Introducing PSPMAN

When Ken Kutaragi announced the PlayStation Portable in May 2003, Sony had no finished machine to show. What it described was more than a handheld game system: it was a portable entertainment platform.

Kutaragi called it “the Walkman of the 21st century.”

More than two decades later, I kept coming back to that idea. The PSP can already play music, but its original player belongs to another era. How much more could be done with the hardware? What would the experience feel like if Sony had continued developing the PSP as a Walkman?

I wanted FLAC playback with the library browsing, album artwork, and physical controls that would make the PSP feel like a dedicated Walkman. Earlier homebrew players had already brought FLAC to the machine. The idea was to bring those listening capabilities together with the kind of interface I enjoy using on later Sony music players.

That became PSPMAN.

PSPMAN is a homebrew FLAC and MP3 music player made specifically for the Sony PSP. It plays music locally from the Memory Stick and organizes up to 1,000 tracks into Songs, Albums, Artists, Folders, Favorites, Recent, and Playlists.

The Public Alpha supports stereo 16-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC and CBR and VBR MP3 files up to 320 kbps. It also reads M3U and M3U8 playlists and displays embedded JPEG and PNG cover artwork.

I wanted it to feel at home on the PSP. The screen layout takes its cues from later Walkman players, with navigation built around the D-pad, face buttons, and shoulder buttons. Browsing an album, choosing a track, and opening its artwork should feel natural on the hardware.

Cassette mode came from the same attention to the screen. A standard compact cassette is approximately 100 mm wide; the display on a PSP-2000 or PSP-3000 is about 95 mm wide. The cassette appears almost life-size.

That was too perfect not to use. Its reels turn while the music plays, and pressing left or right on the D-pad switches between five cassette colors.

Getting all of this to work together has taken considerably more effort than the simple interface suggests. Playback, library scanning, artwork, and navigation compete for the same limited memory and processing time. Much of the development has gone into making room for each of them while keeping the music playing.

Testing has included several generations of PSP hardware, with users contributing logs and reports from their own machines. The Public Alpha supports PSP-2000, PSP-3000, PSP Go, and PSP Street. PSP-1000 remains outside official support for now. It can run the application, but its 32 MB of RAM leaves much less room, and users should expect a more limited experience.

There is still work to do on stability and responsiveness. The reports coming in are helping identify problems that are difficult to reproduce on a small collection of test machines.

In less than a week, PSPMAN passed 5,000 downloads. I hadn’t expected that response, especially for an early version of a music player made for a 21-year-old handheld. Seeing people pull their PSPs out of drawers, load them with music, and share photos has been the best part.

I have spent years documenting Sony’s history through books and archives. Building something people can use on these machines has given me another way to share that interest.

More than two decades after Kutaragi’s announcement, people are carrying their PSPs as Walkmans again.

Maybe “the Walkman of the 21st century” just needed a little more time.

PSPMAN Public Alpha is available as a free download. You’ll need a PSP capable of running homebrew.

Download PSPMAN


Photo credit: https://tonchikiroku.com/pspman/