How to Make Your iPod Compatible with Your Playstation 3

Although the Playstation 3 has many multimedia functions (DVD upscaler, Blu-Ray, etc), people may not know that Apple's iPod is compatible with Sony's Playstation 3. In just a couple of easy steps, you can turn your Playstation 3 into iTunes-lite.

Step One: The Essentials
Before doing anything else, make sure to connect your iPod to the Playstation 3. Plug your iPod in the one of the Playstation 3's USB Ports.

Now turn on your Playstation 3. Make sure it launches into the XMB (XrossMediaBar). If your Playstation 3 launches a game instead, press the "PS" button and highlight the "Quit Game" option and press the X button to confirm; that should launch the XMB on the Playstation 3.

Step Two: Finding the iPod
The Playstation 3 will recognize your iPod as "USB Device (iPod)." You should see your iPod in the Music, Photo and Video categories. Go to the Music category.

Step Three: Finding the Tracks
Highlight you iPod. If you press the X button, it will say "there are no tracks." Instead, with your iPod highlighted, press the Triangle button. Doing so will bring up two options: "Display All" and "Information" (which shows the size, amount of free space and number of tracks on your iPod). Highlight the "Display All" option and confirm your selection by pressing the X button.

You will see a series of folders. To find your music tracks, highlight the "iPod_Control" folder and confirm your selection by pressing the X button. In the next series of folders, highlight the "Music" folder and do the same thing. All other folder options will give you the same message: "there are no tracks."

If done correctly, you should see folders named "F00," "F01," etc. Your music tracks should be in the folders. Some of your tracks may have weird looking names composing of random capitalized four letters but your music tracks should be all there.

Step Four: Playing the Music
Simply press the X button to play with your desired music track highlighted. When it's playing, you can press the Triangle button to bring up different options: volume control, visual player, shuffle, repeat, etc.

Step Five: Copying to Playstation 3's Hard Drive
To play your music tracks on your Playstation 3 without your iPod connected, you have to copy your songs onto the Playstation 3's hard drive.

To accomplish this, highlight the desired song, press the Triangle button and highlight the "Copy" option. Press X to confirm. To copy all the songs, highlight the "Music" folder (you can press the O button to go back to the folder) and follow the same procedures as you would with a single song. When the Playstation 3 is done copying the songs, go back to the Music category on the XMB, your copied music files (or folders) should be there.

Step Six: Renaming
If you copy the songs to the Playstation 3's hard drive, you would probably want to rename some of weirdly named-songs.

Highlight the desired song and press the Triangle button. Highlight the "Information" option and confirm it with the X button. Here, you can edit the name among other information like album, artist, genre and attached picture.

That is pretty much the rundown on playing your iPod music on the Playstation 3. Hope you enjoy this unknown multimedia function for your Playstation 3.