Next firmware update to improve music playback -- but how?

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Next firmware update to improve music playback -- but how?

Posted Oct 22nd 2007 8:00PM by Andrew Yoon
Filed under: Firmware Updates

Brier Dudley from The Seattle Times is loving the PS3. Not as a games machine, but as an affordable media center. At $399, the upcoming 40GB PS3 will be one of the most affordable and most advanced Blu-ray players around. With its ability to play music, showcase photos, display movies, and more, the PS3 has a great chance of targeting the media savvy with its newer, cheaper model.

Sony will continue to expand upon the media functions of the PS3. According to the report, "within a month, a software upgrade will improve the PS3's interface for music stored and played through the system." However, we don't have any further specifics. Patrick Seybold from SCEA emphasizes that "we haven't made any specific announcements on upcoming firmware." Could enhanced music be a part of the now-mystical 2.0 firmware update?

It will be interesting to see what Sony plans to offer the media hungry in America. While Europe gets PVR capabilities, America has been left out. But, it appears that something will be in the works soon. "Some of that same functionality are things that we're working on here," Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment America, told the newspaper.

[Via Joystiq]

Tags: dvr, firmware, pvr

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Reader Comments

(Page 1)

1. Every PS3 comes with a hard drive so I can't figure out how such a basic feature like this was left out.

Then again,it's still painfully frustrating just to get people i'm friends with into a game of Warhawk. Took me like 25 minutes last time to where I didnt even want to play at that point.

Posted at 8:15PM on Oct 22nd 2007 by OTAM

2. If they really want to sell it as a media center, they need to include divx, xvid, and matroska file support. Or just give us access to 2D acceleration in Linux.

Posted at 8:26PM on Oct 22nd 2007 by Spoon!!

3. They can start by having an actual music player instead of what they have now which is barebones... it should be a self contained application like the browser, but, you should be able to put it in the background so you can do other stuff like look at pictures and browse.

Also, they will most likely add an resampling feature for audio tracks up to 192khz .. just like video can be improved with upscaling, audio can be improved as well.

Posted at 8:30PM on Oct 22nd 2007 by phattie

4. whatever they do, there should be some sort of search function. even though i'm streaming media to my ps3 through tversity, the size of my music library (24000+ files) makes browsing through the ps3 interface impractical. I tend to create playlists and play music through those instead. a search function would be the tits.

Posted at 8:44PM on Oct 22nd 2007 by Darren

5. @3 You can currently play music in the background while looking at photos. While the song is playing, press the PS button (I think) and it will back you out to the XMB bar while the song continues to play.

Posted at 8:46PM on Oct 22nd 2007 by ninxf

6. I want mp3 to be playable during gameplay thats all I want dam is it too much to ask for

Posted at 8:47PM on Oct 22nd 2007 by ekbigpimping

7. @ phattie...yes, like number 5 said.

go to your music, start playing it, and just hit the PS button (on the controller) and it brings up the XMB so you can do anything else (ie. web browser, look @ pics) but it turns off if you play a game or a movie

Posted at 9:18PM on Oct 22nd 2007 by Justin

8. I think they might change the play screen for music. Make it more complex than it is right now. Maybe add visualizations like the PSP has?

Posted at 9:30PM on Oct 22nd 2007 by Hashbrown_Hunter

9. One thing I want is to actually choose the visualization. If you play and song and turn on visualization for that song you only get that style of vis. Even if you enable and disable it.

Hint: You can play music while browsing the web, for boring sites like PS3fanboy it makes it much more enjoyable(just kidding)

Posted at 10:02PM on Oct 22nd 2007 by Andy

10. Hmmmm... apparently you can have music in the background .. lol thnx. OK.. now, how about LPCM support as well.

Posted at 10:40PM on Oct 22nd 2007 by phattie

11. I think I prefer the PS3's method of playing music vs. the 360. The 360's interface is very slick, but playing music can be a pain. The PS3 approach is, so far, the better of the two.

But as others have said, some improvements would be great. One thing that I would really encourage is lossless audio support. Sony Media Manager Pro for the PSP just added FLAC support, so... maybe? Anyway, it's good to know that some fun stuff is on the way.

Posted at 10:42PM on Oct 22nd 2007 by navsimpson

12. I stream my mp3s from my Vista machine through my PS3, and it would be nice if the PS3 would display the album art instead of just a generic Note icon.

Posted at 11:32PM on Oct 22nd 2007 by meateebon

13. @12: Windows Media is a poor streaming server. Use something more robust like Nero Media Home and you'll get album art.

Posted at 1:10AM on Oct 23rd 2007 by Popfrogs

14. This is still a 'game' machine right?

Posted at 1:12AM on Oct 23rd 2007 by TCampbell76

15. How about Playing Music in the background while playing video games? 360 can do it...I would expect the same for the PS3!!!

Posted at 1:29AM on Oct 23rd 2007 by carl

16. @carl: coming to a 2.00 firmware near you!

Posted at 1:36AM on Oct 23rd 2007 by animekid3515

17. Nero Media Home will display album art?! My music collection is in awesome shape, tagged correctly and everything has album art, but it's set up with iTunes which isn't a DLNA program. Will Nero be able to display my album art immediately or will I have to add images to everything all over again?

Posted at 2:03AM on Oct 23rd 2007 by Tyba

18. One more thing, I think buffering the next song set to play shouldn't be an unreasonable request... gapless playback FTW!!!

Oh, I also have the occasional "disconnect" from the media server... nothing sever, maybe once every four or five hours of play, but it's still something that shouldn't happen.

Posted at 2:06AM on Oct 23rd 2007 by tyba

19. Hopefully, they will add DTS-HD Master decoding and SACD DSD bitstreaming as those are the two gaping holes in the audio playback department.

Posted at 2:56AM on Oct 23rd 2007 by Apollo

20. TCampbell76.......yes, the PS3 is a gaming machine, but it does have several other secondary features as well. When Sony tells us they are trying to improve these features some of us like to discuss how they might go about doing this.

Posted at 3:01AM on Oct 23rd 2007 by matropolis

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