect the PSP to the PC using the USB cable and select USB connection from the PSP menu (second option from the top on the system tab). The PC should then see the PSP as an extra storage device in windows explorer, if you are using Windows XP.

At this point its worth mentioning that there are two USB versions, one is 1.1 and the other is 2.0. The PSP will connect to a PC and use whatever USB version is available, but version 2.0 is much quicker for transferring content to the PSP than version 1.1. The two USB variants are hardware based, so if you only have USB 1.1, it may be worth considering purchasing a USB2.0 expansion card if you intend to transfer alot of data to the PSP.

Assuming you have connected your PSP to the PC successfully, and can see the device listed in Windows Explorer, you then need to copy your music to the PSP itself. Your music should be in mp3/atrac/wma format and needs to be copied into the /PSP/Music/ folder. Within the Music folder you can create a sub directory for either the artist or the album you are copying. Note that you cannot go more than one folder deep, so the structure should be /PSP/Music/Artist/track.mp3 or /PSP/Music/Album/track.mp3 and not /PSP/Music/Artist/Album/track.mp3.

Once your music is copied across to the PSP, you can disconnect it from the PC and then play the music by browsing to the Music directory. You should then see the file structure you implemented and be able to browse to the individual track you want to play.

There are other ways of getting music onto the PSP by using the wi-fi capabilities, you can even stream msuic from your PC directly to the PSP using the RSS function if you have a PSP with firmware 2.6.